I’m on my fourth notebook as part of my daily Bullet Journal practice and thought I’d share my two favorite brands with you! My very first Bullet Journal started smack in the middle of my Action Day Idea Notebook. I was already using it for notes at work and when I found out about Bullet Journaling I simply flipped to the next empty page and started. And never looked back!
The Action Day Idea Notebook was great and held up well. The leather still looks nice on the outside and I love having a ribbon bookmark, pre-numbered pages and an index with enough lines for a title/topic for each and every page. I also liked having the blank pages at the time, but I’ve since switched to a dot grid and don’t think I’ll change that anytime soon. The notebook is very well made, and while the paper isn’t thick enough to stop ghosting (seeing the words you’ve written on one side through the back of the paper) it is very smooth paper and a lot of pens work well with it. (Check out the video for a quick flip-through of the Action Day Idea Notebook.)
Once I filled up the Idea Notebook, I tried the Leuchtturm 1917 and this is the one I’ve decided to stick with for the time being. I love all the fun colors the Leuchtturm comes in and the quality of the leather and the binding is superb. The pages here are also pre-numbered and there is a printed index, however, I found that if you want to log each page, you’ll run out of index lines pretty quickly. In my second Leuchtturm, I left the first page blank to hopefully solve this problem. The Leuchtturm has TWO ribbon bookmarks, a paper pocket inside the back cover, and also has perforated the last few pages so you can share a page of paper with the co-worker who forgot a pad of paper or your budding artist without ripping into the spine of the notebook.
I’ve also switched over to a dot-grid paper instead of plain, which I really like as I’ve got a more formal “layout” to my weekly spreads now and the dots make it easy to draw the charts each week. Again, check out the video above in the second half for a view of my weekly layout and how I use the dots to my advantage. That being said, when I’m taking notes things inevitably get messy and I write all over the damn place, with arrows, zig-zags, stuff scratched out, etc. So while I use the dots when it works for me, I don’t let it hem me in! Thankfully the dots are faint enough to use or ignore as the mood strikes me.
All in all, you can have a Bullet Journal in loose-leaf paper stapled together, but I’ve always had an obsession a preference for pretty journals so I’ll continue to either use up what I have laying around or I’ll buy a new Leuchtturm 1917 for my next notebook. The hard part will be choosing a color…
Leuchtturm 1917
Action Day Idea Notebook
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