February 2024 in Pens and Paper

I started the month ready to spend the first half of it in hospital, with my dad. So the fountain pens I chose were all expendable pocketable pens that I was willing to have stolen (apart from the Schon Design Pocket 6 which was a leftover from January and never left my desk). So that meant I inked 4 Kaweco Sport fountain pens using various ink cartridges that I had on hand.

The portable lineup:

Once my dad got out of hospital and back home, I decided to celebrate by “shopping” from my collection. I inked up a Parker 51 Plum (use the good china!), a Parker Vacumatic, a Franklin Christoph 45L Turqish (spelled like that on their site) Crush that I had purchased but hadn’t inked before, and a vintage Radius Comet (because I heard that the brand was being revived).

The Franklin Christoph EF nib isn’t the best companion to the Eau de Nil as the ink tends to dry in the nib, causing hard start issues. The Radius is a flexible nib of the vintage kind, which means it’s really flexible and not just springy. It also rattles, which makes me not carry it around with me — it stays at home at my desk. The Leonardo is a beautiful pen with a beautiful ink that I refilled immediately — the only Inkvent 2023 ink I did that with. The two vintage Parkers are phenomenal, as usual. The extra fine nib on the vacumatic somehow really well with Diamine Ash, though I was worried at first that the combination would be too light to be readable. The Parker 51 Aeromatic is a treat to use. It’s the rare Plum colour, and it’s got a fantastic nib (as all 51’s have) which pairs very nicely with the Monteblanc The Beatles Psychedelic Purple.

In terms of paper I’ve been using Kokuyo A4 KB paper which I cut to half size (so A5) to manage my daily to do list. The paper is relatively cheap and very fountain pen friendly. I’m also able to use both sides of the page despite there being some show through.

Kokuyo A4 KB paper cut in half to A5 size. This is why standards are great.

I’ve got a Field Notes Heavy duty on my desk at home and at work, and I just bought a new stock of them. These are where I jot down quick notes, phone call details, doodles during boring meetings. When they’re filled up they get tossed out as nothing in them is permanent — everything important in them moves to somewhere else as I work my way through them.

Field Notes Heavy Duty pocket spiral bound reporter notebooks

I have finally found a use for my Dingbats notebooks (beyond giving them away as gifts, as I have in the past): this lined purple hippo one is my blog notebook. I discovered that I have a much easier, much quicker time writing blog posts if I first draft them on paper, and this is where I do it in. I’ll likely write a dedicated post to this notebook soon.

Apart from them I still use the notebooks I used last month.

Pencils

I’ve been using the Drehgriffel Nr. 2 as my daily driver. I use pencils extensively to plan, as my plans tend to change, and there’s something about this solid little mechanical pencil that makes me want to use it.

Apart from that I brought two pencils into the rotation, to try to use. One is from my last purchase from the late and great C.W. Pencils Enterprise, and it’s the “Big Dipper” J.R. Moon Pencil Co 600. It’s an oversized pencil, the kind of pencil that kids who are learning to write are expected to use. I’ve been having pretty significant neuropathy in my hands lately and I thought that this would be nice and easy to use, as after all it’s designed for kids just learning to develop their fine motor skills. So far it’s been a disappointment – the eraser and ferrule make it very top heavy, and I’ve been having a hard time manipulating it. I can’t imagine kids using this pencil and having an easy time with it. I like the over the top red foil with gold writing look though, so I haven’t given up on it yet.

The second pencil is a Blackwing Volumes 56, the baseball themed one. The core is soft and dark, and I’ve been using it for quick and loose sketches. I’m trying to ease into one week 100 people by training myself to work faster than I normally would.

What did you use in February? Any planner changes? Pencil revelations? Pen preferences?

Adventures in Time Blocked Planning

With time blocked planning the idea is to break down your day into blocks of time where you do things. The point is to structure your day so that you’re never faced with the question of “what do I do next?” Instead you sit down ahead of time and block out large sections of time where you do a specific large task, or bundle together a group of small tasks. You don’t block the day out into a minute by minute plan, but instead work in blocks of at least 30 minutes and usually 1-2 hours.

