Morrighan plans

One of the unexpected things journaling brought me was a new way to make decisions. I thought journaling would be more a form of memory keeping with words. I thought I would talk about how I was feeling. I didn't think I would start journaling my way to decisions.

But its remarkably effective. So much so that ensuring I have space to do it is part of my selection criteria for a new journal. Apparently, I think well on paper.

Let me talk you through an example. I, along with everyone else in the planner community, spent most of August trying to work out what journals I want. I'm currently trying what I call the three (plus one, plus many) book system. Three books for different purposes - planning, progressing things and pondering, plus a separate book for work and some companion booklets. That was itself the product of a lot of journaling about what was and wasn't working. But now I have that, there is a new question - what planner do I buy for each slot.

Where I was when I sat down to make choices was as follows:

I plan in booklets in a standard size Traveller's Notebook

I progress in an A5 common planner (2 part)

I ponder in a Hobonichi Cousin

I plan work in another A5 common planner (2 part)

But those choices were based, with the exception of the Cousin, on repurposing things I already had. Only the Cousin is serving its original purpose. So, when planner season hit, what did I do.

I planned. And I journaled. Looking back over my Cousin for the last month or two shows I wrote about this at least a couple of nights a week. During late August, I wrote more often, as the recent 'reveals' finished and I could start to make decisions.

I did research. I watched the videos and made plans. And then I revised those plans. In particular, I spent a lot of time considering what I wanted as an everyday carry (my planning book). I assumed the others were easy. And then, when I sat down and worked my way through these, I made changes I wasn't expecting.

The initial plan

What turned out to be the easiest was the progress planner. Early on I considered whether I wanted dated dailies or not, decided I didn't and that was fairly easy. the Common Planner works well. I'm going to stick with it. [editing Morrighan: I did not stick with it].

The journal came next. I was interested in the Sterling Ink Daily Planner versus the Cousin. The big difference being that the former did not have weeklies. Otherwise the Sterling Ink offerings are a bit more to my aesthetic and don't have the quotes taking up space. But I didn't 'love' it. Here's an extract from the journaling:

"My reservations with the daily planner are the colour and the way the pages are headed. Mulberry [a Common Planner which has blank pages in this colour] fixes both. But I have to set it up. And what will I do with the weeklies?" The headings of the daily planner are in two different font sizes and split into two sections. Its completely irrational, but I don't like it! To the point where it was bothering me. With blank pages, I could write my own consistently formatted headings.

So I wrote a bit further and came up with ideas for the weeklies. At this point my decision was made. By finding enthusiasm for the weeklies, the decision fell into place.

Could I have worked through this in my head? Maybe. And this next bit is an odd way of explaining it, but I feel that when I have a lot of things to consider, its better if I put them on paper. For me this does three things:

It solidifies my ideas, making them tangible and specific.

It allows me, a very visual person, to see those thoughts as a concrete thing.

It empties my head of things I am trying to keep in mind, allowing room for new thoughts.

For the next decision, the last one came very much into play. Because what I had thought was the most settled choice - the planner for work - went somewhere else entirely.

I started out by writing out where I thought I was. A compact A5 Common Planner. And then this happened:

"Or I could do something cool with booklets? A blank option might work better, but, again, more work [to set up] when my time is pressed most [at work]. If only the weeklies came in A5, or could I use an N1 for work.

That's an interesting idea. Since desk space is at a premium that could work. And I often use the length over depth. So work = N1 booklets."

And then I talk myself into N1 Horizontal Weeklies, but confirm I don't need Monthlies.

This was an idea I had never entertained before. After a failed experiment with A6 for work (if its smaller, I will write down fewer tasks, was the theory), I was set on A5. Over the years I've always used A5 or near A5 planners for work, mostly in more of a bullet journal format. It was only by writing down the original idea that I could come up with a new idea. I like to challenge my thinking when I journal through decisions because it can lead to things like this. Something energising and exciting. To the point where I am going to have to stop myself from implementing it immediately so as not to waste a perfectly good journal.

And then I ended with the everyday carry. The one I was having most trouble with. It was going to be N1. That I as sure of. I had two options. I liked both. I wrote down the pros and cons and the concerns and the things that enthused me. One of them was an N1 full year. One was N1 booklets. My booklets concern was the cost. The N1 full year was in the pretty colour.

