Show Notes
In this episode Helen shares how she’s getting on with her Hobonichi system, a year after making the switch from Bullet Journaling. We did an episode on this switch in early 2024 - you can listen to that episode here, where Helen shared why switching over the New Year was a bad idea. And so, a year later, we revisited this topic to hear how Helen is getting on, what’s adapted and whether she still needs a suitcase to carry around her growing sticker collection. I ask Helen about the Hobonichi system, how it differs from Bullet Journaling, how she organises her stickers, whether Helen then keeps each notebook and how her system works. Helen shares more about the Hobonichi eco-system, bulldog clips & paper clips and how she’s had to retire her massive collection of Washi tape.
We also talk about or mention: Mark and Fold stationers & our chat on the show with founder Amy. Atoms to Astronauts notebooks Lamy Fountain Pens (aff link) Our interview with Fountain Pen legend, Urban Hafner And lovely kind comments left on Rob’s video from fellow stationery freaks
(Some images of Helen's planner are shared in the newsletter).
More from Stationery Freaks
After a few months away — and a very welcome "petition of one" from Stacy in Florida — Rob and Helen are back. Rob has been building a public commonplace: twenty-five years of learning, typed onto index cards (possibly breaking his typewriter in the process) and slowly taking over his studio wall. Helen has been redistributing her notebook collection to a room of grateful authors, which may or may not count as cheating in the great notebook challenge. See original hoarding cast here and a revisit to the challenge of using notebooks here. Along the way: why old publishing offices were built around attention rather than productivity, a typewritten daily planning ritual that's quietly replaced Todoist, the strange magnetism of Midori paper, a beautiful Japanese storage haul, giving away index cards to parents and why the whole world seems to be drifting back to analogue. It's like old times. Which is rather the point of the cast. It's good to be back. If you'd like to see images, and more about the show - check out the companion newsletter to this episode. https://stationeryfreaks.substack.com/
In this episode of Stationery Freaks, Rob and Helen dig into the messy, essential world of scrap notes: desk pads, Post-its, legal pads, envelopes, voice memos, and the “grab whatever’s nearby” capture habit. They explore the real question beneath the stationery: what’s the process for turning a quick note into something useful — and what happens when your capture system becomes a pile of open loops.
It’s our first Stationery Freaks episode of 2026, and we’re going deep on goal setting, as we usually do for the first cast of the year.
It’s the last Stationery Freaks episode before Christmas, and after a slightly chaotic month we’re back with a free-form catch-up full of notebook temptation, planning experiments, and advent calendar joy. Helen reviews two very premium stationery advent calendars — Martha Brook(s) and Tom’s Studio — including what you actually get, which one feels more “decorative vs functional,” and the one item she absolutely refuses to touch (again). Rob shares his new structured SmartPlanner time-blocking experiment (and why he’s moved from pen to pencil), an everyday-carry bag confession featuring nine notebooks, and an early idea he’s calling The Wallpaper Method: learning notes on a giant scroll. We also chat about “analog wellbeing,” why January is peak notebook season, end-of-year reflection (hello, Collins ledger), and what we’ll be tackling in the first episode of 2026.