If you know me, you know that I’ve been into documenting for a long time, whether that’s snack reviews, year-end-lists, or restaurant business cards (if you visit me, I can show you my multiple binders). These days, my primary motivation is to remember what was meaningful to me so I can reflect on what I find important and how that might shift over time.
Going into 2024, I had attempted to capture that information digitally through a Notion page, keeping track of largely media and experiences that mattered to me, ranging from books to podcasts to recipes I enjoyed cooking. I felt that a digital format would be valuable so I could easily link to content and revisit it as needed.
At the same time, I was also exploring completely off-line journaling, and that’s ultimately what stuck with me (I had abandoned the Notion page halfway through 2024). I’m writing this post to reflect upon why I think that is (spoiler alert: I think it has to do with information density).
This year, I kept three physical journals: a journal with a monthly calendar spread where I could draw one thing that stood out from me each day; a blank notebook where I ended up creating a monthly-spread listing (rather than drawing) things that I did; and a book journal for keeping track of what I read.
The Book Journal
My motivation for keeping a Book Journal was to better collect my notes about books I’m reading. Many of those notes are on Kindle, which I can sort of access through Goodreads, but I liked the idea of having a physical notebook I could more freely annotate and reference outside of using an Amazon platform.
My book journal is an A4 Ca.Crea notebook I purchased in Japan, contained in a Traveler’s Notebook cover. One hurdle I overcame in using this journal was having anxiety about “wasting” pages by leaving un-used space on the page. In this journal, I start every new book on its own page. For each book, I include some basic info about it, an overall rating, and a short review / notes depending on the type of book. Most of the time, this ends up being about half a page, so I leave the other half of the page blank. It was just easier that way so I wouldn’t have to estimate how much room I might take up. I use a Pilot FriXion star stamp for ratings.
On books where I have a lot more notes, I might highlight ideas or include quotes that stood out to me:
At the back of the book, I keep a table of contents & index (starting from the last page and going backwards) so I can more visually identify the books I read at a glance. I use a Canon Selphy Square QX10 to print out these photos on color sticker paper.
Overall, I really enjoyed keeping this book journal. I did my best to not make it feel like a chore. I would often write about a couple books at time rather than write every time I finished a book. I did find that I only kept actual notes about maybe 1/4 of the books I read, and the others writeups were more reviews or impressions of the book overall. In the future, I might just create pages for the books that I have notes from. I also would often wait until I finished 6 books to update the TOC because the printer paper is on the expensive side (a little over $1 per page), and I print 6 book covers on a single page – this wasn’t an issue, though, because of the frequency with which I update this journal. I really feel like the colored photos go a long way towards helping me quickly see my whole year in reading, which I especially appreciated.
The Monthly Calendar
I purchased a small A5 monthly journal from the Mochi Things Seattle shop (it’s called MYO) to encourage myself to remember events from each day. This journal mostly ended up being a form of gratitude journaling, as I would more often than not write about something I enjoyed from the day.
I updated this journal every few days as I don’t quite have the energy to journal every day. As you can tell, the drawings are very fast (under a minute) and not especially detailed so I don’t feel a lot of pressure to write.
Overall, I found I really liked this monthly format, though the notebook was overall a little too small and the paper too thin (so there’s more ghosting than I would like). I purchased a journal with bigger boxes for next year. One thing I quickly realized, though, is that only having space for a single image makes it hard to capture more nuanced emotions / events that happened that aren’t easily represented visually. This encouraged me to start the third journal that I’ll describe next.
The Monthly Spread
This last journal is just a reused old Moleskine I had that I’ve used for random things since 2011. Since I didn’t know exactly what format I wanted, I didn’t want to waste an especially nice journal on figuring that out. For the most part, each month was a spread in this notebook, where I would combine some notion of habit tracking and list-keeping for things like restaurants I tried, books I read, and major events. I would also customize additional sections based on monthly goals (for example, in this particular September, I was especially trying to meet people at my new job so I tried to keep track of the people I met to represent that effort).
What I found valuable about this format is that I could easily see a lot of content at once, and the blank page made it very easy for me to add / remove sections as I was determining how I wanted to use this book. Later on, I also used taped-in sticky notes to add special sections as well.
For the habit tracking, I used this writable washi tape from JetPens - but I don’t think I will keep up with this as I found the idea of habit tracking to not feel especially rewarding and a bit like a chore.
The main thing I really wanted to enable with my notes in this journal was to reflect at the end of the calendar year on all the things that mattered to me and happened to me during that year. While 2024 hasn’t quite ended yet, I put that spread together today and found it especially gratifying to see everything on a quick scan, without having to flip through lots of pages.
Plans for 2025
For next year, I plan on making a few changes. I purchased a larger monthly calendar spread journal with blank pages at the end so I can combine both the calendar + lists into a single notebook (the Laconic A5 Monthly). Rather than splitting up my lists by month, I plan on doing a single long index for things like restaurants and events so I can more easily browse at the end of the year. I plan on largely keeping the Book Journal the same, though I would love to find a good cheap insert like the one I have rather than purchasing the Traveler’s refills, which I think are kind of pricy.
Overall, I came to really appreciate how much simplicity matters to me in journaling – I don’t like having expensive notebooks that I feel anxious about “ruining,” and my main goal is to get ideas on the page as fast as I can, which is why I use minimal accessories. That being said, I’m excited to use the Traveler’s Refill Binder in the future to be able to collect all these journals in one organized place.
What is this Substack?
I don’t really know, to be honest – I just wanted to write up year end stuff for 2024 (I plan to write about my favorite books and music next) but I also want to write about other things – like choosing academia after being in industry for a while, reflecting on being a junior faculty member, etc. So for now, I plan on writing about that here in the hopefully not-so-distant future!