Editing The Pen Addict 552/transcript (section)

== Planner check-in for 2023 ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So I was asked to do a quick planner check-in for 2023 so far. And I have to say, Myke, things are going swimmingly. So I have two main products that I'm using. The Plotter Nero. The very specific, unique, non-standard size notebook, which I can't unsee now since you called me out so beautifully in a recent podcast.

'''Myke Hurley:''' One of my honestly crowning achievements of this show was playing the long game on that one.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I'm usually prepared or ahead of you a little bit. Like I know what's coming. You got me there. Like that rarely happens. Like it rarely happens. You got me and I deserved every bit of that because I'm loving it. I'm still loving it. Every week I sit down and lay out my week in the weekly pages, which is kind of what I wanted out of a planner for this year is moving to a two page per week layout from a one page per day layout. So it's basically I've gone back to a previous style that I've loved before in different planners. Um, the William Hannah I've used it in, I've used it in the traveler style and it, I guess I'm just going to have to stick with this forever. Like this is the, the layout I keep going back to, to where I have seven days on the left hand side of the page and then open on the right hand side of the page. And it just really works for how I think about my weeks and how I want to see things because I don't need the singular page per day because I'm not, I don't really like use my planners in that way to where like, if I had like a more traditional job and I was like, you know, in a traditional office job or like even my old it job, it would be great. It's like, Hey, today, let's just like hammer out all the things, keep notes as I'm actively going. And I really don't use a planner in that way for my current job. So it's more of, Hey, I need to see big picture layout of what the week looks like. And then I just kind of go to town on all these individual tasks, like on their own. So that's worked out well for me. The regular blank pages in there also work well. That's just kind of my note taking pages. They're generally more work planning type of pages, right? It's, I don't use those pages for journaling, right? They're for ideas or for followup or for tasks. It's generally work related, you know, for different projects I have going on. Right. And if I want to do some separate journaling, like, well, I have a regular A5 notebook for that. That's separate from, you know, this. The new thing I added this year, that was a new layout for me in the plotter. But I had used that style before, just not last year. A completely new product was the five-year planner that I bought. Such a beautiful thing. Yeah. So I have an A6 Hobonichi five-year planner starts in 2023. I have, I am, I was unsure going into this and I spent, you know, months and months thinking about, should I do this for 2023 and beyond, right? Because it's five-year commitment at least. And I was like, nah, I won't do it. Yeah, maybe I'll do it. No, I won't do it. I've been in it since January 1st and I haven't missed a day yet. And I actively enjoy filling out that little block of time for each day because it is so short. And, you know, it's not time consuming at all. It takes you about one minute a day, maybe two minutes if you have to like think about what you're going to write. But you could write nothing there. It's like, hey, cook dinner tonight. It was, it was pretty sweet, you know, like stuff like that. Here's what we had. You know, it's, there is for a broad, big commitment, hey, five-year journal, it's almost no commitment on a daily basis. And that's the goal here, right? Take this teeny tiny little commitment every day, spend a minute doing it. And then five years from now, you'll have this, like this notebook full of like your, your past five years. And it's like, dang, that's kind of cool. So like I'm into it and I'll admit that I wasn't sure I was going to be into it, but I'm very into it. And so far so good. I am, I'm digging it. It doesn't hurt that this is, and one of the reasons that pushed me over and which I mentioned this before is this is the last edition with the traditional 52 GSM Tomoe River paper. So that didn't hurt me purchasing this, but even if they didn't, I think I still would have gotten this or a Midori one with the great Midori paper or any kind of layout of a five-year journal, I think it's, it's been a good thing for me to just capture some little detail or two every day. And I usually do it the next day, right? Like the next morning I'll, I'll write yesterday's event. I don't say like at five o'clock I'll write about the day because my day doesn't end then. So it might be something else going on that day. So I found it to be useful and enjoyable and I can't recommend it enough. So I, you know, if you're interested in that more of that long form or long timeframe product, you know, that's something pretty neat.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Do you gratitude journal? Like what is going in there?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I don't gratitude journal.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Was it just like his little thing that happened today? Like it's just a time capsule?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's more time capsule-y. Like there might be like random acts of gratitude in there, right? But it's not like the gratitude journal to where today, you know, I'm thankful for this or today I appreciated that. I don't have a space for that. What I will generally do if I have a broader thing, like say like a gratitude that it's a little bit broader topic to write on, I will get my standard journal out and just write, you know, maybe a half a page, a five page and just say, Hey, this is what happened today. I really appreciated this. This is, you know, something that, you know, that was meaningful to me and that will go in my A5 notebook, which I keep separately. So I really kind of have three active products, but I don't count that A5, my everything notebook is what I call it, my everything journal. I don't count that in like these planner type of things. So that's just more of an unscheduled events go in there whenever I feel like writing or doing something broader or sketch or draw or something like that. So yeah, I don't have like, I'm not taking these daily entries as a one specific thing that I talk about every day. It's just whatever I want to talk about. I would fail if I gave myself the one thing today you have to put in this and you have to do that for the next 365 days. Like I would fail at that and I've proven to fail at that before. Right. So it has to be more open, more open-ended ideas to go in there. So yeah, it could be, it could be work related. It could be family related. It could be, you know, whatever hobby related. It could be absolutely anything. It could be nothing. Like if I, if I get, if I get stuck, I'll say the weather.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Do you ever expect to go back and read stuff?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Um, yeah. So that's the beauty of these is once you get into year two and three, you're kind of thinking about the past a little bit. Hey, this is what I wrote that previous year. So they're all tracked on the singular page has five years of that day's entry. Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' This is the interesting kind to me. This is how this product is structured. This is all the images. Cause I've seen some where it's like a really thick notebook and it's like a diary page and every page, you know, you just keep going on and on and on. Yeah. I like these kinds of, these kinds of journals where it makes you think back and like reminisce a little bit. Um, I think that they could be quite valuable. I've been, I've been looking at that as like, oh, this is an interesting like thing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. And once I understood that was the layout because I didn't think that was how they, these types of three year and five year journals worked. Right. I didn't know that it was the same day on the page for five years of entries. And once that kind of clicked in my head, I was like, okay, I think I can, I can probably make this work and, and enjoy it while doing it. And it's like, okay. And I can see how, you know, years from now it'll be valuable, um, to look back on those types of things and just kind of figure out like what the recurring themes are and the ideas are. So, and it's, again, it's just such a short entry. Like it's an ace, it's a half of an A6 page and then like six lines for like today's entry. Like, so it's really, really small, um, amount to write in. And sometimes like if I don't have much, like I'll just, I'll just say something nonsensical or do like an ink swatch or whatever. I was like, but I'm putting something in there every day. So it's been good.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Good. What about you? Do you have a task? No. So like for me, you've been, you've been on lock for years, obviously. Yes. Here's the thing for me with, with journaling, right? So obviously I'm daily without fail, things just in general. Like I do it when every day I'm working. That's kind of the way that I work. I have a task goes off at five o'clock. It's time to journal.