But, having made a decision to use booklets for work (the companion booklets came later), my enthusiasm for more of them was sated. Sure, it would be nice having a stack of Traveller's Notebooks. But it felt like I had scratched the itch. The cost for a full year of booklets was more than double the other option. That sealed it - I could choose the N1 full year.

The changes my journaling had wrought were pretty significant. If you had asked me even the day before, I would have given different answers for two of the planners and been sure of it. I was failing to make a decision on a third. Only one of my earlier choices remained.

The other thing I noticed, was that my enthusiasm for these choices had gone up. By writing that monologue (and yes, I really do write like that), I had come to conclusions that were exciting. And that is how I knew they were right. This was not my first attempt at making these choices, but it was the first time I felt excited by the choices.

So next time you face a decision, try writing about it. And keep writing about it until you're excited for the decision you've made.

The inspiration for this came, from all places, from a World of Warcraft stream, talking about some of the challenges the game has faced over the past few years. But I think it has a pretty wide application. Essentially, the thesis was that there is a difference between making plans and planning.

And that rings very true. We see it every year, every half year, every quarter when we make plans in the form of goals and resolutions. Sometimes those are just a vague idea, which barely counts as a plan. Sometimes they are fully fleshed out plans. You could even go as far as working out all the steps, undertaking the first few of them. And then still fail. One reason for that might be the difference between plans and planning.

Goals are not planning, they are plans

Our goals are not going to magically achieve themselves. We need to make them happen. A part of that is setting the right goals, but another part is working out the detail of how to implement them. What steps do you need to go through to meet your goal? How will you know when you've succeed? I normally start with a backlog.

Backlogs are not planning, they are plans

I normally create a backlog for something I want to achieve. There are a lot of benefits to this - it removes decision fatigue and confusion. It lets me assess the real scale of what I am making a plan for. But, you still just have a list. The list helps, but if its just a big long list then, to be honest, its probably a bit overwhelming.

The next step is planning.

I've taken the name for backlogs from agile methodology, particularly scrum. What you do, in scrum, is take a plan and turn it into planning.

How I do planning from my backlogs?

First of all, I ensure my backlogs are prioritised. I need to know what is most important to me. Otherwise you end up wandering around in the corner getting something done that doesn't really align with your overall goals. For example, if I have a backlog to read a book for work, and a backlog to read a book for personal development, I need to decide which book takes priority. All things are never equal.

Then, once I have things in an order, I start by scheduling some of them. How many depends on how big they are vs how much time you have. So the second thing you want to do with backlogs is understand the scale of each item. Say one of your books has 5 chapters and another 20 chapters. Are those equal? If a chapter in book one takes 20 minutes to read, you have 100 minutes of reading. If the chapters in the other book take 5 minutes to read, you still have 100 minutes of reading. If you have 10 minutes to read a day, you can get through either book in 10 days. But how you schedule that work will look a little different.

In scrum, you don't actually size your work items by minutes taken. Because you don't know how long they will take up front. But you can probably compare them. If reading one chapter in the 5 chapter book is a large task, then reading one chapter in the 20 chapter book is a small task. An approach I think suits personal planning here is t-shirt sizes. Mark items on your backlog as XS, S, M, L, XL. If you want to do numbers instead, a common scale used is a modified Fibonnaci sequence - 0.5, 1, 3, 5, 8, 13. You can keep going but at some point estimating above a certain number in the scale just means your task is too big and you should break it up.

Now you can move on to the final step of planning - figuring out how much you can do in a day or week - however you prefer to plan. Scrum generally works in 'sprints' which are generally two weeks. But I tend to plan monthly and weekly in personal terms.

This will take some trial and error but eventually you'll get an idea of how much you can do. I suggest, while you work it out, that you keep the number of tasks low. You can always pick up the next thing on the list if you complete everything.

Now you have both a plan and planning, and a much better chance of success, right? Assuming your plan survives contact with the enemy. Which is never. The enemy here being life. Being the unexpected things that crop up. Being the day you lose to a migraine. Being the news that sweeps in and leaves you unable to focus. Being the new obsession you develop.

So lets add a few modifiers.

Apply the principles of slow productivity. Do less. Even when you discover how much you can do in a month, put less things in. Spend time making sure the ones you do pick are done well. And if you get those done, you can go ahead and work on the next thing and 'get ahead'.

