We often hear from people who are trying to decide between several different planning formats, or who’ve used a particular format for years but have always been curious about another one. As a Business user recently explained: “I still love the others and am pondering excuses to use them all, somehow.”

I totally know the feeling — I’ve been a Sapa X user for years, but have always wondered if I should try a format like Space 17 or Rhodia, with weekly note-taking space. Still, my jury-rigged time management system doesn’t make me feel like I *need* weekly note-taking space, so never I’ve indulged the curiosity. Though I did just find an excuse to use a Monthly 4!

What do you do when you see a new format that you like? How do you decide whether or not you’re going to switch?

It’s difficult to imagine that we had 20+ inches of snow last weekend, cause this weekend was beautiful: sunny, clear, with temperatures that had you peeling off gloves and scarves and even coats as you walked around.

I’ve been dreaming of spring ever since last summer, which seems to be something of an occupational hazard of gardening. This year, I’m prepared for it, too. I’ve already decided what I want to grow and ordered my seeds. I’ve also figured out exactly when I should start them, thanks to this nifty new Monthly 4 planner Karen gave me. In the past, I usually waited until the weather was warm, then scrambled to get my seeds started. Thanks to the Monthly 4, I’m already ahead of the game, and my tomatoes and brussels sprouts are sitting in peat planters on the windowsill.

I’ve never used a monthly planner, but I can tell it’s gonna be great. First of all, the calendar pages give me a great way to keep track of what I need to do, and get an overview of plantings, germination times, etc.

The notes pages at the back let me go into in more detail, and record stuff like what varieties I planted, how many plants I’m aiming to grow, and so on. I’m sure I’ll figure out more ways to put it to use as the season goes along.

Do you garden? Karen has two extra Monthly 4s in the office, waiting to be raffled off to the first two people who contact us to claim them. One has a spring green club cover, and the other has a Jade soya cover, so let us know which one you’d prefer and we’ll do our best to coordinate.

Good luck!

Bookmarks can be sold separately by retailers if they choose to buy them. They are sold in a pack of 10.

I have a few extra in the office I would be happy to send to our QV blog readers.  Please send us a quick note with your mailing address via the Contact Us form on the blog.

You can have a look at photos of them here.

Let me preface this by saying that nearly everyone keeps a variety of different notebooks, made by different brands, in regular rotation. We know that. We endorse that. And we all have different needs/preferences in terms of writing instruments; fountain pen users love our heaviest, 90g paper, while others need nothing more than a few pages of lightweight 64g to receive their gel pens and rollerballs and pencils.

But Karen and I were nonetheless intrigued to see pen maker Brian Goulet’s recent vlogs over at Ink Nouveau. As you may remember, Brian likes to subject the notebooks and stationery that his company sells to various acts of ink-related torture. A couple weeks ago, he put a Habana, a Webbie, and a Moleskine to a head-to-head bleedthrough test with a couple drops of J. Herbin. That video’s embedded above, so you can see the results for yourself.

Brian’s since done more detailed comparisons of Moleskine vs. Habana and the Moleskine vs. Webbie to discuss size, thickness, price, and all the other factors that help determine which notebooks best fit your needs. In a world where you can’t always try before you buy, they’re great tools to aid your decisions.

To learn more about Brian and his pens, check out this profile at Rhodia Drive!

As long as we’re revisiting old Quo Vadis ads, I figure I might as well retell the story of our most popular planning format…

Though it seems like one of those things that must have been around forever, the idea of weekly time management—at least as it applies to planners—didn’t exist until 1952. The inventor? A French doctor named F.G. Beltrami, who invented the “one week on two pages” planner format when he stamped a grid onto the white pages of a notebook. (Up till then, appointment books were like diaries, with one day per page.)

Dr. Beltrami called his invention the “Agenda Planning Diary.” His friends and family were so enthusiastic about it that he eventually decided to switch careers and form his own company to manufacture his creation. In 1954, Editions Quo Vadis was formed in Marseilles, France—and has been turning out new Agendas ever since.

Curious about the name “Quo Vadis”? Read Karen’s post about the topic.

I found these images recently when I was straightening up my desktop (New Year’s resolution: keep my files better organized).

Karen sent them to me years ago, and it’s just madness that I’ve never blogged about them, because they’re totally interesting. Here, for example, is a montage of old print ads (click through to see a larger version):

And here’s an office display that seems to have been set up for a trade show booth or something:

Here’s a simpler trade show display:

And here’s an old product display. Dig that mod-ish logo design!

Lots of people write in with good suggestions for tweaks to our planning formats, and often those tweaks take the form of supplements or additions. More space for notes is a popular one. Another popular idea, at least for those formats that don’t already have it, is adding a monthly view that would supplement a daily or a weekly planner.

First of all, let me say that we are always grateful for your suggestions, because it helps us understand how people actually use our planners. Also, they do make a difference, as Karen has described. But when it comes to adding pages, we face a problem: if we add pages to our planners, for the most part, then we have to delete other pages. We can’t make the planners larger because the refillable covers would be useless—the planner inserts wouldn’t fit. (Of course, they could stretch a little bit, and as Karen will describe later, we are indeed planning to make notes supplements for the Business and Minister planners.)

