Your Planner Is Not Content

On paper

It is planner season.

Which, if you are not a planner person, probably sounds completely ridiculous. There is a season for buying notebooks?

Yes. There is. And some of us are very busy right now.

Hobonichi started revealing its 2027 lineup on August 1, with something new basically every day leading up to release. New covers. New Weeks designs. New collaborations. New accessories. Things I absolutely do not need and nevertheless immediately need to inspect from every possible angle.

And I have to say, the designs this year are SO GOOD.

Like, annoyingly good.

There are years when I can look through the lineup and think, cute, cute, absolutely not, cute, moving on.

This year I want everything.

I will not be buying everything. I am still a person with bills.

But I will absolutely be sitting here in New York at 10 PM on August 31, which is September 1 in Japan, ready to order.

I love this part.

I love the reveals. I love the design collaborations. I love seeing what artists Hobonichi worked with and what weird little object somebody in Japan has decided I desperately need to attach to a notebook. I love seeing what everyone else is excited about. I love stationery stores. I love paper. I love pens. I love stamps.

Planner season is FUN.

Except there is something else that seems to happen every year now, and this year I am noticing it more than ever.

Everyone seems so fucking anxious.

There are people worried about picking the wrong cover.

People trying to decide their entire color palette for a year that hasn't happened yet.

People asking what colors everyone is going to assign to each month.

People worried that they won't keep up.

People worried about blank pages.

People worried their handwriting isn't pretty enough.

People buying a planner and then being afraid to write in it because they might ruin it.

And underneath a lot of these questions I keep hearing the same thing:

Am I doing this correctly?

And I want to grab everyone gently by the shoulders and say:

It's a notebook.

You're allowed to fuck it up.

Actually, I think you're supposed to fuck it up.

I'm a Xennial, so notebooks were part of my life long before Instagram could tell me what one was supposed to look like.

I had diaries as a kid. I recently found my diary from seventh grade, which was seventh grade in Germany, and reading it now is one of the funniest and most wonderful things.

The things I thought were important!

The drama!

The opinions!

I wish I had done that every year of my life.

Not because it was beautifully written. It absolutely was not.

I wish I had it because it captured who I was at that exact moment, including all the completely stupid things that mattered enormously to me.

We also had something in Germany called a Poesiealbum, which really deserves its own blog post because I don't think there is a perfect American equivalent. You gave this little book to friends and classmates and they would write poems, sayings or little messages in it and give it back to you.

It was another way of collecting pieces of your life on paper.

Then I moved to New York in 1997.

And I had my notebook.

Not a planner ecosystem.

Not a carefully curated collection of matching accessories.

A notebook.

And that thing was IMPORTANT.

It had everyone's phone numbers. Addresses. Notes. Information I needed. Things I had to remember.

Because remember, there was no GPS.

Cell phones existed, but they weren't what they are now. A lot of people my age were still walking around with pagers. If somebody paged you, congratulations, now you needed to find a phone and also know their phone number.

If you were going somewhere, you needed the address. You needed directions. You might need to write down which subway to take or where you were meeting someone.

That notebook lived in my bag because it contained pieces of my actual life.

Nobody cared what the spread looked like.

There was no spread.

Eventually, of course, the phone ate the notebook.

Phone numbers moved into Contacts. Addresses went into maps. Calendars became digital. Notes became digital. Then I got really into iPads and digital planning and digital journaling and digital note taking.

And I still love all of that.

My actual calendar is digital.

I use Fantastical with my calendars. I subscribe to schedules for things I care about. College basketball. The Knicks. Things happening in my life. I like movies and books and TV and reality television and approximately seventeen thousand other things, and digital tools are fantastic for keeping track of a lot of it.

But somewhere along the way, I wanted paper back.

Not because paper is more efficient.

It isn't.

My phone can remind me about something. My notebook cannot jump out of my purse at 3:47 PM and yell, BIANCA, YOU HAVE AN APPOINTMENT.

That's not why I use it.

I like physically writing something down.

I like crossing something out.

I like flipping backward.

I like finding a movie ticket tucked between pages six months later.

I like seeing something I scribbled when I was rushing.

I like that my handwriting changes depending on my mood and how much time I had.

I like paper because it leaves evidence.

I've gone through plenty of planner phases.

When I had my own business in the 2000s, I was using different systems. Later I got very into Danielle LaPorte's Desire Map Planner and used that for probably four or five years.

I tried Passion Planner.

That one did not work for me.

I am extremely opinionated about calendars. Monday begins the week. Saturday and Sunday belong together at the end. I don't want Sunday hanging out on the other side of the calendar like it has been separated from its family.

No.

Eventually, sometime around 2012 or 2013, a friend and I went to Kinokuniya in New York and I discovered Hobonichi.

I bought an A6.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

I wasn't dedicated to it. I didn't have a "system." Eventually I stopped using it and forgot about Hobonichi for a while.

Which, by today's planner-internet standards, I suppose means I FAILED MY HOBONICHI.

Except nothing happened.

The notebook police never came.

Years later I came back.

For the last four or five years, Hobonichi has become part of my life again.

