Happy New Techo Day to all whom celebrate

12 Dec, 2024

Hell yea, it's a moody evening and my 2025 Techo arrived! Time for some dimly lit photos of my journaling future.

I started using a Hobonichi Techo day planner in 2016 and I kind of haven't looked back since.

Weirdly, I tend to use them retrospectively - instead of using them to plan upcoming things or schedule, I take time each evening to chronicle things that happened in the day, doodle, and make note of what I did / didn't get done from my to-do lists or habit trackers. (I've written about this before on Cohost, good chost imo - wayback link)

Back of the Techo Box; it has a passage in Japanese followed by the English translation: 'Before you think of anything, write 'That made me Happy.' Don't ask yourself 'what' made you happy until afterward. Then write down an answer, even if you really have to dig for one. You could also try 'That made me sad' or 'That was delicious.' - Safety Match's Morning and Evening Talks'

The open box featuring a wrapped Techo A5 cousin planner, a wrapped pen and a smaller object in a silver sleeve.

Back of the packaging for the Techo itself

The Techo is a daily planner, notebook, journal etc created by Shigesato Itoi, best known outside of Japan as 'The EarthBound guy'. Like, he's got a huge body of work in his home country but the Mother series is probably his major export - though I'm a personally a huge fan of his side project Dokonoko, a social media app exclusively for pet photos.

I've primarily used the standard A6 size Techo over the years but this year I grabbed the A5 size 'Cousin' instead; I'd had a great time with it in 2019 when I wanted more room for pixel art but went back to A6 afterwards for portability. For 2025 it's in English for the first time ever and I decided to give it another go.

Look at that size difference:

The Techo is broken up into different segments; month, week and day view. The per-day section is the bulk and allows you to use it as you see fit. You can use the side section with timestamps, or you can ignore it and draw a dragon. I used the grid-based nature of the notebook for several years to do the inktober prompts as video game pixel art.

An A5 Techo Cousin opened to January 1st

As mentioned, I use the month view for my daily habit tracker; in that top section I can write 9-10 things I want to see myself doing daily, and then each day I can check it off from this month view - at the end of the month I can reflect a bit, like "damn I only played guitar every other day" or "I didn't work on X project at ALL this month" etc.

An A5 Techo Cousin opened to the month view

But overall the vibes on these thing rule. There's a quote on every 2-day page spread that range from inspirational to absolute nonsense and it brings me joy. Each day has the moon phase listed, the back section has measurement charts, it's just a neat little one-stop. Plus there are a whole range of covers for Techos to customize / personalize your experience. I still have my custom cover from my 2019 Cousin and I was happy to get to re-use it for 2025.

A black techo cover with a large sticker of the Mother franchise's Mr Saturn on the front

The back side of the cover; there are large Night in the Woods stickers of Sharkle and Donut Wolf

There's also the strange freebies they always send as well. A few years back it came with a knickknack tray shaped like a piece of toast - this year it was a bonus graph paper notebook with some cool art on the front.