So periodically we ask: what would you like to add? And more importantly, in exchange, what would you eliminate? An address book seems quaint to me in this era of Outlook and cell phones, but maybe there are still people who prefer to store that stuff in their planners. Similarly, the maps and reference materials—I like that they exist (though I rarely consult them), and it’s true they come in handy while traveling, but as Marty pointed out, Google can give you the same information with much greater specificity…

So, what do you think? Should we do an annual bound book (i.e., not refillable) with extra pages for notes and calendars? Would you be willing to pay more for that expanded edition? Or should we try to find a way to fit those things into our current planners, or create special supplements for them?

“The funny thing about Meryl Streep’s character (in the movie) is that she forgets appointments and meetings. Steve Martin’s character gives her the gift of the leather bound Quo Vadis planner to help her remember her appointments with him. When she opens the gift, the back of the planner is face up. The imprinted Quo Vadis label is displayed before she turns the planner over.”

Note that we did *not* pay for product placement, which is part of the reason we’re so excited about this! Director Nancy Meyers is apparently just a fan of Quo Vadis — as is Meryl Streep.

When your daily patterns are mostly predictable, your planner needs are straightforward. You know what your home and work life consists of, and your planner needs are usually consistent from week to week.

But all this is turned on its head when traveling. What works fine at home or in the office may break down when you’re out in the world. Unpredictable things happen while traveling (which of course is part of the fun of traveling in the first place), and you need a planner that is flexible enough to handle out of the ordinary needs. This is especially true when traveling internationally. Suddenly you need information at your fingertips such as international dialing codes and time zone information that you might not normally need in your day to day life. Especially for people who travel frequently, whether for work or pleasure, you need a planner that can handle your day to day life as well as your travel needs.

Several years ago while traveling back to the US after living in Nepal, I spent 3 weeks in Paris and 3 weeks traveling around Scotland. That year I used an Exacompta Daily Pocket planner, and that little book was a champ. The book itself is tiny, light, and took up no space at all in my bag. But the page size is still substantial, and having a page for each day was great during my entire trip. I used that little book for everything. Each page had plenty of room to write flight reservation details and phone numbers of hostels I stayed in. While in Paris I took a short course in French language, and the daily pages held my lesson reminders and reading assignments. On one page I drew a map of how to get to a new friend’s apartment off the Champs-Elysees for dinner. I recorded each place I went on my journey around Scotland. In the cover pockets I tucked in slips of paper with people’s email addresses, ferry schedules and postcard stamps. I filled the pages with the location of that excellent crepe place, the quaint restaurant where we ate a delicious dinner, and the cool shops I found on the little side streets. Now it’s an excellent record of my trip, and when I look through that little book the memories come right back.

Last fall on a trip to Budapest I didn’t even bring my planner because the one I was using at the time was too bulky. Besides, I was only going for a week, surely I could live without my planner? No, of course not. I had forgotten to notify my credit card company that I was traveling, and when I used my card to pre-pay my hotel the early warning protection caused it to seize up. I needed to call the US from Hungary to rectify it. But what is the code to dial OUT of Hungary for an international call?? If I’d had my planner with me with its page of international dialing codes, I would have had that information at my fingertips. But instead, with no planner (and no internet) it took me about 30 minutes of searching and asking people before I found out it’s 00, like much of the rest of Europe. By the time I placed my call, the Fraud Protection office was closed. 5 minutes ago. So I had to wait until the next day to call. Lesson learned: don’t leave home without my planner and its list of international dialing codes!

My most recent trip was to Scotland over the holidays, and I brought along my Minister planner (with its list of international dialing codes, time zones and extensive maps, which I love). I didn’t really think I’d be using it much during my vacation. I wound up using it extensively, to my surprise.

As you may have heard, the UK had some pretty severe winter weather over the holidays. I had intended to travel within the UK during that time, but had to change my flight information and hotel reservations several times due to airport closures and impassable roads. My Minister has plenty of room in the daily columns for writing hotel reservation numbers and flight times, and the notes boxes at the side of the page allowed me to jot down the details of my often-changing reservations. I also had plenty of room in the daily columns to record what we did each day, just for fun. Now when I look back in my Minister and see those days, I fondly recall eating fish and chips at the Oban seashore or hiking in Glen Coe.

I would never consider using an electronic device as my planner, for so many reasons. I vastly prefer to have all of my important information and plans written into a book. Especially when I’m traveling, I can’t be bothered with plug adaptors for charging up the battery, worrying about it running out of juice on long hauls or while I’m out and about, or the threat of the device crashing or seizing up. I want to open my nice little book and see what I need to find right there where I wrote it. And of course, no electronic device can replicate the pleasure of, years later, flipping through my book to remember my trip!

The paper used for Quo Vadis planners is made at the main Clairefontaine mill  located in the Vosges region of France. It is situated 90 km from Strasbourg in the Meurthe river valley. Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of Alsace in north-eastern France.

In 1858, Jean-Baptiste Bichelberger chose the small town of Etival-Clairefontaine in the Vosges mountains to set up his paper mill.  It is in the heart of a region with a long-standing tradition of paper-making. Clairefontaine was established on the site of a paper mill built in 1512.

Taking advantage of the rags supplied by the local textile industry, Clairefontaine quickly became one of the most important mills in the area. The mill has been making paper since 1858 and stationery products since 1890.

Clairefontaine paper is shipped in rolls from the mill to the Quo Vadis manufacturing plant in Hamburg, NY.  The paper is different colors and weights for the different books: most are bright white, but some are ivory and others tinted a very light mint green. The planners made at the Hamburg plant are destined for the U.S, Canada, Australia and the U.K.

Read about Clairefontaine’s environmental commitment here.

Learn more about the different Clairefontaine mills here.

Who is Claire Fontaine?