+--------------------------November 19, 2025-------------------------+
|     The Joy of Looking at Planners, and a Commitment to Bullet     |
|                         Journaling In 2026                         |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

As we surpass the halfway point of November, it once again becomes 
the time of year when I become obsessed with looking at planners for 
the new year. I've been looking at Leuchtturm1917 day planners, 
Moleskine weekly planners, the Field Notes undated weekly planner, 
and of course, all sorts of Happy Planner layouts. I've also been 
considering trying something like a Calendex in 2026.

There's honestly something fun about this. I think it's the promise 
of doing, the temptation to imagine a version of myself that is 
slightly more diligent than the me that I am today. There's a lot to 
unpack there, but I've forgotten the combination to my suitcase lock 
B)

Regardless, it is something that I enjoy a lot. However, I've had to 
contend with the reality that, in all honesty, I didn't use my 
planner as much as I should have in 2025. I bought a Field Notes 
undated weekly planner in January, and then a few months later, took 
up Bullet Journaling. In theory, the Bullet Journal has it's own 
built-in planner: you keep track of future events in the future log, 
and then plan out each month in the monthly log's calendar page. 
However, I didn't want to stop using my Field Notes planner, so I 
used it as a kind of extended future log.

What I've found throughout 2025 is that "I'll just carry around two 
things instead of one" is a way bigger deal than it seems like on the 
surface. One of the things that really attracted me to bullet 
journaling was that you don't have to know where something goes 
before you write it down - you can just dump everything into the 
daily log and organize it later[0] - and I find that this process 
doesn't go so smoothly when things are either being migrated to or 
extracted from a separate, secondary notebook/planner. I'm much less 
likely to use either when the "system" relies on me using both.

That, and the notebook I've used for my first bullet journal is a 
truly ginormous tome of a notebook that I evidently used as a diary 
for about 3 days when I was in high school. I had decided to use a 
nearly empty notebook I already had instead of buying a new one when 
I picked up journaling again sometime in February, and figured I 
should just keep using that when I switched from regular journaling 
to bullet journaling. This thing has about 400 pages[1], and is a bit 
smaller than A4, but a bit bigger than A5. Truth be told, I'm just 
not gonna carry that shit around. So I end up finding other places to 
write things down that SHOULD go in the journal, such as appointments 
and things I need to do or remember, and then migrating them into the 
journal becomes an extra step that defeats the purpose of the journal 
being a dumping ground for stuff.

So, there are two things I'm going to do differently in 2026:
1. I'm going to do "regular" bullet journaling, with a standard 
future log. I'll think about switching to something else, like a 
Calendex, if I find that the future log isn't meeting my needs[2]. 
Whatever I do, though, it has to be within the bullet journal itself, 
so that I only have to carry one thing.

2. I am going to use a smaller notebook. I've ordered both an A5 and 
A6 Leuchtturm dot graph notebook, and I'm going to use both over the 
course of the year and see which I like more. I think I'm more likely 
to take the A6 with me, since it fits in my pocket, but we'll see. I 
suspect I may like the A5 more because I'm used to a larger journal.


Anyway, that's it for today. I usually talk about stuff like this on 
my website, but I kind of just felt like posting on nightfall city. 
Keep being weird.
-mathpunk

+                              Footnotes                             +
[0] This idea - "braindump now, organize later" - was what originally 
attracted me to Zettelkasten, too, though I ultimately found that 
it's a more useful principle for planning/listing than it is for 
notetaking (as in David Allen's inbox) and I've found that it works 
better for me to keep planning and notetaking separate rather than 
doing them both in the same place.

[1] Over the course of the year, I've only used about half of them. I 
don't really expect to get to page 300 by the end of 2025.

[2] Which is a distinct possibility, since there's a lot of "future 
stuff" I need/like to keep track of!