Journal Jam Fall 2022
2022-08-22 22:37![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
razielimI'm alive!! I finished painting my comic at uh... 6am last night and the last few pages are being posted this week!
Anyway, I hear a certain 👀 beloved journal community![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
journalsandplanners is doing a questions meme. I'll throw all my catch-up answers on this one master post!
Q1. Have you ever pivoted/made a pretty big shift in journal/planner usage? What prompted it and what was the shift in usage?
Yeah! Prior to 2019, I used very productivity-focused dated planners, with lots of extra pages meant to nurture and track goals, time-blocking, prompts for reviewing results, etc.
I didn't mean to change that, but when I got a Hobonichi Cousin for 2019, the filling out of the daily pages with actual journaling came up front and center, and the productivity was confined to the weekly pages and eventually tapered off. First I used the dailies for studying/notes for my job, then just thoughts/feelings/tarot, then notes on random interesting things and recipes.
I tried to use an empty dot-grid notebook this year, having to set up my own weeklies, and all journaling/notetaking pretty much disappeared and instead the whole thing became very focused on decoration and scrapbooking with a little bit of half-hearted productivity. The grid was so big (5mm) that I just didn't enjoy writing in it longform.
After ~7 months, I gave up on all that extra set-up effort and bought the A6 Hobonichi and have since then happily been using the daily pages again with to-do lists, notes, and journaling, but now with a lot more decoration now that I've gotten a taste for it. I'm considering using the A6 in future years too as the A5 Cousin was getting difficult to fill out with my busy painting schedule, which was both a source of stress and the reason I attempted to abandon ship and use a blank notebook.
Ultimately, I respond to the format of the physical object I'm using and the time available to me!
Q2. Do you keep your old journals/planners, or do you get rid of them? If you keep them, how do you store them, and do you have a longterm plan for them? If you get rid of them, do you throw them away? Burn them? Something else?
I've thrown out all my pre-Hobonichi planners/journals while doing the whole Marie Kondo thing. They were boring, all different styles, and just... I didn't care. A couple times since then I've thought it would be cool to see them again, but I'm not broken up about it.
I keep my Hobonichis in a nice stack! They're all identical on the outside, and I reach for them to look up information all the time! Recipes, notes, brainstorming, ideas, detailed record of what happened when, it's all there! They're also just very satisfying to look through, the daily pages being filled wall to wall with tiny cramped writing. And I wasn't as into decorating before, but that's not to say I didn't decorate, and there's some really neat-looking stuff in the weekly and monthly pages that I enjoy admiring occasionally.
The one this year will be smaller than the rest and stick out, but I'm okay with that. What little note-taking or journaling I did in the dot-grid notebook, I've transferred to the Hobo and dolled up some other old daily pages just for fun so by the end of the year, I don't think it will be truly half-empty even though I only got it a few weeks ago.
Q3. What prompted you to get into using a planner or journaling?
I have ADHD and felt like a failure. Writing down tasks made me feel more in control of my life and able to execute a higher percentage of the tasks I would have ideally liked to do because it partly gamified otherwise huge and unmanageable responsibilities, ideas, and projects. So I began testing out ever more elegant solutions. First the school-agenda style planners you can get in any grociery store, then a mini blackboard, eventually getting to the very nice planners. The journaling was an accident.
Q4. How far back do your journals/planners go?
Just to 2019, which suits me just fine as that's the year I quit software dev, went to Europe, got brain damage, attended Lightbox, etc. It was a very eventful time that did a full reset on my life. Lots of other people count time these days as "X years since the pandemic started" but I count time as "X years since I decided to become an illustrator." I don't really need to know or remember what happened before then; at this point, all that stuff essentially happened to someone else.
Anyway, I hear a certain 👀 beloved journal community
journalsandplanners is doing a questions meme. I'll throw all my catch-up answers on this one master post!Q1. Have you ever pivoted/made a pretty big shift in journal/planner usage? What prompted it and what was the shift in usage?
