Most of today was spent making progress on cleaning up the novel I’m working on, but I did spend a little time thinking about my 2024 planning system. In a previous post, I mentioned that I’ve switched from using a bullet journal to trying out the half-year Hobonichi Cousin. It’s been working well. Mostly. But there have been a few things I’m not entirely pleased with.

The first of those is that the Cousin doesn’t have a lot of blank pages for free-form planning and notes. So, if you want to do that, you’re limited to using the daily pages, or looking elsewhere. The more I tried to stay in the planner and work around this, the more frustrating it was to keep track of progress toward my quarterly and monthly goals. Eventually, I tried using Obsidian to fill in the gaps.

After months of trying to keep track of tasks across multiple notes in Obsidian and struggling to find a view that worked for me, I gave up. About a week ago, I started pulling all the tasks I’d created out of my Obsidian notes and moving them to my planner. The only problem was, I still had no place to put my goal and project planning. I think this is why some people end up using multiple planners. But I am determined to figure out how to make everything work in one.

The solution I’ve come up with is one that I’ve found by watching planning videos from other Cousin users on YouTube. That’s how I figured out that you can buy a thin companion notebook that has only about forty sheets in it. These notebooks are meant to slip into the back cover of your planner. Awesome! Problem solved!

Except, I live on a tiny island. I’d need to order these online, because there are no stores here that sell that sort of thing. And there is no way (given the absolutely slammed holiday mail situation on said tiny island) that these would arrive anytime soon. Best case, they’d likely be here a few days before the New Year.

Not to worry. I have a perfectly good bullet journal that I only used for three months. There is still at least half a notebook worth of blank pages in there. So, new plan! I am going to use my old bullet journal for noodling out 2024 goal and project planning. Once I have everything figured out, I’m going to copy it over onto one of the precious few blank pages in my Hobonichi Cousin.

Here’s how it’s going to work: There are exactly four blank pages in the planner. I’m going to use one for each quarter’s goals. Then I’m going to use the blank page at the start of each batch of monthly pages as a place to track all my monthly projects and task. This will be kind of like the right-hand side of the monthly spreads I used to do in my bullet journal.

I also have the start of a plan for how I am going to track my reading in the planner. I don’t have a good spot for doing any readathon spreads, though. But I have some ideas about how I want to handle that, and I have time to figure it out. I think the next Magical Readathon isn’t until April.

I’m going to keep using Obsidian. Overall, I like it. I think it works best for things like you would put into a “collection” in a bullet journal. So, lists of movies I want to watch or books I want to read, research and links for vacation planning, notes on what I want to remember to fix in my next edit pass on my book, a brainstormed list of tasks for a project, that type of thing. This is a great addition to my system because it’s digital and searchable and syncs across all my devices (you can’t hyperlink in a notebook). Plus, I definitely do NOT have a place (other than the daily pages) for that sort of thing in the Cousin.

Ultimately, I envision the Obsidian-Cousin flow looking something like this: Notes in Obsidian will generate tasks and/or projects. Those will get migrated to my planner so I can keep track of them. Meanwhile, my daily pages in my planner will probably generate content that needs to be migrated to a note in Obsidian. Either an existing note (for example, a new task to add to a project note), or a new note (like a place to park a new story idea so I can add to it later).

I have to say, it’s a relief to have a plan. When I feel like I have things I need to keep track of and no place to put them, they just fester in my brain, taking up space and keeping me from doing other, more creative things. Now that I’ve been able to off-load some of that junk, knowing I have a system in place so I don’t just forget about it, I feel a bit better.

Next up is taking some time to sort out my goals and projects for next year. But, I’m trying to hold off on doing that until next week. After this draft of my novel is done.

I’m planning a series of posts at the end of the month where I’ll talk more about how I did on my 2023 goals and what some of my goals are for 2024. When I do those, I’ll take some photos of my planner spreads to make it easier to see what I’m doing.