The idea isn’t new, and I haphazardly gave it a try when I was a student, and not surprisingly I failed spectacularly at it. It was only very recently when I decided to give it a serious try. The reason I decided to give time blocking a try was to solve a problem that I think is pretty common: I’d run out of steam about two-thirds into my day and end up just vegging out in the evenings, not accomplishing what I wanted, not even consuming the sort of media that really interested me. There’s only so many decisions my mind could make throughout the day, and late in the afternoon I would run on empty.

Since I was already “front-loading” my day (i.e. doing the really important work first thing in the morning or as early as possible) it was pretty easy to see the benefit of deciding what to do at a given point of time early on in the day, or even the night before. My issue with time blocking in the past had been that my work day is inherently unstructured. I may plan to work on something in the morning, but then a slack message or an email comes in, or someone bursts into the room with a problem and suddenly I’m working on something completely different.

Here, however, is where maturity kicks in. When I gave time blocking a chance years ago, I didn’t really take it seriously as an approach to work and life. Once something interrupted my day (and something always interrupted my day), the plan went out the window never to return. The plans rarely survived until lunchtime, and very quickly I decided that there was little point in time blocking for people like me. What I failed to realize at the time was that the majority of people are people like me: we live in a world where we are constantly being interrupted, and rarely does the day end in the way we envisioned it at the beginning.

Given this new found realization, and the realization that some very smart, very accomplished people whose work I follow use time blocking successfully and consistently, it was clear that the issue wasn’t with time blocking itself but with how I was approaching it. So I decided to make a more consistent, serious attempt to use time blocking for at least a month or two and see where it gets me.

I’m still very early into the process, but I decided to write about it as I go along, so I’ll have a record of how I tweaked things, and for those who like me, wanted to try time blocking but have failed in the past. Maybe my successes and failures will help them in their journey.

The First Mistakes

I started out with two mistakes, one easily fixed and another a mistake that I’m still working on correcting. The first mistake was trying to create separate time blocks for my work day and my “home day”. That failed spectacularly. Lesson learned: you need to follow one timeline, one plan, from waking up until going to sleep. If you use two different plans you are setting yourself up to fail because you’re creating two points in the day where you have to switch plans. While the morning switch may be relatively easy, by the time you’re off work you don’t feel like opening a different notebook or calendar and seeing what it is exactly that you’re supposed to be doing right now. I kept my home plan on a Rhodia dot pad and my work plan on a Moleskine squared notebook, and it just didn’t work for me. I had to carry two different plans with me, I had to reference and cross reference them, it was a mess. Now I have one plan per day, on a Rhodia dot pad.

The second mistake is one that I’m still working on correcting, which is what do I do when things don’t go as planned. What I should be doing is taking 5 minutes and replanning the rest of my day basically from that point onwards. What I currently do and doesn’t work well is either try to get back to the plan the moment I can (at which point things start to fall apart pretty quickly), or try to make only minor adjustments to the plan. The reality is that if there’s a significant break in my plan (i.e. something that takes more than 30 minutes to deal with), then I need to take a few minutes to stop and completely reassess my day. No, I will not be able to fit everything I planned into it now. Yes, my energy reserves are most likely more depleted at this point than I originally planned. Rather than trying to stick to the plan and crashing and burning, I need to be kinder to myself and look at what’s left of my day with fresh eyes. “That production outage took a lot from me, so let’s switch things up so I have a lighter workload until I’ve had a chance to recover, maybe even schedule a significant break here. Then rebuild my evening so I also have a bit more recovery time then – add a meditation session, or more reading time, etc.”. This is something I’m currently working on doing consistently.

The First Successes

While I’ve been time blocking only for a short time, I have already seen the value of this system. I’m getting much more done, and I am able to dedicate long stretches of time focused on meaningful work. I batch emails to the beginning and end of the day, and slack messages only to the times between large blocks of deep focus. I haven’t had an episode of mindless YouTube watching in the evenings since I’ve started. I’m reading more, journaling more, meditating more, spending more meaningful time with friends and family. I’m also being much more realistic about my goals. Once you start putting things in the context of the hours you have in the day, it becomes easier to assess how much you can get done in a given day.