'''Myke Hurley:''' My, you know, I, I don't have an issue with this because I'm committed to the idea rather than the product. Right. So like I'm committed to the type of journaling around yearly themes that my, I'm committed to my theme, which means I'm committed to the act of reflecting on my theme on a daily basis, tracking how my life is going, giving myself a little space to write how I'm feeling, write what's going on. But then also do like the daily questions thing, which are all laddering up to my theme. And I mark those off to see if I'm continuing to move forward the things in my life that are important to me. I'm fixed on these ideas. You know, like these ideas came before the theme system journal, right? I was doing it in a Hobonichi for over a year. I developed this kind of, this way of journaling that made sense for me. So I'm just committed to that, right? And so it's very easy for me to do it every day because it's not about the products. It's about the idea. But then I have then went ahead and made the perfect product to match my idea of journaling and like a way of like a system of journaling that I think makes sense for people. So it's easy for me to keep track of it. I look at something like this five-year journal and I'm like, oh, that seems really nice. But as we were talking, I was kind of like, how will I, how would I commit myself to doing that? And I don't have any as easy an answer as I do for the theme system where like the commitment is the theme. That's the commitment. And then everything else from there is easy. But when it comes to the idea of like writing something down every day, like some piece of ephemera is something that's important to me. Like I don't know what, how I would stay committed to that for the time because I can't think of initially a thing that was going to push me to it. Yeah. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Yeah. You're duplicating your ideas, which are really singular. Like what's the point of saying this again? You've already had say like in your theme system journal, like, you know, just your gratitude or your, your thought for the day or your recap of the day is like, well, why do I need to do that again? And that is my thing. And that's where people get in trouble.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I feel like I would be, I would be just, just repeating myself. Like, so I don't think that that for me is as useful. Like, but I want to think on it. I do want to think on it. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because it seems really cool to have something like that because I don't keep my journals, right? Like not that they, they don't have a good way of like doing the prompting, like the, like the five and three year stuff do where you're going back every day. But I'm just not the kind of person that would ever go through an old journal. Like I fill it up and then it goes in recycling, you know? Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm just kind of dumb of it. So like my notebooks and like journal types, I do keep my planners. I don't keep like anything that I've had like schedule stuff in. Like what I will do is sometime the following year, I will, if I have time on a weekend or like an hour or two to sit with it and I'll flip through it to see if there was anything interesting worth keeping and cut it out. And then just like attach it into like a notebook that I know I'm going to keep it and then chuck the rest of it. Like I don't, I don't need to keep those. So like the plotter, the plotter pages, like I, yeah, the plotter pages are removable, right? Like I'm not like if I find one or two things I need to keep in there for just reference purposes, like I'll save that, tape it into a notebook and they, I just throw them away. Like I don't have the plotter like archive thing to like keep all of my past pages. I'm not interested in that. It's not beneficial to me.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, yeah. So I would say our 22, 23 planners are going well.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. Very, very well. I'm happy that you found this, like these two things that are working for you.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I literally like carry them together, even though like my five year, I'm only using once a day. They kind of like live in the same space. It's like they're both physically in my hand right now as I'm talking about them. So they just kind of go together. It's like I want the five year around, even though I know like I'm only going to write in it once today. It's kind of, it has the same space in my life as like the plotter, which I will use several times today. Right? Weird. Weird that way.

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