One thing I have learned in the last two years is that I am much more likely to write in my journal each day if it has a pre-designated space for each day.
In my Recurring Journals I split each open spread of two-pages into quadrants and then put corresponding dates from each 13-week “quarter” in them. So, the first page of 2024 had the Mondays: January 1 and April 1 on the left-hand side and July 1 and September 30 on the right-hand side. The next two-page spread had the Tuesdays: January 2, April 2, July 2, and October 1. I explained why I do this in My Year in Weeks, but the important thing is that every day had a space.
Having a space for each day made it much more likely that I would write something in that space. Even if I missed a day, I went back and recreated it. I did this even when I missed a few days. And because it was a recurring journal, when I got to the end of The First 13 Weeks, I went back to the first page and went through each spread again for The Second 13 Weeks. If I noticed a blank space in the past, I would see if I had any way to recreate what happened that day (from my calendar, git logs, blogs, etc).
This year (2025), I am not going to be using a recurring format, but I am still using pre-dated pages. I will have to be more diligent about checking the previous days, but my weekly retro pages will probably be good enough to make me do that.
I got my Supernote Manta (A5) two days ago. I haven’t used it much—mostly learning the UI and getting an idea of the features. Mostly, I wanted to get my own 2025 planner on that I made with Page-o-Mat and then get to planning 2025.
Generally, I like it and I still think it is the best choice given my preferences. Here are a bunch of unstructured impressions.
The on-screen keyboard is bad. I hope this can get better in software. Luckily, I think of this as a writing device and won’t want to type much. When I have to, it’s painful.
I wish I could give files names with handwriting (because typing is so bad)
The pen/paper feel is really good—even better than I expected.
The pen doesn’t perfectly make marks all of the time, but no worse than real pens.
The left and right sidebar gestures are ingenious.
Inside of their notes, you can make links to other pages and notes, but you can’t do this inside a PDF. Since standard PDF Annotations supports this, I hope it comes in a software update—I would use that journalling.
I use a passcode to lock the device. I would love it if I could put contact info on that screen so that the journal could be returned if I lost it.
Everything else is as widely reported in reviews. It’s a thoughtful device. I appreciate that I can upgrade the hardware and the software is generally high-quality so far. I am looking forward to having this device for many years.
I released my 2025 Journal PDF (for Supernote) yesterday, and in the middle of describing it, I realized that I have never explained how I plan my year around weeks and 13-week blocks. There are mentions of it in a few posts, but nothing canonical.
I use a week as my main planning timespan, not months or quarters. Additionally, I use Monday as the first day of the week, which is normal for a lot of the world, but not Americans. When I think of how a week flows, the Saturday and Sunday are a unit. I think of them as the start of the week, but almost no software will let you do that, so I got used to them being at the end.
So, all of my projects are estimated in terms of weeks, and I program in sprints that are a multiple of weeks. Then, I split the year into four 13-weeks “quarters”, which is close to a year (364 days). This year, 2024, started on a Monday, and because it was a leap year, April 1 and July 1 were exactly on 13-week boundaries (Oct 1 was only a day off), so my system correlated to normal quarters about as well as it ever could. This doesn’t happen again until 2052. I hope I am there to see it and that I still care.
My journal is set up to follow the flow of a week. Days of the week tend to be similar to each other—so, there is a feel to a Monday, a Tuesday, a Sunday, etc. But March 3rd will not be like April 3rd or October 3rd. A lot of recurring meetings are weekly or bi-weekly, or on the “Third Thursday of the Month” or some other pattern that works well with my system.
If I have to deal with something that is on a month or quarter boundary, they are just a regular day in the journal. External deadlines can be on any day.
I finished adding features to Page-o-Mat to support the journal I wanted to make for 2025 to use on a Supernote Manta. I fixed some bugs and added the following features:
Internal Links to pages: This is supported in titles, section titles, and rectangles
Start/End Dates on Pages: This is so I can show a date range in a title
More support for using expressions as values: This is so I could calculate a page link inside a loop or do more date math.
My Journals do not use heavily templated pages—Most pages are nearly blank, but they have a 5mm dot grid on them. You could do bullet-style journaling, sketches, or whatever you like.
The main opinionated thing I do is that my year is based around four 13-week “Quarters”, not the months or the typical quarters, and my weeks start on a Monday.
So, 2025 starts on Monday, December 30, 2024 and goes to Sunday, December 28, 2025. I did add on the week after, though so that Dec 29-31 are in the Journal (and the rest of that week). The full 2025 journal is 53 weeks with a little of 2024 at the beginning and a little of 2026 at the end.
Since this was created with Page-o-Mat, you could customize it and make your own. See the config file in /config/2025-journal.yaml in the repo. The script uses Python—I added installation instructions to the README.
I wrote Page-o-Mat because I had an idea for a paper journal that I wanted to make. I could have just made a PDF, but making each page was a repetitive task that was easier to do with code. I could have just made a python script to make just that journal, but I was still designing the journal, so I put some configuration in a YAML file. Once I did that, the config grew to the point that it became a language for making journals. I made my 2023 journal with it and got it printed by LuLu.
