The 2026 Planning Episode: Painted Pictures, Todoist, Obsidian & Too Many Notebooks
Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode of Stationery Freaks with myself, Rob Lambert, and of course.
Helen:And with me, Helen Lisowski.
Rob:So Helen, it's too late, isn't it, to say happy new year?
Helen:Yes, but it wouldn't have been when we actually had this recording scheduled, Rob, and I have to apologize for canceling on you three times. I am so sorry. Apparently you canceled on me once as well, but it was so crazy for me that I don't even remember that.
Rob:That's it. This is our first one then, isn't it, of 2026, and it's the January 30 as we record this.
Helen:I know, crazy.
Rob:We're gonna talk about goal setting, and that's what we were wanting to do in that pretty much first week back in January, wasn't it? Life it just got in the way. We've got a broad selection of things to chat about today, haven't we? Yeah. But the focus really for you, our listeners, is gonna be on goal setting.
Rob:Me and Helen, we have different ways of doing this, don't we?
Helen:Sometimes different ways each year, Rob.
Rob:That's true. Mine's certainly different. That's a good thing, think. And yours, you said, is pretty radical and I'm not gonna like it.
Helen:Wildly different and you're not gonna like it, no.
Rob:All right, so yeah, we haven't discussed what our systems are, so that will be kind of interesting as we go through this. But before we do, Helen, what's happening in your stationary world?
Helen:Not a lot. I've, well, it kind of ties in with goal setting. One of the things that's happening is that I have decided to try really hard and buy local for my stationery. Just challenging myself every time I open Amazon. Say, does it really have to come from Amazon or can I get it locally?
Helen:So yes, I've been trying to do that as a result of that. I don't know if you know, I've talked to you about all the weird places that I get stationary. Vintage was a big one for a long time. I've had to put that in a quiet drawer somewhere, not touch it. But I did find amazingly in a charity shop.
Helen:Take my mother loves a nice bargain. So she loves to go to, you know, thrift shops, think they're called in America, charity shops in The UK. They're all for like common good and she loves to have a nice rummage and see what's in there. Not that she needs any more stuff. So I take her because she doesn't drive very much now.
Helen:So most weekends I take her. And while I was in a charity shop, I found a Rocketbook. Do you know what one of those is?
Rob:I do not, no.
Helen:Okay, I'm just getting the thing down to remember who makes it. I don't actually know who makes it, made by Rocketbook. What it is, is it's like several pages of special paper. So you maybe have 20 pages in it and you download the app and it will allow you to reuse and reuse and reuse the paper. So you write on it using the Pilot FriXion pens, which I use anyway because I love the fact you can rub them out.
Helen:And this is you write on it the pages and then you can erase it with just like a damp cloth. And it's really good and you can snap it and it will go to Evernote, it will go into, well, it goes into all sorts of things that you can send it to email, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneNote, loads of places you can send it. And you can also, I think they've got like a dozen, 10 different types of tag you can tag it. So it can be a certain type of thing. So based on that tag can tell you where to send it.
Helen:You can send it to different things, you can send it to people based on a tag. These are really quite expensive, and I've always fancied one, but they're all a bit faffy because I, you you just have a notebook, but I got it for 50p in the charity shop because they didn't know what it was, and I was just like, actually, and it's still in its little box and it's pristine. And I thought, I know exactly what that is and I'm gonna take it home just to play with it. So that is my little stationary story for this week. And I got it two weeks ago, and I was so chuffed with it, because it was so unexpected.
Rob:That's mad. I'm just sort of making a little deal here on a index card because this notebook sounds like it's at a sort of intersect. I don't even remember the CTO that we used to work with. He had one of those notepads that had a pen and you'd write in the notepad and the pen would record what you're writing. Not visually, it would just, you remember, if you moved it, it would work out what you're trying to write and then give you a digital version of it.
Rob:Then obviously Moleskine came out with the Evernote collaboration where you could take pictures and upload to Evernote with, again, these stickers that allowed you to categorize and taxonomize them. Then obviously you've got the Remarkable, which is pretty much a digital And this sort of sits kind of in between or part of that sort of Venn diagram. And you got it for what, a quid did you say? A pound?
Helen:50p, yeah, less than a pound. So that's like, yeah, I don't know, 40¢, 60¢. I don't know what the exchange rate is. It's not very much.
Rob:Not much.
Helen:And I was super pleased with it. And what's really nice is it's not just blank pages. So they give you like a month to view and they give you a weekly list and they give you, you've got blank pages for drawing, you've got dot pages if you wanted to use it. And you just can use these over and over and over again and they just upload. You just use them by taking a photo and it sends it off.
