Through the Jibun Techo, Nolty, FC Japan, and other Japanese Planners Facebook group, I came upon the Nolty company planners. Now Nolty planners come in a huge variety of sizes and layouts. The Stationery Cafe wrote a 2 part blog post recently as a guide to all the different versions. (Part 1 | Part 2)
Searching Amazon Japan I came upon the 6469 Nolty planner in A5 size. As such any descriptions listed below are only for this particular model Nolty planner.
Monthly the planner runs from December of the previous year to March of the next year. (December 2020 – March 2022). However, January 2022 is only on one page, and February and March 2022 are split horizontally in half to both fit on a single page together.
Weekly runs from the first week of December 2020 through the last week of December 2021.
This planner has no daily pages.
It has 2 ribbon bookmarks built-in.
Each monthly 2 page spread is followed by a set of vertical weekly spreads for that month.
Starting with January 2021 there are 2 pages of lined paper after that month’s weekly spread ends. Then the next 2 page monthly spread begins.
It’s worth noting that throughout the regular dated layout, the paper is completely lined.
The boxes this planner checks:
- The planner is large enough to write in while being perfectly portable.
- Being a Japanese planner the paper is more hopefully more fountain pen friendly. (I have yet to test it so this is to be determined.)
- It’s a Monday start planner.
- Month on 2 pages. There is a bit of space on the left and bottom for writing notes, to-dos, doodling, etc. There is also a mini monthly calendar on the bottom with the previous and next month displayed.
- Vertical weeklies. The time marking starts at 7 am and goes to 24. My workday begins at 6 am, but this seems close enough. There is a bit of space above when the vertical schedule begins if I needed to write in something.
The vertical weekly spread includes a large space on the right side of the right page for notes, to-dos and anything else
Other features that it includes:
- Full page monthly layout of the current year at a glance, half of a page dedicated to previous and next year.
- A yearly plan that is separated into 4 pages. This gives you 3 months (vertically) on each page. Plenty of space to write in.
- The planner has built-in number tabs on the right-hand side for each month. This makes it so much easier to get to a certain month in this planner.
- After the monthly layouts for January to March 2022, there are 26 lined pages followed by 3 grid pages.
The cons:
- The large space on the right of the weeklies page takes away from the horizontal space to write in for each day. This is something I couldn’t measure before physically getting my hands on it. Comparing it to the A5 slim Jibun Techo, the columns are definitely narrower for writing in events each day. I’d guess the column width would be what you would get for a B6 size with a full weekly spread.
- I can see the printing on the opposite side of the page. So the paper is thinner.