Yeah! Prior to 2019, I used very productivity-focused dated planners, with lots of extra pages meant to nurture and track goals, time-blocking, prompts for reviewing results, etc.
I didn't mean to change that, but when I got a Hobonichi Cousin for 2019, the filling out of the daily pages with actual journaling came up front and center, and the productivity was confined to the weekly pages and eventually tapered off. First I used the dailies for studying/notes for my job, then just thoughts/feelings/tarot, then notes on random interesting things and recipes.
I tried to use an empty dot-grid notebook this year, having to set up my own weeklies, and all journaling/notetaking pretty much disappeared and instead the whole thing became very focused on decoration and scrapbooking with a little bit of half-hearted productivity. The grid was so big (5mm) that I just didn't enjoy writing in it longform.
After ~7 months, I gave up on all that extra set-up effort and bought the A6 Hobonichi and have since then happily been using the daily pages again with to-do lists, notes, and journaling, but now with a lot more decoration now that I've gotten a taste for it. I'm considering using the A6 in future years too as the A5 Cousin was getting difficult to fill out with my busy painting schedule, which was both a source of stress and the reason I attempted to abandon ship and use a blank notebook.
Ultimately, I respond to the format of the physical object I'm using and the time available to me!
Q2. Do you keep your old journals/planners, or do you get rid of them? If you keep them, how do you store them, and do you have a longterm plan for them? If you get rid of them, do you throw them away? Burn them? Something else?
I've thrown out all my pre-Hobonichi planners/journals while doing the whole Marie Kondo thing. They were boring, all different styles, and just... I didn't care. A couple times since then I've thought it would be cool to see them again, but I'm not broken up about it.
I keep my Hobonichis in a nice stack! They're all identical on the outside, and I reach for them to look up information all the time! Recipes, notes, brainstorming, ideas, detailed record of what happened when, it's all there! They're also just very satisfying to look through, the daily pages being filled wall to wall with tiny cramped writing. And I wasn't as into decorating before, but that's not to say I didn't decorate, and there's some really neat-looking stuff in the weekly and monthly pages that I enjoy admiring occasionally.
The one this year will be smaller than the rest and stick out, but I'm okay with that. What little note-taking or journaling I did in the dot-grid notebook, I've transferred to the Hobo and dolled up some other old daily pages just for fun so by the end of the year, I don't think it will be truly half-empty even though I only got it a few weeks ago.
Q3. What prompted you to get into using a planner or journaling?
I have ADHD and felt like a failure. Writing down tasks made me feel more in control of my life and able to execute a higher percentage of the tasks I would have ideally liked to do because it partly gamified otherwise huge and unmanageable responsibilities, ideas, and projects. So I began testing out ever more elegant solutions. First the school-agenda style planners you can get in any grociery store, then a mini blackboard, eventually getting to the very nice planners. The journaling was an accident.
Q4. How far back do your journals/planners go?
Just to 2019, which suits me just fine as that's the year I quit software dev, went to Europe, got brain damage, attended Lightbox, etc. It was a very eventful time that did a full reset on my life. Lots of other people count time these days as "X years since the pandemic started" but I count time as "X years since I decided to become an illustrator." I don't really need to know or remember what happened before then; at this point, all that stuff essentially happened to someone else.
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Date: 2022-08-23 20:18 (UTC)I'm glad you became an illustrator. :)
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Date: 2022-08-29 19:39 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 17:15 (UTC)And your style is just so UNF HOT, I don't know what you would have to paint/draw I would not massively applaud to... Snails, maybe. Yeah, snails, definitely!
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Date: 2022-09-11 23:31 (UTC)AH DR ZOOK SAYS MY STYLE IS HOT! ...And they're a doctor, so they'd know. :) Hmmmm..... snails, eh? Hmmmm
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Date: 2022-08-24 23:38 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-29 19:37 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-07 09:35 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-27 08:18 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-29 19:55 (UTC)I'm discovering these Snowflake type events.... really do it for me. Hahaha. I feel like I'd have no choice but to be a lot more active here if there was something like this Journal Jam relevant to my interests every month.