It’s not just a result of the time blocking itself, of course. It’s also the way I’ve structured my year, a commitment to deep focus and digital minimalism which mean no social media, no mindless media consumption, more reading and more deliberate practice of the things that matter to me. I’m also far from reaching a point where the way in which I time block my day is stable, well-defined routine. Things are still shifting around as I’m recording in my journal what worked and what didn’t work. While I’m not looking for perfection, I do want to reach a point where I have a system that works for me (and not I for it), and that helps me better shape my days.

I’ll be writing more about time blocking in the future, whether my experiments with it succeed or fail. If you’re giving it a try or use time block planning regularly I’d love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments.

Ghosts of Planner’s Past: Bullet Journalling

I’ve been putting off writing this post because of all the planning systems I discussed, this Bullet Journalling (BuJo) is such a big topic and the system that I’ve used the most and the longest, apart from GTD. This will be the last post in this series as I’m planning on starting another series of posts on a different “how I use my notebooks” kind of topic. The previous posts are here: Chronodex, Weekly Planners, Daily Planners, Filofax, GTD and Friends.

So, Bullet Journalling was started by Ryder Carroll as a very utilitarian, relatively simple, glorified to do list combined with a calendar and some forward planning. At first glance it looked like another GTD system, and it’s clear that they share a common ancestry. This is the first video that Ryder Carroll published on the topic. He’s using a Moleskine squared large notebook here (he’ll switch to a Leuchtturm once he hears about the brand from the Pen Addict podcast, and he’ll land a collaboration deal with them later on), and there are no Instagram worthy spreads, metaphysical musings on how BuJo can transform you into a more enlightened human being, or attempts to upsell anything. It’s like the early days of Moleskinerie and 43folders posts – a guy finds a way to manage his to do list that works for him, and may work for others and so he shares it. Ryder Carroll knows how to explain complex things succinctly and clearly, and the video is beautifully made. It gained a lot of traction at the time, although it’s clear that Carroll prefers that you don’t watch that version of the BuJo explanation.

This is version of bullet journalling is what I started using, and what I still sort of use to this day. Why sort of use? Well, because the basis of the system is a daily to do list with a monthly calendar (and a monthly review), an index and a set of “collections” which are basically project to do lists. I still use the daily to do list and “collection” lists, so I sort of bullet journal. But I also sort of don’t – because none of this is new or unique. To do lists with checkboxes written out on notebooks, with project lists alongside them? There’s a monster list of those. You can’t get a book deal and a stationery collaboration based on that, right?

The official Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal

Wrong. About a year passes from the original video, and Carroll signs a deal with Leuchtturm1917 and suddenly there’s an official Bullet Journal and a new video. Stuff gets added to the system. A future log. A whole set of new symbols instead of checkboxes. There’s an added aura of importance and self improvement sprinkled on top. This system will help you be a better person, not just a more productive one.

The included pamphlet – with a poem about BuJo no less – and sticker sheet

This is where the Bullet Journal system starts taking a problematic turn for me (and others, gathering by the comments to the videos). It starts becoming an Instagram thing. People spend hours making gorgeous, Instagram worthy monthly spreads. They spend money on templates, markers, stickers, and notebook bling for this. There’s an army of BuJo influencers. It’s no longer a “getting things done” system, it’s a “make pretty planner pages” system. Carroll inflates the system’s importance and “holistic” approach more and more. Out of curiosity I bought the second edition of the official Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal. My PTSD makes planning a real struggle now, and I was at the point where I was willing to try anything. Well, for quite a bit of money you get an overly thick notebook full of Leuchtturm paper, which is tolerably useful with fountain pens. Don’t expect Tomoe River levels of fountain pen friendliness, as there is spreading, and it doesn’t show off the full properties of all your cool inks. Then again, it’s not really meant for that. There’s also an added 12 (!) page manual about the system and a large sheet of planner stickers (and three ribbon bookmarks). There’s also stuff printed on the end papers that shows you how you can divide the dot grid page using the supplied markings. If you create tables often, I guess it’s useful. What I mostly feel using it is that it’s a lot.