Schedule in your filling the well activities too. Make sure you have a backlog for this. Not in a 'here's an endless list of books I will never read' way. More in a 'here are a couple of books I am excited to read so I don't have to make a decision when I come to this' way. It's very easy to not do these things. I backlist just books, but the things I want to do in games, or podcast episodes. If you don't add it to the to do list, it will get buried. You can schedule specifics or just 'pick an activity' each day. I do a mix, depending on how I am feeling.

Make sure your plan is flexible. I picked three specific days of the week on which to post to Tumblr. And then realised that I needed to be more flexible because the rest of my life is flexible and there would be different days of the week on which I was more or less able to write. So now my goal is 'post three times in the week'.

Think about your planning horizons. I tend to set up my week in advance for regular tasks and then add others to a 'sometime this week list'. I have to keep reminding myself to do this because I love to plan in advance, but I know that if I do it, I'll end up 'failing' because life is complex.

Lastly, keep the why in mind. If all else fails, forget it all and go back to the reason you set this goal in the first place. Think again about how you are going to get there in a way that will actually work.

If you watch journaling channels on Youtube you will often see planner hopping. Planner hopping is jumping from one book to another, sometimes frequently. You'll also see people criticising planner hopping because it is morally superior to stick to one system for the entire year (yes, that was sarcasm).

The 'problem' with planner hopping

The problem with planner hopping is not what you think it is. Planner hopping gets a bad reputation. People see it as wasteful. Some criticise the 'inconsistency' as if changing the way you do things is somehow bad in and of itself. This gets amplified when your hopping is in the public domain. Viewers look for people doing similar things to them and get irritated when that changes.

None of these are real problems. As long as you can afford the planners you are hopping to, you're good. You should not base your planner system on what other people think you should do. You should not base your planner system on feeling bad about wasting paper. Its just paper. Put the old planner away in a drawer where you can't see it and move on.

The actual problem with planner hopping, is guilt. It's the guilt you feel as a planner for being wasteful and inconsistent. Its the guilt that you feel when someone criticises your choice to hop planners.

It's guilt that you shouldn't feel. Because the 'right' way to plan and journal is the way that works for you at any given point in time.

The goal of planning and journaling isn't to complete the pages, it's to help you navigate life in some way. Planner hopping is a good thing.

Embracing change

One of the biggest challenges we as human beings face on a regular basis is change. Everyone's response to it is different, but a lot of people feel threatened by it. Change generally brings about negative emotions and we find ourselves trying to understand what we are feeling - something that journaling is really useful for.

Sometimes that change needs to be reflected in the tools we need to plan and explore our lives. If we have less time, we need a system that won't leave us feeling stressed and behind. If we are struggling with health, we need a system that allows us to explore that, without putting further pressure on it. Essentially, we need to ensure that planning and journaling are making things better, not worse.

So if you need to, change your system.

It might be that you can change within your existing books. It might be that you need something better suited. Either way, you don't want to be adding more stress to your life. Just move.

The FOMO caveat

Generally speaking, planner hopping is positive, but there is one exception to this (sort of). FOMO. The fear of missing out. When you buy a planner because you've seen someone else use it and it looks amazing. Or when you buy a planner because you like the cover or the colour. I say sort of because if the new planner brings you joy, then by all means embrace that. There doesn't have to be another reason.

Where this can fail is when you buy a FOMO planner that doesn't work for you. Then we're back to the guilt. This is why I suggest prototyping.

Prototyping

Prototyping is trying out different planners and layouts and approaches, but without buying anything new. The idea here is to try things quickly and change quickly when something doesn't work. If you think the Take a Note layout might be better than the Hobonichi layout for you, draw up the Take a Note layout. Either in your Hobonichi, or in another book.

Does this work? Do you spend ages setting it up and then not touch it? Do you find you feel like your are duplicating information? Or does it make you feel energised and excited?

Now you know whether to hop or not.

When you know you're a planner hopper

The other thing that could work is planning for planner hopping. If you know you aren't going to stick to one book for the whole year, how do you adjust for that?

