the satisfaction of planning on paper
there's something about filling up a physical planner with all the things you want to get done and being able to look back after it all that scratches an itch in my brain. no matter how mundane, boring, or hard those tasks were, it has a sense of record or memory keeping that's a little underrated.
without even looking at the dates i can tell which weeks were at the end of the semester (when everything is due!! they are stuffed with tasks and adorned with extreme breakdowns of what i need to write and points i want to make in my essays) and when i've had time off (big empty spaces with few tasks and a lot of miscellanous things (stickers, sticky notes, pen testing, etc.). nowadays whenever i need a new pen i like to pick up something new and sometimes in a different colour so i can see the lifetimes of different pens joining and leaving me.
i've kept the same planner for a couple of years now (muji weekly notebook planner) which has been fun to look back even further and see what i was doing in high school (my handwriting was neater and i was a lot more minimalist. i can also see the days when i had my final exams... o7 to the ones completing them right now...) i've also amassed a lot more stickers since then, and have been more willing to use them so my current planner is decked out while my first one has no stickers on it at all :(. i'd totally ignored writing in my birthday in 2019, but this year i drew a little smiley face with a party hat <:).
this is sort of a send-off to this particular kind of muji planner (muji a5 weekly notebook) that has accompanied me for the last 5 years (? woah), because i am now a proud owner of a hobonichi weeks! (something i have wanted to try out for a long long time...) this year has finally started to feel like i'm growing and changing, so it feels like a nice coincidence to have something else match what's going on with me :). but there's still a couple more weeks to go before the 2025 hobonichi schedule starts so. have at it!