Change planner, change life?
📓 Change life, change planner.
It’s an inexplicably timed, cyclical urge. One day, I wake up, and I want to cut bangs again, or rearrange the furniture, or clean out the closet and re-organize my bookshelves. The need for change is sudden, and pressing, and my mind will not rest until I’ve conducted some kind of overhaul—and this time, it was my planning system.
It seems especially dramatic to leave my Bullet Journal behind in 2025 - as I’ve discussed my notebook ecosystem at length before, citing my Bullet Journal as a daily foundation for organizing my life, but sometimes, life calls for a little premeditated plot twist.
My aforementioned cyclical urges are not borne of a desire for arbitrary change, but of a need to let go, to strip down to the bare essentials, to become lighter. I leave the salon with tumbleweeds of split ends behind me, I rearrange my home in a way that makes daily life more efficient, I de-clutter, and donate clothes that I don’t wear, and I leave only my favorite books on the shelves, making space for more.
The inciting incident was a routine trip to browse the stationery section at McNally Jackson on Prince Street in December. A delectable tower of colorful 2026 planners was on display. I picked up a pocket size (3.5x5.5 inch) Moleskine Daily planner, and thought about how my life might be different if I embraced the practicality of a planner that fits in my purse, rather than insisting all of my organizing happen at my desk with my 1.5 pound behemoth A5 planner that is simply too heavy to take anywhere. The notebook was a red, and full of promise for my 32nd year, just like Bridget Jones’ Diary1.
As I walked away, I thought I might make a change to my planning system in 2027, as I had already purchased blank, dotted, A5 Archer & Olive Notebook; the 7th successor in the line of Bullet Journals I’ve been using to plan my life since 2017.
A core principle of Bullet Journaling is to make changes to your format if it is no longer serving you. As a fully customizable medium, there is so much room make adjustments and corrections so that journal becomes exactly what you need. I hadn’t fully realized, until I considered buying a pre-made planner, that my Bullet Journal no longer felt like a labor of love in creating a custom work for myself, but rather, just labor. The Bullet Journal system was no longer serving me, I felt like I was in service to the Bullet Journal.
The pandemic had nurtured my habit of doing my planning at home. I spent more time in my apartment than not, and was able to work ahead and create elaborate layouts for the fun of it. As life slowly began to accelerate, I never really adjusted by BuJo to match its pace. Several times, I left my planner at home while traveling, because I could not tolerate the extra 1.5 lbs in my backpack — the costs of my current planning system were literally outweighing the benefits.
When we buy stationery, we’re buying potential2. Like Bridget Jones, many of us buy a planner with the idea that it’s going to change our life (change planner—change life). In my case, I had to take stock and examine that my life had changed. I now needed a different tool for my more dynamic lifestyle: change life—change planner.
My current Bullet Journal was set to run out of pages by the end of January, and so a decision was made: January 2026 would be a transitional month between my old planner, and whatever new planner I chose in the coming weeks.
Due to the nature of my impulsive decision, I did little to no research on a new planner, and simply went to one of my favorite stationery shops in the city to peruse their current offerings. I emerged from Goods For the Study on West 8th street with a planner from a brand I had never really heard of, and an unexpected level of commitment due to the nature of the final sale transaction.
Goods for The Study, has in my opinion, one of the most comprehensive selections of planners and notebooks in the city, with sample planners for customers to flip through before making their final choice. In this instance, I found that picking up, seeing, and feeling each planner was absolutely necessary before purchasing a planner for the year.
Below are the salient characteristics that resulted in my choice of the Mark’s Inc. (Japan) storage.it A6 weekly planner:
Portable, but not quite pocket A6 size
Weekly format with a notes page included for each week
Monthly Calendars
Annual Calendar
Super-thin, ultra-light paper
A number of blank pages at the back (but not too many)
Two ribbon bookmarks
Storage pockets on the inside of the front and back covers
A unique, resealable slider on the transparent cover
I determined this planner to be the best fit for me based on the format, size, and unbeatable lightness. I was especially charmed by the annual calendar in the front of the notebook—it reminded me of the Case Study yearly poster-sized calendar I have hanging in my living room.
I found this planner to be so unique due to its somewhat utilitarian-in-design, resealable, transparent cover. As soon as I got home, I got to work creating a custom cover by painting a piece of paper to place inside the plastic sleeve.
Once I started to customize the inside, I became more convinced that I had made the right choice.
I was afraid that changing my planner meant giving up my love of decorating pages, but soon found that the weekly notes pages allowed me plenty of room to customize with my stationery collection.
This planner has a continuous weekly format, with no pages to break out the months. Instead of monthly trackers, I’ve consolidated my tracking to yearly layouts in the allotted blank pages at the back of the notebook, a far more efficient system than before, and one that I’m excited about!
Inspired by fellow journaler (Hobonichi) and mutual, MostlyMady, I dusted off my pocket-printer and started a book tracker, focused on featuring the covers of books. I’m mostly winging it, and was excited to mark down my first read of the year, Impossible People, a graphic novel by Julia Wertz3.
A few pages in the back of the planner feature full-color transit maps of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and several other cities in Japan, a serendipitous detail, as this year I am going on my first trip to Japan!
As usual, I’ve decorated the inside front and back cover pages with stickers. There are pockets of varying sizes, and I love that they are transparent, because I often forget I’ve placed anything on the inside covers at all in my other notebooks. I am especially excited to always have postage stamps at my disposal in my new planner, so I can send postcards from anywhere4!
As I continue to set up my new planner in the new year, I keep finding little details that make me appreciate my choice of planner so much more. There are tiny circles to indicate a full moon or a new moon (albeit, they are one day off for a US user, since Japan lives in the future), each day and week is numbered throughout the entire year, each day has tiny dot dividers, which I’ve been using to separate morning, noon, and night activities.
My new planner already makes me feel lighter, and I’m excited to have a system that helps me to feel inspired, rather than creatively burdened. In 2026, I’m letting go of something that no longer works for me, and trying something new. What are you leaving behind in 2026?
“ It all began on New Year’s Day...in my thirty-second year of being single.” - The opening line of Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001) (I have officially entered my Bridget Jones era).
self quote hehehehe
I really, really enjoyed this btw!
When I am traveling in the US obv.
She’s a slim everyday girl! Yay to unburdening yourself 👏👏
loved this read <3 i'm so excited for ur trip to japan!!!