One thing you can do is have a book for prototyping. You can't always prototype within your existing books, so alongside whatever I am doing, I always keep what I call the 'overflow bullet journal'. In my case this is currently a Sterling Ink notebook and I would encourage you to get something you really like because while prototyping is rapid. Best of all, I repurposed this book from a failed planner. I use this book for two main reasons.

I need more space to write about something or plan something. Hence the name overflow.

I want to prototype.

The other thing you want to have a plan for is backfilling. When you hop its tempting to transfer all your previous content into the new planner. That may not be a good idea. The trick here is to treat it like any other task - do you have time for this? Does it take priority over other things? Before you hop, try to come up with an answer to this that you will be okay with. The worst thing is to move and then become paralysed by the overwhelming work of backfilling.

Getting started with a journal or a planning system is the hardest part. I always loved the idea of having a journal, but it took me until my 40s to get that to happen. Likewise with planning - I'd tried various things inconsistently over the years, but never managed the kind of consistency I now have. Here are 5 tips, based on evidence, that will help you cut down that lead time and get going faster.

1. Write about how you will succeed.

On the first page of your journal, write about your future success. What will journaling and planning look like for you? Write as if you are journaling from the future and this has already happened. Whilst some associate this kind of manifestation with spiritual practice, evidence shows that articulating a thing helps us believe it. By writing this down as if success is certain, you will boost your confidence and therefore your chances of achieving that success.

2. Watch others succeed.

Seeing others succeed at something has a name - vicarious mastery. You see other people doing something successful and it makes you more likely to succeed yourself. Plus you'll get a lot of ideas and not all of them will be for washi tape or inks or other things that will hurt your wallet, I promise (disclaimer: some of them will).

3. Continuously prototype and innovate.

Not only is there not a perfect way to journal, there is not even a perfect way to journal for you. That applies not just as a beginner, but throughout your journey. Accepting that will help you. But you can improve your chances of success by prototyping quickly and often.

Regardless of the journal or planner you are using, make sure you have space in it, or another book, to experiment in. Draw out new layouts. Try different types of journaling and planning. I keep and 'overflow' bullet journal for this and its helped me make a lot of good decisions in planning and journaling (and avoid some bad ones).

Not only do we learn by actually doing an activity, we also learn from our failures. The more failures you generate through rapid prototyping, the quicker you get the experience that helps you make the right decision. Switch things around from week to week and keep trying until you find the approach that works. And when it stops working, because things change, because you change, you can dig out the prototyping book and start the process over.

4. Narrate your journey.

This can be with others or for yourself, and I would encourage you to do this. There are many journaling and planning communities - online, local groups, etc. Bouncing ideas off of others is a really useful way of developing your thinking.

If you don't have someone else to listen? Sometimes the person you bounce ideas off of doesn't actually add anything other than an ear. I've heard of people using a stuffed animal, or a pet (in defence of my talking to the cats about my journals, it is often because they are sitting on or next to said journals). Its the process of explaining that helps you crystalise your thinking, as much as the response. So do what journalers do - write it out in your journal! Journaling to develop your thinking on a topic can be incredibly useful.

5. Write about why you want to do this.

If you are struggling to practice journaling or planning regularly, you could try all sorts of things - reward systems, developing habits. But one of the most powerful things you can do is go back to the question of why. Our internal motivations are far more powerful than any reward system or any punishment. Write about why you wanted to do this in the first place. Re-energise yourself with the dream you were trying to achieve.

A final note on planning

You'll notice here I talk a lot about journaling, but have planning in the title. That's because, for me, there is a real link between the two. My planning was not as consistent or effective until I started journaling. Until I found ways to work through my thinking about planning. And likewise I never got journaling to work until I did those things I list here and until I started planning my journaling. I write planning and journaling entries at the top of the to do list every day. When I do the things above, I am considering this combined process, not two separate ones.

It took me way too long to work this out. But we're here now and that's what counts. Here is the revelation: if you are going to set yourself any kind of targets or goals and you have a chronic illness, you should adapt your system to account for that. Particularly if your chronic illness is less predictable.

Hi, I'm Morrighan and I've suffered from migraines for most of my adult life. And yet I was way too old when I realised I should add accommodations to my planning system for those migraines.

How I set goals

I tend to plan on a number of different horizons. But today I am going to talk about my daily planning. A key part of my system is that I am attempting to build daily habits. Things like write every day, exercise every day.

