Excellent post on bullet journals from @nofars at which is part of a series on planners. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole series. Writing at Large is a cool site to peruse, analog friends! Includes some great sketches as well.
Some random thoughts in response: like @nofars, I prefer bullet journaling in its earlier, simpler, non-artistic mode, and still use some of that today. That’s what made it do-able for me. I get overwhelmed quickly by too many choices.
re planners with Tomoe River paper, I did a search for that a few years ago, wanting to see if there were alternatives to the Hobonichi planners which I like, but again have a lot of elements that are more than I need.
I’ve found, for me, Wonderland222 planners to be just what I was looking for: fountain pen friendly Tomoe River paper, and a clean-lined, minimalist looking planner that had extremely useful layouts: nicely laid out calendars with time lines, planning pages that allowed for habit and routine tracking, quarterly planning, monthly review and overview pages – just incredibly clean and thoughtful and useful layouts.
Here’s the weird thing: their website is the opposite of their planners.
If I had just looked at the website, which is busy, splashy, colorful, and (to me) confusing, I would have said, “NOPE too much whiz-bang for me.”
I bought my first Wonderland222 through a third party site. It wasn’t until I went to their home site to re-up for the next year that the aesthetic dissonance hit.
Such a visually BUSY website! Behold it here. They have actually toned it down, a LOT. It’s much cleaner and easier to navigate than it used to be.
And such a clean, elegant, useful Tomoe River planner. They have dated, and undated versions, in several useful sizes (A5, A6, B6).
Behold the clean layouts here.
Anyway, I just pre-ordered my 2024 planner and notebook (they have awesome Tomoe River notebooks, undated pages with timelines along the sides) for next year. I get the A5 size, for my big, scrawly handwriting, but you can get smaller sizes as well.
P.S. No conflicts of interest here; this is a personal site, not a review site. These are the planners I buy full-price, as a regular customer, for myself; just sharing what I’ve enjoyed using for the last few years. YMMV, FWIW, all the acronym disclaimers.