A blog about notes and notebooks! Yay!
Let me introduce myself:
I am a thirty-something year-old nurse in California who also happens to be a student. I’ve always loved notebooks and journals but it became quite an obsession recently. The precipitating factor? — Planners. Specifically, Erin Condren.
Yes, I jumped on the Erin Condren bandwagon and within a few months, managed to accumulate those bright, colorful planners and notebooks, which by now sit in my bookshelf half unused… I honestly don’t know what caused me to fall so hard for the style. It’s probably the novelty of the idea that you could “decorate” your planners. I had fun for a while (I even started buying stickers and tapes, wow…) until the “playfulness” of Erin Condren designs became too much to bear.
I then switched to Plum Paper planners which were lovely. I had been using the Moleskine Weekly Notebook to keep track of my work schedule and projects. The larger, prettier (but in a subdued way) Plum Paper was to keep track of everything personal. This worked for a while until I realized: 1. Carrying two planners didn’t make sense. 2. My bland personal life did not warrant all the space provided by the 7″x9″ size planners.
And then last year, I unexpectedly became a student again — a graduate program run by the Biomedical Sciences department of the hospital where I’ve been employed for the past few years. With my boss’ blessings, thus began my new life of perpetual running — running from classes to meetings, meetings to classes. This new life required a compact system of organization and planning, a simple planner where I could keep track of both work and school. (forget the personal, which I no longer had.)
Enter Traveler’s Notebook! With its slim design and the brilliant system of multiple inserts, it fit my needs perfectly. The beauty of leather cover was an added bonus. I should mention, my choice was not the extremely popular Midori Traveler’s Notebook, but a much cheaper look-alike by a company called ZLYC from Amazon. I had a monthly insert, weekly insert which had a similar layout as my favorite Moleskine weekly notebook, and a grid notebook insert to keep track of work projects, and a fourth insert for school notes and projects.
If you are a pen/paper enthusiast, you probably know traveler’s notebooks have a huge following, with countless Instagram photos and blogs and reviews. I am not exactly sure how it happened but somehow reading about how people used their traveler’s notebook led me to yet another product, Roterfaden Teschenbegleiter.
Roterfaden was a huge price jump for my comfort level, but here are the reasons I decided to splurge:
- Leather is beautiful. I became addicted to the smell and feel of it since I started using the traveler’s notebook.
- Roterfaden holds regular A5 size notebooks. In it, I still use the same weekly insert I previously had, but also put in several A5 notebooks for my classes.
- Pockets, pockets, pockets! One of the big pockets holds my iPad mini which I extensively use for reading pdf documents.
My notebook preferences have changed drastically — I won’t go into details since I’ve spent too many words describing my planner changes… But simply put, I’ve grown to love these compact, thin, and extremely portable A5 size books for my notes. This was unthinkable even only last year when my go-to notebook used to be an Extra Large Soft Moleskine notebook (pictured in the beginning.) Nowadays I am even finding myself constantly jotting things down in those tiny Field Notes.
I suppose more on notebooks will have to wait for the next time. This became way longer than I planned for my first post. Well, thank you for visiting and let’s see how this goes!
jottermeow 