In mid 2023, I wanted to make a different kind of journal (one for writing Morning Pages), and so I added some features to draw shapes on pages, which I also used to make covers. Later that year, I made my 2024 journal with it without needing more features. I hadn’t touched it since then.
I like my custom paper journals, but they are thick and heavy, so I am trying something different for 2025. I finally found an E-Ink tablet that I can use to replace my Kindle and get a more portable writing/journaling solution too.
I’ve been looking at E-Ink writable tablets. After considering the Kindle Scribe, Daylight, and Remarkable, I decided that I cared about a few things:
It had to be hard to use the machine for anything but reading and writing because I want it to be more like factory equipment.
It had to have a long battery life (like the Kindle).
It had to be easy to get files to and from the device (unlike the Kindle).
It had to be able to read Kindle books.
It had to be readable in sunlight (I live in Florida and read at the beach).
It had to be A5-sized.
The only device I found that met all of these criteria was something that Supernote used to make and said they would make again. I signed up for updates and waited. Then, I forgot it existed. I almost got a Daylight in the meantime, which is a nice device, but it’s too nice—it can easily run any Android software, so it’s too general purpose. I want a “worse is better” machine.
But a few weeks ago, I got an email from Supernote that the A5 is available, so I bought one—it arrives later today. In the meantime, I’ve been reading more about its capabilities, and I see that I can make my own planner for it by just bringing over a PDF, which is what Page-o-Mat produces.
I could make one just like my 2023/2024 planners right now with Page-o-Mat, but one of the advantages of an electronic journal is internal linking. So, I could be looking at a page of all months, tap and jump to a month overview, then tap and jump to a day overview (and back). All you need to do is add tappable zones to the PDF that link to a page.
So, yesterday, I added simple support for that to Page-o-Mat and pushed up the change along with a simple example.
This won’t be enough for my 2025 journal, but helped me get back into the codebase again. I have a week to get the features in so I can make a journal and use it on January 1st.
I want to add videos to each my podcast episodes, so that I can post them on YouTube. One option I’m exploring is trying to sketchnote them while listening to them. This is a lot harder than I thought.
I have two problems. The first one is that I can’t do it fast enough. That’s easy to solve: I can just do it at any pace and fix it in my editor. The second is that I don’t draw well. Slowing down helps, but I just need to get better at doodling and coming up with objects to draw that represent the concept I am talking about in the podcast.
To practice, I saw Quick, Draw! on the Verbal to Visual YouTube channel. Google is training a neural net to interpret doodles, and it’s already good enough for this simple game. It gives you an object to draw, and you have 20 seconds to draw something the net recognizes as that object. When you are done, if it didn’t get your drawing, you can explore other drawings that the neural net did recognize as that object. They even let you explore the dataset of simple doodles. If you see one you like, you can tap it to see it being drawn, stroke by stroke.
I try to do it without thinking first because I want to get better at doing it live. I’m especially bad at animals. One drawback is that every prompt is an object, but I want to get better at translating verbs and concepts to visuals. I’d also love to see what people would draw for words like confusion, hunger, defiant, or tired.
Even playing for a half hour, I got much better. Not at animals, though.
I read Make it Stick [amazon affiliate link] last year, and it’s the book that made the biggest impact on me in 2022. It’s about the “science of successful learning”, and is co-written by researchers in the field who based it on their work studying how we learn.
The core idea is that you must use “retrieval” in various forms to learn a subject. This means that you practice remembering and applying the material instead of re-reading it. Some of the suggestions are:
Practice remembering with flash cards that are spaced, interleaved, and varied
Generate your own answers to problems before learning the technique
Elaborate on material by writing original text that draws from the material
Reflect on your learning sessions by writing a meta description of the material and your relationship to it (e.g. where you struggle, how it’s going)
Calibrate your knowledge with objective third-party sources
I had been primed to accept its suggestions because I was introduced to some of them already. I discovered the book in a video YouTube recommended to me because I watch videos about these topics often.
I learned about Spaced Repetition (using flash cards) a few years ago and have been using it nearly daily since then. I spoke about it at length in Episode 14 of my podcast. While reading this book, I created cards in my Anki deck to help me remember its core ideas. When those cards come up, they test my memory, but also remind me to use the practices.
But even with that background, I enjoyed the more expert coverage of the topics with more details on why these techniques work. Since I have been doing many of them for years, I was able to come to it with less skepticism.
An interesting side-note is that they use the techniques they suggest in the structure of the book, but they are limited by what you can do in a static text. If you are interested in this idea taken to a logical extreme, I would recommend reading Quantum Country, which embeds interactive flash cards in the text.
If you struggle in retaining material or need to learn a complex subject, I would certainly give this book a read and try to incorporate its suggestions into your process.
As I mentioned in my post about recurring journals, I decided to write a python program to create a PDF that implemented my riff on the Da Capo journal. I finished it enough to share, and put it on GitHub. It’s called Page-o-Mat.
