I would lay down my life for this Hobonichi Techo planner
I’d been thinking about buying a Hobonichi Techo Cousin planner ($35.04) for two years, so I finally decided to go for it this fall. It’s just such a good planner, and after four years of dot journaling in a Leuchtturm notebook, I’m ready for a little change! I ordered my Hobonichi Techo Cousin back in October, and I’m legitimately looking forward to January 1 so I can start using it.
Here’s the deal with the Hobonichi Techo, from the website:
The Hobonichi Techo is a planner notebook created by staff members of the website Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun, shortened as Hobonichi. Techo (pronounced “tetch-oh”) is a Japanese word for a planner notebook. We also describe the Hobonichi Techo as a Life Book; it demonstrates the planner notebook’s versatility and freedom that accommodates every user’s unique personality and lifestyle. It first came out as a 2002 edition, which was created when the members — who weren’t professional planner designers — decided to get together and create a brand new kind of planner that they would actually want to use themselves. There are 18 years of history behind the current book. New varieties have appeared over the years in response to customer requests, and all the techos improve every year based on these requests and feedback. New cover designs are released every year so that using a Hobonichi Techo carries an extra sense of excitement and enjoyment. In recent years people from all over the world have begun to use the techo — there are now over 780,000 users worldwide!
I was able to look at several different Hobonichi Techo planners back in late 2017, and the Cousin was my personal favorite. (It was also my favorite of all of the planners I looked at in 2017, and I looked at…a fuckton of planners that year.) It’s more guided than a dot journal — but not annoyingly so — and really nails both form and function.
I highly recommend going to the Cousin’s About section and clicking through all of the different tabs to see/read about the features, because there are a lot of them! But here are some of the things I like about it, if you’re curious…
Size
The Cousin (the A5) is the biggest of all of the Techo planners, but isn’t huge…it’s 5.8” x 8.3”, so it’s fairly close in size to the Leuchtturm I’ve been using for years. It is the perfect size for me.
If you want a smaller planner, the original Hobonichi Techo (A6) ($20.02) is also good. (You can also buy the original on Amazon.) I actually bought the original by accident because I got confused when I was placing my order. (One way to remember which one is which: the Cousin is the big one, much like Cousin Greg is the big one on Succession.) While the original is perfectly nice (and my girlfriend is happy to take it off my hands), I prefer one with more room to write on each day, aka the Cousin.
The paper
Ugh, this notebook. I just love it! The paper is super thin and smooth and feels so luxurious. The journal also has layflat binding (which means it will easily lay open/flat on your desk).
Image: Hobonichi Techo
The cream-colored cover is lovely, and even though it’s super lightweight, it’s surprisingly durable. (I tried bending the corners of the sample one I received, and couldn’t.) You can also buy a cover for it, but I didn’t go that route; instead, I bought a mesh pouch at McNally Jackson to transport it in.
There are different colors of ink used throughout the journal (the daily pages for each month are printed in a different color, for example) but the colors still feel fairly neutral. Also, a lot of the grids and other details are designed to be guidelines that you can only see up close (similar to the dots in a dot grid journal), so those are printed in a fairly light ink.
The page design
So, the big difference between this planner and the dot journaling method is that the Cousin is pre-printed. So, the pages come with dates and other information already on them, and each day gets its own page. There is also a year-at-glance view, monthly calendar pages, a spot for goals/tasks each month, weekly pages (with an hourly breakdown that I like a lot), and then the daily pages. This isn’t ideal if you want to be able to write really long journal entries some days, or to add in a new spread about, say, your favorite books wherever you feel like it. But it’s great if you want something convenient that is kind of doing the work for you, and/or you don’t mind when your journal or planner bosses you around a little bit.
I tend to be way too picky to enjoy pre-designed daily pages, but in this case, they are designed so well and so thoughtfully that I really like them. There’s an hourly breakdown on the left side of the page if you want to use it (but that’s easy to ignore), and then there is space on the right where you can list tasks/to-dos. (There is also a light “invisible line” down the middle that you can use to separate the two if you want to.) And there is space at the bottom for journaling/notes. You can also use the daily pages as a sketchbook or regular journal…like, you can just kind of easily write or doodle over the printed page designs if you want.
Features
The Cousin has several thoughtful/cute touches throughout that I love, including the moon phase on each daily page; subtle color tabs for each month of the year; a mini monthly calendar every two pages; and a “warm up page” at the beginning where you can reflect on the past year/set the tone of the new year. In the back of the notebook, there is blank graph paper; a “Favorites” page where you can document your favorite songs, movies, books, purchases, etc.; and a “My 100” page that you can use for anything you want (wins, top moments, goals, favorites, etc.).
Another thing people seem to love about these planners is that they have a quote on each page. This is actually not my thing, but it’s sort of moot because in the Cousin, all the quotes are in Japanese, so I can’t read them.
Shopping
I will say that the Hobonichi Techo website is a tad hard to navigate, in part because there some choices to be made: you have to figure out which planner you want, and whether you’d like the week starts to start on Sunday or Monday. You can also buy the Cousin Avec, where you get two notebooks that each last six months instead of one notebook for the whole year. And if you want to pick out a cover, there are a lot of options.
Once you make your selection, you’ll get routed to a different interface to purchase, and you’ll have to make sure it’s all in USD. It’s also not the most user friendly, but it’s also not prohibitively difficult to use. And both notebooks I ordered arrived very quickly (especially considering that they were shipping from Japan).
TL;DR: The Hobonichi Techo Cousin planner is super elegant and well-designed, and I am very excited to start using mine in January! Buy the 2020 Cousin for $35.04. 🗓