A Week in my Hobonichi Cousin
In the spirit of writing about recent content here, I wanted to share some of the things that I learned from doing this!
Typically, I don’t pressure myself to fill spreads or even really make them pretty for social media because it defeats the purpose of my planner. It’s for me, it’s not for you or Instagram or TikTok or any social media platform. So filming how I did nearly every entry for a week definitely made me feel a little pressured to not only make my pages pretty, but fill every single spread to the max. As you can see from the footage and photos, I obviously didn’t do that. Many many moons ago, my dad encouraged me to keep a journal, and he brought that up again during COVID. Up until the middle of 2021, I was using a bullet journal to keep track of everything in my life and yes, I do still have those journals, but something about that system was breaking down for me.
I moved into a Hobonichi Cousin Avec that had the second half of 2021 in it, July - December, and I filled it. I fully admit that I fell off the wagon in December, I definitely didn’t fill every single page of that journal, but it taught me a lot about my needs and I obviously liked it considering I bought another Hobonichi Cousin for 2022! The weekly pages let me time block for the week, the monthly pages let me see what days I am the busiest when taking work and just general life stuff into consideration, and then there are the daily pages.
I live my life with relative sanity because of my task list. Getting everything that I need to do for the day out of my head and onto paper is by far the most vital part of my planning process, and it’s loosely based on the system that Ryder Carroll built for the bullet journal method. So when I look at a Hobonichi Cousin (or even the Hobonichi A6 which is just daily pages and half the size of my cousin), that timeline space on the left side of every space screams for a task list. It’s just a list of everything I can think of, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to it.
Things aren’t ranked by importance, how long they take, whether or not I can do other things at the same time, nothing, which is why I fell in love with the “today” section that I added above my task list. Each day, I put down the things that are set in stone, so things like work, classes, appointments, and sometimes content if it’s a hard deadline. Every time I open my pages, this is the first thing I see! It also varies by size (obviously lol), so if the today box is getting really big, it’s a signal that I need to be careful with what I put on my task list because I have a lot of things that are concrete to do’s.
As for what I write on the right side of the page, the open space, I do a few things! At the very top of the page, I pull a daily tarot card of the day and write down it’s meaning using Elliot Oracle’s Card of the Day blog. I google search the card I’ve pulled with “card of the day” and Elliot’s website tends to be the first one to pop up (Elliot also makes a blog post with a card of the day but I like to pull from my deck to get a card that actually resonates with me personally). I jot down anything that sticks out to me, and I take a little bit of time to reflect on how that applies to my life in that moment. This follows the trend of “the top of the page is the important stuff” because this is also one of the first things that I see when I look at my spreads, and I love having that little passage to carry with me through the day.
After that, who knows what’s going on 😂 I really do just journal whatever I want on the rest of the page. I recently started using Noom, a weight loss program with an emphasis on mental wellness, so sometimes I’ll jot down my notes from my readings in there. Other times I’ll reflect on my day, things that happen in class, things I notice about myself, accomplishments, literally anything that I want. I filled the majority of my pages in January (by far) and it has been so much fun to be able to look back on that month to see what I’ve been thinking about, and that’s exactly what my dad wanted me to be able to do with my journals.
So, do I recommend that you also go out and buy a Hobonichi Cousin and do exactly what I did? Nope, absolutely not. It’s not for everyone, and my method probably won’t work in the exact same way for you. I love the Cousin because it has space for the whole year in an A5 journal (my preferred size) without it being a super bulky journal to carry around every day, but the way that you use each page is completely up to you. There aren’t any spaces dedicated to specific things, and you can easily ignore the few markings that are on the pages and work out of the box! So while I do love the planner itself, I think that finding the way that it works for you is important too!