Have you ever tried to write an essay using Microsoft Word? Have you ever been able to do that without futzing with the formatting, the alignment, the spacing, etc? Word is a program created with printing in mind, and it shows. Writing applications like Scrivener supply you with full screen blank canvases that contain zero formatting prompts because that’s how you get the actual writing done. What the Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal does is give you all the tools you need to distract yourself from actually planning your stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible so you can move on to get them done. It’s full of calls to design pages, and I had a hard time at first training my brain to ignore the noise that the notebook came with. Ignore the wide margins, the little division markings, the pages with titles, the stickers and the pamphlet.

But back to the Bullet Journal system itself: stripped of its self-importance and its need to preen for Likes and Favs, is it still useful as a planning system?

Let’s take a look at it part by part:

Index – I didn’t keep one. I think I might have tried this during the first month, but I gave up quickly on this. It’s too much hassle for very little gain. How many times a month do you actually need to find something in your notebook, and when do you not just flip through it? There were many GTD systems with indexes and indexing systems, and I never found the indexes useful.
Monthly log – I keep a version of this separately on a small “Rebel Plans” pad from the Well Appointed Desk. It contains a monthly calendar that’s shaped like a calendar (and not a list of days), with important days in the month circled in a different colour, with basic monthly goals and big monthly milestones/events marked on it. I keep it before my eyes constantly as I work, and so having it tucked away in a notebook doesn’t work for me. I also find listing on paper the events of the day for the entire month a waste of time. That’s what digital calendars are for, and they’re much better than paper ones for it.
Future log – a new invention made for the official bullet journal notebook. I tried using it and found it to be useless for me. If you want true long term goal tracking, I suggest you try the theme system journal or something of the kind.
Daily log – this is the heart of the system, and it works because it’s a to do list. See also my post about GTD. I fluctuate between using the dash-plus annotation system and simple checkboxes, but you can use whatever works for you, of course. The important part is, of course, defining your tasks properly – actionable, doable in a short amount of time, and something that you can and should be doing.
Reflections – these are just a rebranding of GTD reviews. These work well if you do them, but it’s been my experience that it’s very easy to stop doing them because who wants to review what you didn’t get to complete as planned?

So there’s good stuff in Bullet Journal if you are able to strip it down from its anxiety inducing beauty contest trends. The question is, will you be able to ignore all the Bullet Journal page design noise and make use of this as a pragmatic planning system, or will you get carried away and start decorating pages and comparing monthly spreads with people who do this for a living, as you buy yet another template and another BuJo perfect pen? I’ll leave you to answer that one for yourself.

Three ribbon bookmarks and divider markings closeup. You can also see the white margin all around the dot grid page.

Ghosts of Planners Past: GTD and Friends

This is probably going to be the hardest post to write in this series, and so I’ve been postponing it.

I got into Getting Things Done around 2005, when it was really starting to gain momentum with tech workers online. I first heard about it via PvP Online’s creator, Scott Kurtz. Yes, I found a productivity and planning system via one of the first webcomic creators. The internet is funny that way.

If you have no idea what GTD is, then I suggest starting here. It’s a 15 minute guide to David Allen’s all-encompassing planning and productivity system. If it resonates with you, then the GTD book is pretty good for a book in the productivity genre. Books in this genre tend to be repetitive, padded with anecdotes, and oftentimes poorly written. The GTD book is readable, and while it contains the inevitable productivity guru anecdotes, there aren’t very many of them.

There are a few things to note about GTD that set it apart from other productivity systems, and make knowing about it worthwhile:

While it was developed for a paper office based world and appears on the face of it to be very rigid, it is in fact extremely customizable and flexible, and it converts very well to digital planning and to do list systems. Many of the most popular to list applications have their roots in GTD, for good reason.
While it was developed for an office setting and busy executives, it easily works well for students, designers and other creatives, developers, teachers, and just about anybody that doesn’t lead a leisure filled life. If you have “stuff to do”, if you feel overwhelmed, then GTD in some form or another could very likely help you.
This system spawned dozens and dozens of other systems. You can see the roots of GTD in BuJo (Bullet Journalling), there’s a monster list of GTD implementations, and 43folders (Merlin Mann’s old productivity site) is full of info on various GTD tweaks and variants. This, by the way, is my favourite one.
The basics of GTD are worth implementing no matter which system you use, because they just work, and because they will likely fit whichever system you use. They are:
- Make a list of all the things you have on your mind that you need to do. They need to be actions that you can perform in the real world, and you need to be able to clearly envision what “done” means.
- Curate that list – make sure that things on it are actually ACTIONS that you can take IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE. Break big tasks into little ones, things that you are able to do it small chunks of time. Make sure there aren’t any hidden dependencies or prerequisites to these tasks. Make sure you know what DONE looks like. Make sure that they are REAL and actually need to be done, and need to be done by YOU. If things on that list take less than 2 minutes to do, just do them. T
- Go over that list and do the things. If you’re stuck, make sure the thing was properly defined and isn’t a hidden project (i.e. isn’t actually one task but rather 20), something that you can delegate or not do, or something that you can’t start working on now. If you’re balking at doing it open a timer (the famous pomodoro technique enters here).
- Once a week prune the list. Be ruthless.
- Don’t schedule anything on your calendar unless it absolutely has to be on your calendar – a doctor’s appointment, a child’s graduation, an exam date, etc.
You can get carried away by GTD and become more interested in the organizational part of it (“Productivity Pr0n”) than in actually getting the work done.

The last bullet is what earned GTD a place in this blog post series.

I love GTD. I’ve been using it in various form for almost two decades. I have the book and have read it twice, and I have a good grasp of the major players in the GTD cinematic universe. I know the system well enough to be comfortable to get rid of its mannerisms and streamline it to my own needs. I can see its influences in Jira, in BuJo, in Omnifocus and other to do apps. And it’s very powerful dark side is that it really invites you to tweak and tinker with it. You are tempted to make your system a little bit sleeker, better, more efficient, better suited for your needs, to the point where you suddenly find yourself spending more time and care on the system than the tasks that it is supposed to help you manage. So while GTD taught me how to define and manage my tasks, it also taught me to be constantly aware of how much time I’m spending on my task management systems.

So if you are worried about being carried away by GTD’s siren call to tweak, tweak, tweak, here are some basic ideas from the system that I think are worth taking with you or thinking about no matter what:

Our minds aren’t good at keeping track of things. Write them down.
Not everything is a real task. It if it isn’t an action that you need take in the world, then it needs to be trashed/delegated/better defined.
Tasks that languish in your planner/to do system are either ill defined (see bullet above) or require deliberate action to get out of the way (see pomodoro technique, dashes and timers).
Don’t clutter your calendar. It just adds needless stress to your life.
The best definition of a task is a physical action, that can be accomplished at a sitting, supports valuable progress towards a recognized and desirable goal, and something that YOU are the most appropriate person to perform.

Ghosts of Planners Past: Daily Planners

It was obvious that I’d discuss daily planners after I addressed weekly planners, right?

This format, in combination with some of the planning tactics that I’ll talk about in later posts, has been the one that I used the most over the years. Daily planners usually have a page per day, oftentimes with hourly notations on the side. Less commonly they have a page for planning and across from it a page for notes. Sometimes the page is divided into sections for various meeting notes, todos, etc. Daily planners tend to be the thickest of planners, unless they split the year somehow, or only cover part of it (academic year planners, for example).

This is a very old Filofax daily planner example that I had laying around. I’ll be posting separately about the Filofax system

I’ve used the daily format the most because it allows for the most room to think and plan in, and the main reason I plan on paper is for the space it allows me to sit with a pen in hand and a blank (lined/squared) page and plan the direction, location and movement of my tasks like a general ordering troops around in the army. Push this one until tomorrow or early next week, this one gets a little marker for lower priority, and this one for higher, etc. The marking methods that I use have changed a bit over the years, but the format that I prefer largely hasn’t. I can oftentimes plan two days on a page, but it makes things feel cramped. I’m giving that format a try now (two days per page), and I’m likely going to revert back to my beloved page per day format soon. Ideas need space to breath, and when tasks get cramped I tend to miss a few of them. They just run on into each other in a condensed wall of text.

