It took me several years of trial and error, but I think I’ve finally cracked productivity journalling. I tried bullet journals – couldn’t stand having to draw my own designs for everything. I tried a range of pre-made journals from regular stores, but I found these either weren’t fit for purpose or not too broad. In 2023, I started using a Hobonichi Techo, a journal designed in Japan. The Hobonichi is this almost exclusive club, because it is really hard to get overseas. It’s a bit easier now with a global store, but shipping costs are still very expensive. But I still found myself not using it to its full potential. Now, in 2025, I’ve finally cracked the ideal Hobonichi system that links multiple productivity and wellbeing systems together. In this post, I’ll explain why some journals don’t work, how I use the Hobonichi, and then I’ll finish by comparing it to the Bullet Journal. Note: in this post I’ll be referring to Australian stores and currency, but similar ideas apply all over the world… except in Japan, I suppose.

Why most diaries are useless

Most work journals (or a diary, if you like) are not designed to help you achieve things: they harken back from an era where you needed to track of meetings physically because no-one had a digital calendar. They look something like this:

As you can see, it’s not designed for task lists. It’s designed purely so you can write down what meetings you have on a given day. Sure, as A4 it’s ginormous for this task, and you could probably write tasks down the right hand side of each page, but that’s a little clunky for my tastes. This is especially useless if you’re in a job where you don’t have end-to-end meetings!

One year, I moved to something like this:

This was admittedly the style of diary I had in a year where I felt at my most productive (until I converted to the Hobonichi). Because it’s a week to view, you still have room to write in important meetings and events on each day, but you also have a dedicated page for each week to write down tasks, notes, and goals. This is definitely better than the above, but not by much: although having the task list is useful, because it’s a week-view, it doesn’t offer you a lot of accountability per day. If you’re anything like me, you write down everything you want to do in the week, piss around for a few days, and then it’s the end of the week and you go into hyperfocus to try and get everything done you said you would before inevitably failing and moving everything into next week’s, where the pattern happens again (I said it was a productive year, I didn’t say it was a good productive year).

Student diaries are also often similar to this second option, because it’s acknowledged that students need to track to-dos for assignments; but no-one seems to care about tracking to-dos at work. Enter: the Hobonichi.

How I use the Hobonichi Techo Cousin

As mentioned earlier, the Hobonichi is a planner designed in Japan. It has a lot of pedigree; it’s well-regarded in the stationary community (not that I spend much time in the stationary community). The Hobonichi provides you with: 6 month spreads; monthly spreads; weekly spreads; and a page per day spread, all in an A5 package (there is an A6 version, but I find that too small to be effective for my needs). You might think that this would be a monster of a journal: although it’s slightly thicker than most I’ve used, it is actually pretty slim because it uses a special kind of thin yet strong paper. It’s slightly thicker paper than your average bible, but not by much. As a result, they fit 544 pages into something that’s equivalent to a paperback of half that number.

6 Month Spread

This is what it looks like on the inside. This is the 6 month spread, there’s two of these (for the two halves of the year). At the top of each month, I write in the top 3 goals I have for each month. Once a week, I go back and write in one memorable thing from each day: at the end of the year, or whenever I’m going through past diaries, I can quickly see what I was doing over the whole year, and can then also jump ahead to the relevant daily page to get more insight into how I was feeling. At the bottom of each month I write a brief reflection about how that month went when it is finished, or I might use it to hold tasks that I need to do in future months.

Monthly Spread

This is the monthly spread. I’m following the 12 week year this year, which asks us to treat each quarter of the year as its own mini-year. This takes advantage of that end of year rush we feel to complete everything before the fresh start of the next one. With this in mind, I’ve planned out all my tasks for the first quarter until the end of March (and you get one “rest week” in the final week, which I also use as a bit of a buffer or to wrap things up). On the left hand side, I write in all those tasks next to the week they need to happen. On each day’s square, I write in important events and I also have my running training program listed there so I can quickly see what I’m doing each week at a glance.

Weekly Spreads

For ages, I didn’t know how to use the weekly spread. I tried time-blocking in here, but I found it sort of pointless because then I was managing time blocking in three locations (digital calendar, weekly spread, daily spread). So for all of last year I didn’t use it at all. This year, I’ve been using the weekly spread to track every half hour (the time delineation of the spread) of my time. Every few hours I open this page and write in how I spent each half hour block (or whatever took the most amount of time in that half hour). I find it keeps me very accountable when you have to report on everything that you spend your time doing. I’ve also then been consolidating this into an excel document, so at the end of the year I’ll be able to see exactly where my time went. On the left hand side of the spread, I put in the weekly tasks that I want to achieve, which are drawn from the monthly spread but also other ideas that may just pop into my head at random.

Daily Spread

Finally, we’re left with the daily spread! These are what have traditionally gotten the most use in my Techo. On the left for about half the page is a time-spread. I timeblock in here, so I can easily see my plan per hour for the whole day. Cal Newport (Deep Work, Slow Productivity) is a big advocate of time-blocking and I definitely find it useful. It’s essentially a digital calendar for my day. I do also have a digital calendar, which I fill with a rough timeblock at the start of each week but at night I’ll turn this into a more specific analog timeblock with more details (especially as plans can change over the week). I’m still getting used to rewriting timeblocks when plans change on the day, but the section is wide enough to do this (there is a subtle solid line divider separating this from the rest of the squared paper).

