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 the 2027 lineup on August 1 and then just kept going, something new almost every day. 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.

Some years I look through the lineup and think, cute, cute, absolutely not, cute, moving on. This year I want everything. I will not be buying everything, because 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 freaking love the reveals. The collabs, finding out which artist they worked with, seeing what weird little object somebody in Japan has decided I desperately need to attach to a notebook. Watching everyone else lose their minds about it in real time.

SunSun! WA! And yes, that banana Weeks will be mine. There is also a tiny keychain Techo with an actual little notebook inside it, which I did not know I needed until roughly four seconds after I saw it.

Also I just like stationery stores. Paper, pens, stamps. Not new information. That is most of my personality.

Planner season is FUN.

Except there is something else that happens every year, and this year I am noticing it more than usual.

Everyone seems so fucking anxious.

People worried about picking the wrong cover. People trying to lock in an entire color palette for a year that has not happened yet, asking which color everyone else is assigning to which month, like there is a correct answer and they might get marked down.

People worried they won't keep up. People worried about blank pages, or that their handwriting isn't pretty enough. People who bought a planner in April and are still afraid to write in it.

It is all the same question wearing different outfits.

Am I doing this correctly?

It's a notebook. You're allowed to fuck it up. I actually think you're supposed to.

I was a kid in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s. Xennial, young Gen X, old Millennial, take your pick. Either way, 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 found my seventh grade one recently, from when I was still in Germany, and it might be the funniest thing I own. The drama. The opinions. The things I thought were a huge deal.

It's not good writing. It's barely writing. But it is exactly who I was that year, stupid parts included, and I wish I had one of those for every year of my life.

Then I moved to New York in 1997 with a notebook. Not an ecosystem, not a curated collection of matching accessories. A notebook, and that thing was IMPORTANT.

Phone numbers, addresses, directions, things I had to remember. Because there was no GPS. Cell phones existed but they weren't what they are now, and plenty 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 number.

Going somewhere meant writing down the address, which subway to take, where you were meeting. That notebook lived in my bag because it had pieces of my actual life in it.

Nobody cared what the spread looked like. There was no spread.

Eventually the phone ate the notebook.

Phone numbers moved into Contacts. Addresses went into maps. Calendars and notes went digital, and then I got really into iPads and digital planning and digital journaling.

I still love all of that. My actual calendar is digital. I use Fantastical, I subscribe to schedules for things I care about, college basketball, the Knicks, and I like movies and books and TV and reality television and approximately seventeen thousand other things that digital tools track beautifully.

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 set off an alarm at 3:47 PM and yell, BIANCA, YOU HAVE AN APPOINTMENT.

I like writing things down by hand and I really like crossing them out. I like flipping backward. I like finding a movie ticket wedged between pages six months later and having almost no memory of the movie. My handwriting changes depending on my mood and how much of a hurry I was in, and I like being able to see that later.

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 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's been separated from its family.

No.

Sometime around 2012 or 2013 a friend and I went to Kinokuniya and I discovered Hobonichi. I bought an A6 and had absolutely no idea what to do with it. I wasn't dedicated to it, I didn't have a system, and eventually I stopped using it and forgot about Hobonichi for a while.

Which, by today's planner-internet standards, 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 been part of my life again. A Weeks, then an A6, then another A6, and for the last couple of years a Cousin.

The Cousin is my work book. Center for Babywearing Studies, design ideas, sketches, lists, things I need to figure out, whatever else needs somewhere to go.

The Weeks lives in my bag, and I LOVE my Weeks. It's the closest thing I have now to that notebook I carried around New York in the late 90s. Lists, receipts, basketball, TV shows, things I want to remember, stamps from stationery stores around the city, an enormous amount of random crap.

This year I also used an A6 as a diary, and I learned something about myself: I am not a person who is going to sit down every single day and write an entry just because a dated page is sitting there waiting for me.

Fine.

Next year I'm going back to a regular notebook for that. The Cousin and the Weeks stay, and some of what was going in the A6 can move into the Cousin. No crisis. The system changed because it wasn't working.

Which brings me to what social media has done to journaling, which is genuinely strange.

We are seeing other people's notebooks more than humans have probably ever seen other people's notebooks before. And we're not seeing notebooks. We're seeing content. Perfect handwriting, coordinated inks, matching pen cases, multiple-planner "ecosystems," morning journaling routines filmed in beautiful light with a cup of coffee sitting in exactly the right place.

Even the messy ones are usually a photogenic kind of messy.

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. Decorate every inch of the page if that makes you happy.

The trouble starts when somebody else's creative hobby becomes the standard you judge your own private life against. A notebook nobody was ever supposed to see starts feeling like it has an audience, and then you're editing yourself for people who aren't there.

I see this everywhere. Planner Instagram, journaling YouTube, stationery Reddit, doesn't matter.

"Why can't I keep up?"

"What am I doing wrong?"

"How do you make yourself journal every day?"

"How do I choose my theme?"

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

That last one especially makes me sad.

You cannot ruin a notebook by using it. You can spill coffee on it, put a sticker on crooked, start a list and abandon it. You can write three pages on Tuesday and then nothing for seventeen days. You can have beautiful handwriting one day and write like you're signing for a package the next. Skip February, come back in April. Glue a receipt over the blank pages or leave them blank.

They're yours.

Not everything needs to become a capital-M Moment.

Stationery can also 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 fast. The expensive part isn't the notebook, it's feeling like you need to buy an entirely new personality every September. You do not need twelve planners because twelve people on YouTube have twelve planners.

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

Wanting and buying are two different hobbies.

I'm excited. I'm going to look at every damn reveal, change my mind twelve times, and see something everyone else hates and think, ARE YOU KIDDING ME, THAT IS ADORABLE.

But when the package eventually arrives, I don't want any of it to become a precious object I'm afraid to touch. I want it to become mine.

I want the cover to get scratched and receipts sticking out of it. I want handwriting that makes no sense three months later, crossed-out appointments, stupid notes, 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. I want to open it ten years from now and see my life.

That's what I liked about Hobonichi in the first place, and it was never about perfection. A book turns into something else because somebody lived with it for a year.

So buy the beautiful planner. Get the ridiculous cover. Make a gorgeous spread when you're in the mood for it. On the days you're not, write your grocery list on the page and move on.

Your planner does not need to be content.

It just needs to be yours.

Bianca.