I do this by planning in advance (normally a week/month depending on the project I am working on). So at some point I will go to each of the daily pages for the next week or so and add targets for exercise, and a to do line to write.

You know what doesn't work well with a daily exercise target? Agonising pain. And with writing? The severe brain fog I get in the lead up to a migraine.

Accommodations

In education there is a practice called 'accommodations'. This is where you set up different arrangements to accommodate things like neurodiversity. A student with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) might have difficulty regulating their attention. So the school might provide a quieter space to take an exam, with less distractions. They might provide a person to prompt the student if they seem to be getting distracted.

This, and many other tools, are provided because the education environment is rarely suitable for the neurodiverse. A student with ADHD will find it challenging to concentrate for two hours in a row because their brain chemistry simply does not support it.

Do those accommodations go far enough? No. But that's a whole different conversation. What I want you to think about is - do you offer yourself that same grace?

Because I didn't.

Planning and migraine

My migraines are currently unpredictable in terms of when they occur. The only thing that is consistent is the progression - brain fog leads to pain which leads to a 'hangover'. If I catch it early enough, I can skip the pain part. But since the brain fog is the only advanced clue I get so there is no way to avoid that part.

I know, and have known for years, that migraine is one of the biggest challenges to meeting goals I set. All my plans start well, and then the migraine hits, and it all falls over.

Repeat.

I know its not my fault. I can't avoid these migraines (I know what my triggers are). But it still triggers a negativity spiral. I still view it as failing. It still is a day of 'progress' that is left blank.

And so, my solution is accommodations. Which I have also planned.

When a migraine hits I now review my tasks and remove certain items from the list. There is no point trying to do something clever during severe brain fog - I'll only have to do it again later (all the while going 'what the hell was I even thinking?'). I can't drive during brain fog - my reactions are too slow.

So I go through and mark them as done. I class them as complete.

That sounds odd. I didn't do the task. But I've realised that tracking your failures is bad. Negative consequences have a disproportionate effect on how we feel and, as detailed in Ali Abdaal's Feel Good Productivity, we are more likely to get things done when we feel good, and much less likely to if we feel bad. A small failure can very easily become a doom spiral. I missed 3 days of a target, so a 4th doesn't really matter. Or, even worse, I missed 3 days and now I need to catch up, but I don't have time, and so I can't face trying and 3 days becomes 4, 5, 6 ... 3 days missed is 3 dents to your confidence that you can do the thing. All of these add up to failure. Not because you didn't do the thing (which was probably a very minimal loss in the grand scheme of things), but because you felt so bad about it, that it actually blocked your progress.

If its a regular habit kind of task, then I just move on. If its part of a project, I'll add the task back into my backlog. Key point here - don't add it onto the next day. I've already planned the next day. I can't just add more to it and hope it will work (it won't).

As you write it, this will feel odd. But in a few weeks you'll find you can't even remember what day it was you had the migraine on unless you wrote that down.

Reframing your planning horizon

Going a step further, you also need to build those accommodations into your planning horizon. If, once or twice a month, I am going to lose 3 days for writing, then I should assume I will be unable to write on 6 days of the month. And likely, because of my life, there will be a couple of other days where I can't write. So I plan to write every day and assume I will achieve that on 20 days in a month.

I will still write the prompt down each day. Say I managed to write on 24 days. If I write on 24/20 days, I feel good. If I write on 24/30 days, I feel bad. Its the same number of days, but it can have a radical effect on my state of mind.

The goal of planning is to achieve those plans. To do that, you need to plan accommodations for the things that will derail those plans.

Your ideal journal is right there. It has everything you need. But also, a bunch of monthly pages that you don't need because you're not using this book for planning. Almost all dated journals come with monthly pages. What do you do with them?

The big advantage of a monthly page is that you are going to be able to see a whole month in one go. Find something that uses that. I've got a few ideas for you:

Write down a word that summarises each day. Its great to look at a whole month of these and get a feel for how your month went. Think of it as micro-journaling or memory keeping. Add a little description if that helps. (I do this one).

Use for a tracker for something you really want to emphasize. An example might be to track your movement each day and write it down. You may even have space to draw a little graph. Again, looking back will give you a feeling for how its going.

Draw a doodle every day.

Make some kind of daily spiritual notation - a tarot card, a bible verse.

