Notebooks and Weeknotes

• As comfortable as I am with digital interfaces, one thing I just cannot manage digitally, at least consistently, is task management, planning and daily logging. I'm great at doing all of those on a notebook, but I've always wanted to do it digitally - I'll explain why below. This is why I've abandoned many notebooks in hopes of being able to manage my tasks and daily logging on an app, but nothing has ever really stuck. I've tried Things, Obsidian, Google Calendar, Apple Reminders and Notes and a bunch more. They are all great apps but none of them allows for my chaotic mind to plan and document in the way that it needs to. And I think the main reason of that is that every week or day requires a different way of organization and planning (as chaotic as that sounds), and no app can ever be versatile enough to allow me to switch things up as needed (at least not without effort). There are periods when I'd rather plan day by day, and there are periods when I'd rather have an overview of the entire week for planning, and sometimes I need to think in terms of months and quarters. And these are fundamentally different ways of thinking about time, so it's not just a matter of switching view from daily to weekly or monthly. So I think I've finally given up and completely abandoned the idea (once again, but this time hopefully for good). I've secured a bit fat B5 dot grid notebook, and it sits on my desk everyday, and that's where all my planning and logging happens — when and if it happens.
• I've come to love the B5 size for notebooks. Having previously mostly used A5 sized notebooks for my desk, and pocket-sized for travel/on-the-go, I randomly picked up a B5 Paperchase notebook a couple of years ago in Dubai, and it was such a pleasure to use that notebook. I'd always thought that A5's (the primary size of choice for many notebook brands) were compact enough to be carried around, but I realized two things: if an A5 can be stuffed into a bag, so can a B5: I've never carried a bag that is just barely able to fit an A5 and nothing larger than that - and when I'm not carrying a bag, I carry my pocket notebook anyway and not an A5 notebook. And secondly, I also pretty much never carry my desk notebook away from the desk. The extra real estate that I get per page from a B5 notebook is amazing (it's like four spreads on two pages), and it's just more comfortable to place my hand on the notebook while writing rather than having it hang off the edge of an A5 notebook.
• One of the main reasons I have so desperately wanted to set up my daily log digitally was so that it was 'searchable'. The solution to that problem is 'weeknotes', an idea I've found on a few blogs recently. Instead of having a searchable digital repository of my daily logs (which end up being quite mundane - and honestly only fun to browse through when you're flipping through actual physical pages), these weeknotes, written up in Obsidian, will serve as a log for what went on every week, and by writing them every Sunday night, I can use them to reflect on the week too. This way I can continue to write my actual daily logs in my notebook.
• The second reason for wanting a digital daily log was that I wanted it to be accessible at any minute, and what's more accessible than an app on my phone? I've realized however that having such easy access to it makes me take it for granted, and I end up not opening the apps to review or reflect. Essentially, I need friction to be able to actively engage with it, by making it a deliberate act that needs to be and can only be done at a specific place or time of the day.
• I haven't really decided on a format for these weeknotes yet, but I think I'll like to have somewhat of a rough setup. For example, right now, I'm loving these bullet point style notes, I imagine that some weeknotes would require me to abandon the very structured format of bulletpoints in favor of paragraphs, so maybe there might not be a fixed format after all. We'll see.
• I'm also not yet sure what exactly I'll feel comfortable including in (the published version of) these weeknotes, or whether they will serve as a catch-all for all my thoughts, or if I'll prefer to write separate posts for other topics. Hopefully, that will become clearer over the first few weeks. The main goal is simply to force myself to post at least once a week — and if calling it a weeknote is what gets that done, then weeknote it shall be.