My 2026 Hobonichi Weeks Setup

Greetings :) Although I already uploaded a video showing my 2026 Hobonichi Weeks setup, I thought some still photos would be great for reference!

0. Table of contents

1. What I use it for
2. Materials
3. Beginning
4. Weekly Section
5. Note Pages
6. The End

1. What I use it for

I use my Hobonichi Weeks mainly to record my workouts, running stats, and general health information. In addition, I have some sections for travel, cleaning, and wellness goals.

I have attempted to use the Hobonichi Weeks three times prior, but I was never able to stick with it. Same old story of having beautiful spreads in January, decent spreads in February, sparse spreads in March, then the spreads slowly dwindle down to nothing by July.

A sane person would probably think, hey, I gave this planner a try three times—maybe it's time to move on! But no, the Hobonichi Weeks is too cute so I kept trying to make it work, and 2025 was the first year I have been successful! I attribute this to a few things:

• It's low maintenance. I typically fill out my Hobonichi Weeks every 2-3 days—rather than every day—because life is just too busy. Since it's a record of things I already did in the past (e.g. runs, workouts, habits), it doesn't matter whether I record the information the day of, or the next day, or two days later. My running app also keeps track of my steps & pace, so I can literally record-keep an entire month later if I need to.
• It's not redundant. My main planner is the Hobonichi Cousin, in which I write my work to-do list, schedule, life things, and journal entries. Previously, I tried to make my Hobonichi Weeks an on-the-go planner. When that didn't work, I made it my work planner. When that didn't work, I made it my personal life planner. And that didn't work too, because I had already written everything out in my Hobonichi Cousin.
• It's useful. The information I'm recording in my Hobonichi Weeks this year was interesting to look at and useful to know. I could get a snapshot of which weeks I was physically unwell, or mentally down, and how that affected my runs. I could see my progression in weightlifting, albeit due to some health incidents this year, I likely regressed (😂).

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2. Materials

The Hobonichi Weeks' paper is different from the Hobonichi Cousin paper, and for some reason I just prefer gel pens over fountain pens in my Weeks. This year, I also discovered my love for the free ballpoint pen that is included with the official Hobonichi store purchases! I will admit I have been a snob and never paid much attention to free pens until this year... my bad. It really is a pleasant pen and the classic black, blue and red colour options are great for work annotations.

Unlike writing with fountain pens, I have a tendency to press very hard when writing with gel pens, so the ink from the backside transfers over to the previous page. For this reason, I use a soft pencil board (shitajiki) to prevent ink transfers. You can use a scrap sheet of printer paper too! I really don't like hard pencil boards for some reason...

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3. Beginning

I use the year at a glance section for tracking my steps and workouts. 

• Top section for 2026 will be a graph of my monthly average. For 2025, I used it as a tally but I didn't find this information to be useful at all. I think something visual will be better, hence I will try a graph!
• I use 5 mildliner colours to colour-code my daily step count brackets.
  • No colour ... less than 10k steps
  • Blue ... 10k to 15k steps
  • Brown ... 15k to 20k steps
  • Red ... 20k to 25k steps
  • Purple ... 25k to 30k steps
  • Yellow ... 30k or more steps
  • Yellow with a star ... 40k or more steps
• Beside the colour dot, I have a 3 letter abbreviation for my daily workouts. If it's empty, that means I didn't do any intentional workouts.
• When I have a work trip, or if I go through some serious health issues, I will draw a line spanning the relevant days. This is to indicate that something was going on during this period which affected my ability to stick to my exercise routine.

I use the monthly calendar section for recording periods of really poor mental or physical health. I don't use these pages daily, which I suppose is a good thing 😅 I don't share these pages filled as I would like to keep that private.

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4. Weekly Section

• I have a running app that gives me a plan for training towards achieving my running goals. The coloured squares are the types of runs I do: tempo, interval, easy runs, long runs.
• I also run just for fun, which I record without the colour-coded squares
• My gym workouts start with a heading of the muscle group I'm working, then bullet points of the exercises I do. As an example:
  • Lower body day
    • BB Squats (75 x 4)
    • BB RDLs (75 x 4)
    • Cable kickbacks (25 x 2 x 3)
    • Hamstring curls (50 x 4)
    • Stairmaster (20 mins, lvl 11)
  • The BB means barbell. I write SM for the smith machine, and DB for the dumbbell.
  • (75 x 4) means 75lbs x 4 sets. I promise I am not doing 300 squats and I'm actually quite weak lmao.
  • (25 x 2 x 3) means 25lbs x 2 sides x 3 sets. This is for exercises where I have to do the left and right side separately.
  • Sometimes, I will also draw a square bracket ] to connect two workouts. That means it was a superset.

For the right note page, I have three sections:

• The things I track in my habit tracker changes based on my needs. Currently, I'm dealing with some health issues so I'm tracking more things than usual:
  • Coffee icon ... cups of coffee I drink
  • Pill bottle icon ... anti-histamine meds
  • Bubbles icon ... whether I showered
  • Skincare icon ... whether I did my night time skincare
  • Fire icon ... inflamed hive symptoms
  • Cellphone icon ... whether I went on my phone before bed
• The "this week" section is basically a free space where I can write anything related to my mental health, physical health, life, etc. Sometimes I make a list of things to meal prep or I doodle my farmers market haul.
• I check my grocery store flyers religiously, and I write down the things I'm interested in.

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5. Note Pages

The 1-12 represent each month of the year. So as an example, if I cleaned the top of my fridge in March, I would draw a checkmark under 3. This way I can reference when I last cleaned the top of my fridge.

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6. The End

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That's pretty much it! If there is a page I didn't include here, it likely means I am not utilising it. I try not to dwell on needing to maximize every page of my planner; if I get overwhelmed, I will end-up ditching the entire planner.

Thanks for reading & take care :)