Like with weekly planners, daily planners have obvious inherent downsides. They’re thick and heavy. Unless you’re making them yourself (which is what I’ve been doing for years), you’ll be made to feel bad with every day you skip in them. They also don’t allow to easily see the bigger picture: having all the space that the weekly planners lack, they pay for that with the inability of letting you get a feel for your week in a glance. You remain mired in the day to day, and need to purposefully remember to look ahead to see what’s coming tomorrow, the day after, next week.

This is the reason that for years I’ve kept two notebooks that I turned into planners, a daily one (which was much more heavily used) and a weekly one (which I referenced once or twice a week). This combination worked the best for me until I got sick and it crumbled. Perhaps it will work for me again.

Ghosts of Planners Past: Chronodex

As I’ve been struggling with planning ever since I received a cancer diagnosis in mid 2021, I’ve been reflecting on the many planner systems that I’ve used over the years. Most of these systems didn’t stand the test of time for me, but I think that there’s still something to learn from their failure. So while I’m working out how planning looks like for the new, post-cancer treatment me, I thought that I would write down my reflections on each system that I have used.

I love planning, I’ve always loved planning, and together with many analogue systems I have tried quite a few to do apps over the years. Analogue planning systems, while sometimes cumbersome, always worked better for me, which is why that’s what I’ll focus on in this short series of posts.

I first discovered Chronodex, Patrick Ng’s gorgeously visual planning system, when he first published it in late 2011. It immediately appealed to me because it was so visual, and I’m a visual thinker, and it was so very different from anything else that was going around in the planning world at the time. This was well before the days of various bullet journal tracking pages, in the heady days of GTD and the Fountain Pen Network. The Rhodia Webnotebook was new and exciting stuff, and the Traveler’s Notebook was all the rage.

Patrick’s Chronodex was meant to be printed at home, 6 months of planning pages at a time, and then folded and cut to size to fit a Traveler’s Notebook. I tried to do that at first, and failed miserably. Home printers are terrible, and the result was unusable and just a waste of a lot of paper and inkjet ink.

Since I still really wanted to give the system a try, I went to the office supply store next to my job and bought a circle template ruler. Using that, a Rhodia Webbie and a Pilot Hi Tec C Coleto I created hand drawn Chronodex pages for a few months. I was a team lead at the time, I was overwhelmed with work and meetings, and I thought that visual time blocking as offered by the Chronodex would be the solution.

I really insisted on getting the Chronodex system to work for me, because I was so aesthetically enamoured with it. I pushed it until it broke and then I kept dragging it on for weeks before I finally realised that it was time to move on. The Chronodex wasn’t for me.

The system works on time-blocking, as drawn on a circular 12 or 24 hour template that is supposed to mimic a watch face. If you are a visual thinker you will immediately see the appeal. If you like pretty planner pages, you will also love the Chronodex’s elegant beauty. But planning for me has first and foremost got to work on a practical level, and the system faired poorly there.

If you have relatively few things to do throughout the day, or if your day is already time blocked (i.e. you are a student or a teacher) then the Chronodex could work well for you.

If, on the other hand, you have a lot going on, or you tend to have to jump around between tasks, or if your days aren’t so easily well defined in time blocks, then the Chronodex is likely not for you. It becomes too cluttered to be readable if you try to splice your day into small time blocks, and if your day is fluid and not well defined in advance, you aren’t going to be able to to time block it until you start to actually do the thing. The Chronodex isn’t a Pomodoro substitute, it’s the equivalent of having an old-school day planner with the hours marked on it, and chunking out your work and meetings in advance in your planner. It’s a great system for students, and for people who have a high degree of control and certainty about their day.

What I did take from Chronodex is the option to stop and visually time block my day when things are getting out of hand in terms of my expectations versus what I can actually do in the time at hand.

If you are at all curious about the system, I encourage you to visit Patrick’s beautiful site and maybe print out a page or two to try it out. Another option is to draw out the Chronodex circles yourselves, just to see if there’s anything in the system for you (don’t do it long term, though, as it takes ages). A third option is to go Etsy and search for Chronodex. There are dozens of stamps for sale with the Chronodex template on them.

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