It’s come to that time of year when I’m needing to put some events, meetings, trips and so on into a 2009 diary. For the last couple of years I’ve been using a small moleskine week over two pages diary but I’ve grown disenchanted with the linearity of such diaries. They are all divided up into sections (either per day, or per week, or month) and all the sections are of the same size but because days are all different (well, they are in my life anyway!) I find that some days the entries are spilling over into surrounding days and other days are virtually blank. This all comes down to how you use a diary. I’m pretty minimalist. Key points only for me.
So, having looked around in the stationery stores I decided to MAKE a diary which was better suited to my purposes. I won’t lay out here all the steps involved in the creative process but I thought I’d share the result. Maybe you’ll be inspired by some element of this, make your own, or borrow some of the ideas I’ve used.
I decided to stick with Moleskine, but to use what they call a “Japanese fold” notebook – like this –
This is a continuous single sheet of paper which is folded instead of cut to make the separate pages. I wanted to use a double page spread for each week. I mark the top right hand corner of the right hand page with the starting and ending dates of that week (my week starts on Monday and ends on the Sunday).
I want to use the whole spread to lay out my commitments and information in a kind of “mind map” style, so I thought I’d put the days of the week down the middle of the spread. That looked pretty ugly and I am a very visual person (which you’ll have realised from all the photography on this blog!), so I decided instead to use a symbol for each day of the week. Well, it turns out that in many languages of the world the names of the days are related to the names of the sun, the moon and five planets – the same ones in many, many languages.
Sunday = Sun
Monday (French; Lundi) = Moon
Tuesday (French; Mardi) = Mars
Wednesday (French; Mercredi) = Mercury
Thursday (French; Jeudi) = Jupiter
Friday (French; Vendredi) = Venus
Saturday = Saturn
I didn’t want to draw all the symbols every week so I made a jpeg of the symbols and uploaded it to moo.com to get stickers made. Here they are –
I place one sticker just to the left of the centrefold (I have more entries usually on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, than I do on Thursday, Friday and Saturday). You’ll see I’ve got the Sun in the middle (it’s not a day I usually enter any commitments). There are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the right, and Thursday, Friday and Saturday on the left, and they follow the sequence like a clock face (time goes clockwise in my life! 🙂 )
To enter a new piece of info I draw a pencil line out from the day of the week and enter the details. I can follow this item out with branching lines, mindmap style, if necessary. (I’ve found it useful to put the actual date (numerical day of the month) at the root of the line.)
That’s it really.
I’m enjoying it. It’s aesthetically pleasing and it suits the way I think and I organise.
I’ve added two additional features to make it more functional. In the pocket at the back of the moleskine I put 3 x 5 index cards, one for each month ahead (carrying only 3 or 4 at a time). This gives me a kind of planner overview.
And I’ve attached two small post-it pads inside the back cover, to write details of any dates not covered by the existing spreads or cards.
I’ve been using this new diary for about a month now and I’m finding it’s sparking off a whole chain of thought I hadn’t predicted. But I’ll tell you about that in a separate post!
Heroes Not Zombies 
Very fascinating! I had some Christmas cards made through Moo last year and I’d like to do a whole lot more with Moo soon. Great stickers btw! Looking forward to the related post soon.
Bob… seriously.. you are scaring me. You have too much time on your hands!
Bob, thanks for sharing this.
I’m very interested at your wanting to keep a diary which is non-linear. I try every now and then to exclude linearity from my own journals because the “That happened. . . and then this happened” mode of writing doesn’t always fit with my life. Or anyone’s life, really. I’m a poet (poetry being a pretty non-linear discipline) and am concerned much more with memory, the past, how motifs of joy, trauma,etc. reoccur and morph and repeat over time.
But I’ll stop waffling and just say : thanks !
Very cool! I love the way you have this laid out.
Excellent idea with the mindmap. This appears very flexible. Definitely worth a look.
I have one question, though: What is the point in having those continuous pages? Do they just make it easier to write across the middle? Or anything else?
Wow… this actually is fascinating.
The idea as well as the result is very nice 🙂
Good job, I’ll think about this too 🙂
Have fun, mo
Interesting, I enjoyed that, thanks.
What a great idea! What impresses me more is the creative process you went through to figure out a system that works well for you. I find this inspiring!
Thank you for sharing and thanks to your daughter for tweeting about it. I probably would have missed this otherwise.
@steve. Thanks. The stickers were fun to make and I’m a big fan of moo.
@amber….is there such a thing as too much time?? (sorry for scaring you!!) 🙂
@sheila. I don’t think our brains work in linear ways! Which is probably why poetry is so good for us!
@tobeme, remo aka mo and speedmaster, thanks for you kind feedback. Glad you like it
@martin – the Japanese fold makes it easy to see a number of weeks at once….gives you a nice visual sense of balance (or lack of it) in your month, for example. Also, I actually just find it very aesthetically pleasing….nice to see, nice to hold
@starrgazr, glad you’ve been inspired.
[…] 9, 2008 by bobleckridge When I recently made myself a visual diary, I explored the origins of the names of the days of the week. In fact, a while ago, when I went to […]
[…] history of the days of the week and the pictures of his ultimate artistic endeavor in this venue. I’ve shared the post with friends who are diarists/journalists. And I thought I should share it with my online readers […]
Got directed to this entry from Moleskinerie. What an absolutely fabulous idea!
Any change you could make the sticker image available under a creative commons licence so that others interested in the idea could get some stickers made? It’s a shame Moo don’t have an affiliates program.
– Neil.
I bought myself a moleskine – and a japanese fold Moleskine because I thought it would be cool. But I never found a use for it; your suggestion is good! Thanks for the inspiration. 🙂 Cheers!
I’d like to follow up on Neil Ford’s question, above. I think the idea is brilliant and I’d like to try it. Under what conditions would you allow others to order these same Moo stickers of the images? Many thanks for sharing this.
You realize there is a whole industry of time management techniques and tools and no one used this special blend as far as I know (I teach this stuff)?
Thank you very much for sharing this. I especially like how you solved the future months issue.