To make it more generally useful, instead of hard-coding this particular journal, I made it read a configuration file that can be used to describe lots of journaling styles.
Right now, the paper and page types are what I needed for my 2023 journal. I am about to do a test-run with getting it printed on LuLu. After that, I might make some more page templates.
The config file is in YAML. You could just list each page you want one-by-one, but to make things easier, there are a few ways to create enumerated pages.
Any page could have a count, which just repeats that page
Any page can have a variant list, which repeats the page, setting a variable that can be used in titles
Pages can have lists of sub-pages, and so on.
Pages can have sections
In the code, it’s implemented with nested loops and recursion. The indices of those loops are exposed to the config to use in date math, so that any section of any page can have a date calculated for it. Most journals would probably have sequential dates, but a recurring journal wants you to keep cycling back to the beginning of the book, so the date math is fairly complicated.
There are documented examples in the repo that (hopefully) explain this better. Start with daily.yaml, which is just a 365 page daily journal. 2023-recurring-journal.yaml shows the more complex example.
A few weeks ago, I backed a Kickstarter for a ”Day-based Journal”. The idea is that each spread of two pages represents a day of the month. For example, when you open it up, the left page has boxes for Jan 1, Feb 1, March 1, April 1, May 1, and June 1. The right-hand-side has July 1 … December 1. So, to journal in January, you turn pages for 31 days and then go back to page 1 to start February. You go back to page 1 to start March, and you can see each day in January and February as you progress.
This has two effects:
You see your notes over and over (this reminds me of spaced repetition)
You can see monthly progress and eventually a years worth of progress
I love the idea and hope it gets funded, but in the meantime, I’ve started designing a riff on this idea that I will probably print out for 2023 on LuLu.
As a prototype, I drew something similar to the Kickstarter for 62 pages of my current blank journal to cover the rest of the year (Sep-Dec).
Prototype of a recurring journal
Since that’s just four months, each box is much bigger — half a page each month to make up the two-page spread. For me, I think that’s the minimum size. I don’t think I could use the orignal Day-based journal as a primary way to journal, since I need space to do a time block for the day.
The next thing I noticed was that each day was a different day of the week. That is mentioned as a plus in the Kickstarter, but I think in weeks. So, for me, it would be much more useful if each day shown on the spread were the same day of the week. My Mondays are very different from my Fridays, and the weekend is nothing like a weekday.
So I started to sketch out what a 2023 Week-based ”Recurring” Journal might look like.
My solution so far is to run 2023 as 4 sets of 13 weeks. That’s 364 days, and since Jan 2 is a Monday (and I start my week on Mondays), I’ll treat Jan 1 as a special day and then make 2-page spreads for the rest of the year where each box is 13 weeks apart.
One downside is that they are not aligned to months or quarters, but that’s just the nature of weeks, and I want to embrace weeks. I decided to further sub-group the 13 weeks as 4, 4, and 5 week blocks. That’s almost a month, and while it’s not ideal that they are uneven, I am also embracing the 13, so I have to accept its primeness.
Also, you are only revisiting your notes every 13 weeks instead of every month. To address this there will be 28 summary pages with 13 boxes where you try to get the essence of the day. To get 13 equal sized boxes, I’ll borrow from Betsy Ross and just use horizontal stripes. I think this would be the best way to use the original Kickstarter journal.
I’m currently building a spreadsheet where I can plan out what each page of the journal will be. In addition to daily pages, there will be pages for planning and retros. I also want enough blank pages for random note taking. So far it’s over 300 pages.
When that’s done, I’m going to build a python script to generate the PDF for the interior pages. I will open-source it, so if you are interested, then watch this space.
In yesterday’s podcast, I talked about spaced-repetition and how I use Anki to help with my memory. Anki is a flash card system that uses algorithms to show you cards just as you might be forgetting them.
If you are just using this casually, like I am, you only need to “study” for a few minutes a day (and skipping days or even weeks will be fine—Anki will catch you up). If you are a student who is using Anki to cram for exams, you would probably do it differently.
I built up my deck over time. I make new cards while reading or watching videos. I made a bunch last week while watching WWDC.
In the podcast, I said to use a single deck with all of your cards mixed together. So, if in a few months, you read books in different subjects, you wouldn’t make separate decks for each book or subject. This makes it a lot easier to just make cards whenever you want without thinking about it too much. It also makes studying a kind of serendipity machine.
A couple of episodes ago, I had spoken about how to generate ideas by combining disparate knowledge. Going through an Anki session of uncategorized cards helps me do that regularly.
So, in my deck today, I was asked about:
The kinds of gates you find in QUIL quantum computing (I read Quantum Country this year which is a book with embedded spaced-repetition)
As I think it over, there is perhaps something interesting about the communication principles in C4, the communication goals of visual design generally, and Covey’s 7 Habits—specifically “Seek First to Understand”, which is the core communication habit.
I should write a note about that.
We use cookies for some of the features of this website. You must accept cookies to continue to use this website.Ok