Write something you are grateful for.

Write down a fact. Maybe you can theme each month.

Ignore the dates and use it for something else. Maybe a gameboard strategy type plan where you write each step in the next box and colour it in when you've achieved it. Something similar might work for breaking down goals.

Ignore the dates and use it for ink swatches. Or washi tape swatches.

Decorate it so much that it no longer looks like a monthly. Use it for something special - a mood board, a big spread to cover one special day - anything.

As this tumblr is new, I thought it would be good to start with the classic conversation about my journals - the techno kaigi. It's an incredibly useful part of a journaling practice. I'll walk you through mine and you'll get a feel for how much it helped me develop things this year.

What is a techo kaigi?

A techo kaigi is a conversation (normally with yourself, or in this case, with the internet) about your journals. Its a review of where you are now. Typically you see these at mid-year and end-of year. At the mid-year its done just before the new journal announcements happen. Its your baseline to make decisions for next year. At the end of the year its more of a New Year's style review - how did it go, what are my goals for next year.

How has 2024 been treating me?

It's been a more difficult year than 2023. In 2023 my journals made it all the way through the year. I may have tweaked the layouts a bit, but I was using the same books at the end of the year, with the exception the A6 Hobonichi I brought for work (A6 doesn't work for me).

Enter 2024 and I had a plan. The plan looked a bit like this:

My journal would be a Hobonichi Cousin

My writing journal would be an A5 Hobonichi Hon

My project/commonplace would be an A5 Sterling Ink Common Planner (2 book system)

My everyday carry would be a separate A5 Sterling Ink Common Planner (2 book system)

My work journal would continue to be the undated A5 Sterling Ink Common Planner I had landed on after abandoning the A5

My health journal would be an N2 (Weeks) Sterling Ink Common Planner

A learning journal in an A5 Sterling Ink notebook

An overflow journal in an A5 Midori Codex (carried over from last year)

Did this plan survive the year? It did not. Did it survive January? It did not. I had the wrong books, was my first thought, so I rotated them round a bit. The Hon became the everyday carry (the Common Planner was too floppy for an everyday carry). The Common Planner became the work journal. The undated Common Planner went into storage and the N2 got replaced with an A6 because the columns were too small for me to write the detail I needed into the vertical weeklies. To keep track, at this point I am down to 7 journals.

And I tried to carry on that way for a while. But gradually, things continued to evolve. It turns out A5 is also too big for an everyday carry, so I didn't have one for a while and the Hon became more of a desk planner. At the end of March I went to Japan and added an A5 Plotter which sort of became my EDC. This takes me back up to 8.

And then, the mid-year approached and I sat down and really thought about what I wanted.

And the journals started to fall.

First to go was the learning journal. Because I don't like Midori paper, I made that book my overflow journal instead. This was really useful when I started prototyping later in the year. (That's down to 7).

Then the separate health journal went. I incorporated that into my planners (now 6).

I stopped using the Plotter, and then I put the overflow journal away because I now had overflow space in my existing journals (we're down to 4). I then go excited about the idea of 'companion' journals for specific subjects because I do not learn (back up to 6). I cut those again pretty quickly, though the companion concept is going to remain.

This left me with the following 4 journals:

The Hobonichi journal

An A5 Hon as a daily planner

An A5 Common Planner as a project planner/health journal

An A5 Common Planner for work

And no everyday carry. So I replaced my Hon with a Traveller's Notebook with blank booklets to create what I am calling my three (plus one) system.

Three (plus one)?

The three parts of this system are as follows:

Plan - an everyday carry/forward planner

Progress - a working book

Ponder - a tracker/journal

+1. A work journal, kept separately, to be discarded later.

This evolved out of the discovery that I don't like to be doing the same thing in multiple journals. If I'm going to be managing a to do list, I want one to do list. I can't fit what I am doing in a single book, and so I focused on the purposes of the books and let that guide my choices.

This came out of my reflections in preparation for 2025, and that is really what a mid-year techo kaigi has become. It's why I included reflecting on what was and was not working in my 10 steps to choosing a planner for 2025. Planner season is so early in the year, that what you are feeling at the mid-point will heavily influence what you decide to go with next year. But its also a chance to experiment. I implemented this new approach pretty much immediately (using things I already had for the most part) and that has let me evolve it a bit before making my final 2025 purchase decisions.