I started with a Weeks. Then an A6. Another A6. And for the last couple of years, a Cousin.

My Cousin became my work book. It holds work for Center for Babywearing Studies, design ideas, sketches, lists, things I need to remember, things I need to figure out, random thoughts and whatever else needs somewhere to go.

My Weeks lives in my purse.

And I LOVE my Weeks.

It is probably the closest thing I have now to that notebook I carried around New York in the late 90s.

It gets lists. Notes. Receipts. Things I see. Things I want to remember. Basketball. TV shows. Movies. Little bits of my hobbies. Stamps from stationery stores around New York. Random crap.

Life.

This year I also used an A6 as more of a diary, and I've learned something about myself:

I am apparently not a person who is going to sit down every single day and write a diary entry just because a dated page is sitting there waiting for me.

Fine.

Next year I'm probably going back to a regular notebook for that.

The Cousin and Weeks will be my main books, and some of what went into the A6 can move into the Cousin.

That's it.

No planner crisis.

The system changed because my life told me it needed to change.

And this is where I think social media has done something really weird to journaling and planning.

We are seeing other people's notebooks more than humans have probably ever seen other people's notebooks before.

And we're not just seeing notebooks.

We're seeing content.

Perfect handwriting.

Perfectly placed stickers.

Coordinated inks.

Matching pen cases.

Color palettes.

Multiple-planner "ecosystems."

Morning journaling routines filmed in beautiful light with a cup of coffee sitting in exactly the right place.

Even the messy journals are often an aesthetically pleasing kind of messy.

A curated mess.

A mess that photographs well.

And listen, I LOVE looking at this stuff.

I'm a designer. Of course I like beautiful things.

Make the gorgeous spread. Use seventeen fountain pen inks. Put stickers everywhere. Decorate every inch of the page if that makes you happy.

The problem starts when somebody else's creative hobby becomes the standard you use to judge your own private life.

Because then something very strange happens.

A notebook nobody else was ever supposed to see starts feeling like it has an audience.

You start editing yourself for people who aren't there.

I see it across planner, journaling and stationery communities.

"Why can't I keep up?"

"What am I doing wrong?"

"How do you make yourself journal every day?"

"What should I put here?"

"How do I choose my theme?"

"I'm scared I'm going to ruin it."

And that last one especially makes me sad.

You cannot ruin a notebook by using it.

You can spill coffee on it.

You can write something incredibly stupid.

You can put a sticker on crooked.

You can start a list and abandon it.

You can write three pages on Tuesday and nothing for seventeen days.

You can have beautiful handwriting one day and write like a deranged pharmacist the next.

You can skip February.

You can come back in April.

You can glue a receipt over the blank pages.

You can leave them blank.

They're yours.

Not everything needs to become a capital-M Moment.

There's also this strange conversation about how expensive planners are.

And yes, they can be expensive.

Stationery can become an absolutely ridiculous rabbit hole of consumption if you let it.

There will always be another cover.

Another limited edition.

Another collaboration.

Another pen.

Another pouch to put the pens in.

Another pouch to put the pouch in.

You can turn planner season into the Stationery Hunger Games surprisingly quickly.

But buying a good notebook or planner that you use for an entire year is not inherently some wild act of extravagance.

If I buy a Cousin and a Weeks, maybe a few accessories, and spend somewhere around $100 to $150 for tools I'm going to use almost every day for an entire year, I don't think that's outrageous.

I know it's coming every year. I can plan for it.

What gets expensive is feeling like you need to buy an entirely new personality every September.

You don't need every cover.

You don't need the complete collection.

You don't need twelve planners because twelve people on YouTube have twelve planners.

And I say this while currently wanting approximately half of the 2027 Hobonichi lineup.

Wanting and buying are two different hobbies.

Maybe that's what I want to remember going into this planner season.

I'm excited.

I am going to look at every damn Hobonichi reveal.

I am going to have opinions.

I am going to change my mind twelve times.

I am going to admire the collaborations.

I am going to see things other people hate and think, ARE YOU KIDDING ME, THAT IS ADORABLE.

And at 10 PM on August 31 here in New York, I will be ready.

But when the package eventually arrives, I don't want the things inside it to become precious objects I'm afraid to touch.

I want them to become mine.

I want the cover to get scratched.

I want receipts sticking out.

I want handwriting that makes absolutely no sense three months later.

I want crossed-out appointments and stupid notes and stamps from places I went.

I want empty pages because apparently nothing happened that Tuesday, or everything happened and I was too busy living it to write it down.

I want to open it ten years from now and see my life.

That's what I love about Hobonichi in the first place.

Not perfection.

The opposite.

A book becomes different because a person lived with it for a year.

So yes, buy the beautiful planner.

Get excited about planner season.

Choose the ridiculous cover.

Buy the pen.

Use the stickers.

Or don't use stickers.

Make gorgeous spreads when you feel like it.

Write a grocery list across yesterday's carefully decorated page if that's what you need today.

Your planner does not need to be content.

It just needs to be yours.

Bianca.

I also make zines, stickers and printables under Noted., for people who like paper more than they can strictly justify.
notedperiod.com