2026 Notebook Plan
In which I justify my need for multiple notebooks...
I posted last week on my Instagram that I was going with a 3-notebook system for journaling and recording my life but I’ve gotten a few questions asking me to further clarify things.
The three notebooks for 2026 are:
Hobonichi A6 English with Monday Start (Notebook only - currently sold out; Notebook with cover, one of the options with a cover that’s currently in stock)
Leuchtturm 1917 Dotted A5 (Available from my favorite local stationery shop, Penny Post)
Alchemy Journal (Available from Bookshop.org « Affiliate link!; waxed poetic about it in this post)
Why three notebooks? Well, three different purposes entirely. And I love all three and couldn’t ever limit myself to just one.
Hobonichi aka The Planner
Just as it sounds like, this will serve as my planner and daily log of what’s going on in my life. While I live and die by my shared Google calendars with my family and the Girl Scout troop and equivalent ones for work, I still like to be able to see what’s going on and what’s going to happen on paper. I didn’t use a paper calendar for the majority of 2025 and really missed it. I plan to record events including birthdays, to do lists, when I got to and left work on a given day / which office I was in (helps with my daily timecard), logs for meals and movement before they put into the Nourish app, and a short headline for each day.
Alchemy Journal aka The Journal
Any sort of long-form writing I do on paper will be in this notebook. Think responses to journal prompts (still only like 40% of my way through The Book of Alchemy), morning pages, letters to people I’ll never send. My goal will be to try and fill up an entire one of these notebooks every quarter so three months. I purchased three after getting a 20% off everything coupon from Bookshop.org for…some reason. Black Friday thank you? Not entirely sure, TBH.
Leuchtturm aka The Dumping Ground
This notebook is for anything else I want to write, draw, doodle, scrapbook, etc. Junk journaling. Logging my creative projects (even those that never get done). Collecting stamps and stickers. Recording song lyrics and quotes I like. Brain dumps. Brainstorming / mind mapping. Tracking goals. Reviewing life at the end of the month will probably go in here, too. The goal here is to fill up one of these every two months. I’ve got 3 orange-red and 3 dark teal ones I purchased on sale after Christmas.
What’s your journal ecosystem look like for this year?
[I really have five notebooks going right now but two are for work, one for notes that can’t leave work (sensitive data) and one that I carry back and forth between the various buildings I work in and home. Can’t leave is just a bunch of dot-grid paper pages stapled together at the top and numbered so I know I haven’t lost a page. Boring cover-sheet added. The other one is a Rollbahn Spiral Notebook (like this one at JetPens) in a lovely pale orange.]