Its planner season and all the planners are shiny and pretty and you want all of them. Maybe last year you brought one too many (I know I did) or the wrong one (I did that too). Maybe you are new to this selection process. Maybe you've been stuck in a journaling rut and need a change.

This is for you.

I'm going to walk you through ten steps to choosing the right journal. I suggest you run this through and then review it a couple of times before you buy.

1) Write a list of what you want to do with your planners and journals. Do you to do personal journaling? Planning? Memory keeping?

Importantly, this is a list of things you want to do and not a list of journals. It might look like this:

personal daily journaling

important upcoming appointments

commonplacing

future planning

daily planning

backlogging (lists of tasks relating to a project)

health tracking

The only journal I am going to identify early on is a work journal, as I always keep this separate from everything else. This is mostly focused on daily to do lists and appointment lists.

2) Against that list, think about what kind of space each item needs in comparison to other items. Mark them with t-shirt sizes. Small, Medium, Large.

My example:

personal daily journaling - L

important upcoming appointments - S

commonplacing - L

future planning - M

daily planning - M

backlogging (lists of tasks relating to a project) - M

health tracking - M

work to do lists - M

work appointment lists - S

3) Against that list, think about your planning horizon (or journaling horizon, though this is simpler). Do you plan daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, all of the above? Do you journal daily or when you feel like it?

My example:

personal daily journaling - L - daily

important upcoming appointments - S - monthly

commonplacing - L - ad hoc

future planning - M - weekly

daily planning - M - weekly

backlogging (lists of tasks relating to a project) - M - ad hoc

health tracking - M - daily

work to do lists - M - daily

work appointment lists - S - daily

4) If you are already planning and journaling, write a list of your challenges. What is not working right now? If you don't plan or journal and want to, write about what has been blocking you.

I currently feel like I need too many books open at once. I often plan to do too much at once.

5) If you are already planning and journaling, what do you love about your current set up. What brings you joy? If this is new, write about what you envisage feeling like when you journal successfully?

I love decorating and being able to look back at the amazing thing I have created. I love long form journaling and being able to work through my ideas. I like having everything written down so I don't forget things.

6) Do 4 again. And then do 5 again. These are really important. If you don't plan or journal, what has been blocking you and what do you What is new compared to your current set up? What are you expecting to do with it?

I need my everyday carry (EDC) to be light and also have a hard enough structure to write on in less than ideal writing conditions. I need to be able to plan differently for weekdays and weekends.

7) Now you have all the pieces, its time to slot them together. What goes well with what? What would you rather keep separate?

I group mine into 3 sections - plan, progress and ponder. Planning is what I anticipate I am going to be doing. Progress is how I am going to track how I am doing against the plan. Ponder is for more long form things like journals and commonplacing.

For me the appointment and weekly planning is in Plan as I do it in advance, and my daily plan is in Progress because I do that on the day. Health tracking is in Progress. Journaling and commonplacing are in Ponder.

8) Now try to lay out the things you want to group. On one page? On different pages but the same book? On a blank page or a weekly page or a daily page? Get a spare notebook or a piece of printer paper and lay it all out.

I am trying to lay mine out by a grouping I am calling Plan - Progress - Ponder as they are separate activities that take place at different times.

For Plan, for example, I need a monthly view for the appointments and a weekly planning view. I also need space for ad hoc backlogging.

For Progress, each day needs to accommodate a daily plan (in a weekly view) and daily tracking. Whilst I put commonplacing in this group, it won't fit in any journal I have been looking at alongside personal journaling. Since it is something I normally do for learning, it might fit better in here?

For Ponder I need a day per page for personal journaling.

9) Add any practical requirements. If you stick a lot of stuff in the journal, what kind of binding would you need? If you like to write with fountain pen, what kind of paper do you need? What size matches what content?

I have learnt from experience that I prefer A5, but that is too big for an everyday carry which would probably make it too big for my Plan journal. I need all journals to work with my fountain pens and have a preference for tomoe river paper. My personal journal at least will get chonky from me sticking things in it and needs to survive that.

10) Pick your journals! Choose from the ones you researched and fell in love with before you went through this exercise (I know you did, we all did). Or look for new ones if none of those fit.