At the top are 5 to-do checkboxes, so I normally write in my goals for the day up there. I find 5 is a good number, any more is likely too much for one day. Admittedly, I don’t go too granular, preferring instead to have broad ideas like “emails” rather than writing out specifically which emails I will respond to.

For the rest of the page, I follow the Bullet Journal methods of rapid logging and interstitial journalling. Ryder Caroll, who founded the Bullet Journal method, recommends starting each day with an AM reflection, where I usually write down a couple of ideas and get some thoughts out of my head. Then I follow this by writing the time, and the task I’m working on. As I progress through the task, I can take notes below this heading. If I finish the task, I write how the previous task went, then write the new time and new task. If I get to the end of a deep work period with the task unfinished, then I write a few sentences about how it went. In this way, you can track your day as you go, meaning you don’t need to fill in all the details at night. Finally, Caroll recommends finishing with a PM reflection, where you can unpack anything you need to from the rest of the day. I find this usually happens with about a quarter of the page left. Yes, at some point I do swap to start writing under the time blocking part of the page also, which is a little bit gross but not the end of the world.

Something I’ve also started doing this year is writing my D-Day countdown at the top of each page, above the date. The D-Day countdown is a rough countdown to my death (approximately, on my 93rd birthday, according to the life expectancy calculator). I realise that sounds insane, but I find having the countdown at the top of my page, reminding me that (as of today) I only have about 24359 days to live, reminds me to spend my time wisely.

Hobonichi Techo or Bullet Journal?

Of course, the overwhelmingly popular journal in the productivity space is the Bullet Journal, and for good reason. Because you make the bullet journal into whatever you need it to be, its ceiling is the optimum use case for each particular person. Because of that, however, it’s really more of a framework than a specific journal. You can use the bullet journal techniques in any journal, not just a bullet journal. As I said above, each day’s page in my techo functions exactly as a daily rapid log in a bullet journal. The Techo has many of the similar spreads to the bullet journal, so the methods are pretty interchangeable, with one major difference: there isn’t much space for collections in a Techo. Collections in a bullet journal are the pages that have nothing to do with an individual day. They might be notes on a topic, holiday planning, or anything else you want to write down physically. Although there’s a few pages at the back of the Techo that could be used for this, it’s not really built for collections. You can buy an extra little A5 book to pair with the Techo that you could use for collections if you need them, but to be honest I find collections the weakest part of a bullet journal anyway. I actually keep a digital bullet journal on my iPad which is basically exclusively “collections”. I prefer this because then I can actually scroll through it on my phone, and it’s not interspersed with random daily logs that I might not want to read. It’s easier to navigate, too.

The one massive pro of the Techo is that everything is already set up for you. Something I hate about the Bullet Journal is that you have to do the setup yourself. I can’t stand that sort of mindless creativity. If you search “bullet journal” online, you’ll find pictures of the most beautiful setups for a bullet journal. Let’s be honest: isn’t this just another form of procrastination? Why would you spend hours designing your bullet journal for the week, when you could put that artistic talent to something actually useful, like drawing or painting or sketching. The techo arrives pre-setup, all I have to do is fill in the information that’s relevant to me. That’s a huge load off my shoulders when I already have so much to do!

One final factor to consider here is cost. The Officeworks diaries above were cheap, because they’re useless. The A4 one was about $25, the A5 one was available for $3 (and honestly, if cost is a big issue for you, I don’t think you can go wrong for $3). A techo and a bullet journal are both relatively more expensive. The Techo, in softcover form, is pretty reasonable at $59. If it’s your first time getting one, you also need a case for it, which start at $45. The case might seem pretty expensive, but it’s well-made and contains: a pen loop; two bookmarks to keep track of specific pages; and there’s lots of pockets to store things in. The cases also come in a range of colours and designs, styles, and materials, including licensed designs from major companies. The real problem with the Hobonichi is the shipping cost is extreme: $43 for just the Techo this year for me, or $101 total. With the case, it was about $52 to ship or $156 total. Ouch! Compare this with the official bullet journal though: that’s $58, and most people need at least two per year. You’d get free shipping ordering 2, but you’d still be paying $116 per year: more than the Techo (admittedly only barely, and getting a collections book for the Techo would probably make this more even). Of course, you don’t need to use the official one, but even the cheaper, recommended Leuchtturm1917 books are up there at $48. On this, the bullet journal is either slightly more expensive or slightly cheaper than the Techo. But even if it’s slightly cheaper, for me, the hours saved not needing to do all the extra work to make the BuJo actually work is worth it. There are also groups in Australia (and I assume other countries) that will do group orders to save on the cost of shipping and then do cheaper domestic postage, which can further save costs.

Since I got a Techo in 2023, I’ve journalled every day and it’s become something that I genuinely enjoy. I enjoy writing down what happens in my day, I’ve found I’ve become a lot clearer and less anxious, and I have found my productivity has gone up (and I’m hoping to take that to the next level in 2025). At first, I ummed and ahhed about the price of the Techo, but now I buy one every year without thinking. It is the best $100 I could spend each year, and I’ll happily keep paying it for all the benefits it provides me.

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