Two months with a Hobonichi Techo

This year I wanted to try something new: Using a Hobonichi planner for pretty much all my daily (task) planning and bullet journaling. It’s now been two months and I’m not sure, how to think of it. Let’s start with the things that I like about it:

• Planning tasks in advance works much better than with a classic bullet journal since tasks (that are not rescheduled) don’t have to be migrated anywhere. All I have to do is add them to the right date and that’s it.
• I went with the A6 planner and I prefer the format over A5 simply because it’s more portable yet still large enough to write down my thoughts. So far I’ve never needed more than the one page this format inside the planner gives me.
• It’s easy to find all my notes for a specific date simply because there is only one page that they can be on.

And now to what I don’t like / still have to get used to:

• The paper is too thin. I just don’t like the feel of it and therefore don’t enjoy writing on it all that much. MD or Leuchtturm work much better for me.
• No good space for collections/projects. Sure, I can use the space that I don’t use on each day for random notes or collections, but it just feels wrong. There are also some unnumbered pages after the daily pages in the book that could be used here but they are “hard to reach”. I’ve bought a set of memopads for the A6 Hobonichi but I also simply don’t enjoy adding projects there. I don’t know why, though.
• It’s still not portable enough! I still have to have another smaller notebook with me all the time that I can just use to jot ideas down. I had originally hoped that with the Hobonichi I wouldn’t need something like that anymore (or at least less frequently) but that hasn’t happened yet.

To summarize, the Hobonichi Planner simply hasn’t yet become my one-stop solution for managing tasks and writing down new ideas. Perhaps it might still do that but if this doesn’t happen in the near future, I will most likely repurpose it into a classic journal where I just write down impressions and thoughts (or what happened) of a specific date.

Task management etc. would then most likely move into my passport-size Traveler’s Notebook with three inserts:

1. Random notes and thoughts
2. Tasks in bullet journal style
3. Collections/projects

I think I’ll give the Hobonichi a couple more weeks but no matter if it works for me or not I think it is a great product. It perhaps simply isn’t the right format for me.