Helen:That's pretty It
Rob:That's pretty cool, yeah. I mean, charity shops used to be a gold mine in a sense for finding cool, quirky stuff and really interesting stuff for good prices. But obviously now with the internet, you get the sense that they're having a look online at how much these things are.
Helen:Things are quite expensive actually, yeah.
Rob:Yeah, it's really hard to find a bargain now, but you seem to have, you've stumbled I across one, I like
Helen:was so happy. To be honest, I wouldn't probably have spent very much on it because I had no idea. I thought I'd heard of it. I thought I knew what it was. I thought I had a craving for one some years ago.
Helen:And apparently I did. So I bought it to check it out really to have a go. I am not sure that I'll ever use it because I have tried it and it's great. But I'll tell you what, that drag on the page that you get from a real paper versus this is different. And although it writes just like normal paper and you can wipe it off with just a damp microfiber cloth or whatever, and it does the whole, it's easy to click, even so, it's a bit of a nuisance.
Rob:We did an episode, didn't we, we talked about friction versus reward the friction of writing on paper is I think where a lot of companies are focusing. How can we reduce the friction, get it digital, whatever all of these different technologies? But the reward is actually that slow down, that deep thinking, that sort of feel almost. That's really hard to replicate, really hard, which is why paper will probably continue with the A medium of choice, certainly for stationary freaks mostly.
Helen:I'll take some pictures of it for the newsletter, so you can have a look and see what it is. And I'll use some of my friction stuff to draw on it or whatever, you can see.
Rob:100, sounds good. And this buy local, we've talked about this before and I think that even when we think about friction versus reward, Amazon's got almost zero friction. I know. Arrives at five day. I do struggle where I live.
Rob:There's one stationery shop and it's staggeringly expensive. But there is TK Maxx, our favorite jumble sale of notebooks.
Helen:Yes, TK Maxx and HomeSense, which is their sister company. I have to say though, Rob, we did set ourselves a challenge that we said we were gonna do last year, is count how many unused notebooks we had at the start of the year and try and end the year with less brand new notebooks than we started. So I would suggest that possibly buying local where it's really expensive might discourage you from buying any more notebooks.
Rob:Any more, yeah. You'd think that, wouldn't you? That would be a rational approach to this challenge. But just on that, did a video didn't we last year of We did.
Helen:Of us
Rob:emptying our notebooks and I'll try and include it if I can still find it, it's on our Instagram page. And you've done the same and I've sort of roughly calculated and we're coming into 2026. And what was it, how many notebooks have you got now?
Helen:I have 48 unused notebooks.
Rob:48, that's impressive. And yours are very beautiful as well, very stylish notebooks.
Helen:There are many that still unwrapped, Rob, that they're not, I haven't unwrapped them. They're still in beautiful paper protective. So I bought them, I watched them wrap them up and then I've taken them away and put them on a shelf because I don't want to undo them because they're too pretty.
Rob:Yeah, and your video is very insightful the way that they are all neatly in there. They're all, like you say, wrapped. Some of them are in display boxes kind of thing, aren't they?
Helen:Yeah, yeah.
Rob:They're very beautiful. And then my video is the 115 notebooks, scrappy, messy, very functional, one or two nice ones in there. I'm not going to say that they're all disposable of that kind, but yeah, I think so you're entering 2026 with 48 notebooks.
Helen:I think that's the number I'm going to do, yeah.
Rob:Yeah, so I've entered with, let's say 115 last year when we did this count. Used only one notebook that I've actually officially thrown away, so that's 114 and I reckon I have added at least 10. So we're at 124 notebooks and our goal then is to reduce that number.
Helen:To reduce that number? Yes. It doesn't matter how many buy, providing you are using them faster than you're buying them, I think is the feel. Because I don't think no notebook purchasing is That's not realistic, Rob, is it? Let's be honest.
Rob:No, but then I have 124. And they're not all unused as we discussed, some of them are ruined in those first few pages and then shelved. We were chatting before we recorded that you would cut those pages out.
Helen:I would.
Rob:Whereas I wouldn't because it always leaves a little blemish, a little bit of paper down the side, a little bit of an edge just reminds me of how incompetent I am.
Helen:If I take them out, at least I might reuse the notebook. Leaving them in, reusing that notebook is really difficult. Other things I've done in the past to reuse a notebook that I have destroyed by actually using it, is I can washi tape the pages together, first like dozen pages or whatever. And I've actually literally washi tape the whole of the, all of the page edges so that it becomes a single page and I can just ignore it. That's been quite effective, yeah.
Rob:Yeah, you know I don't have any washi tapes.
Helen:Would you like me to gift you some more?
Rob:I'll just use sellotape. We have a very different approach to this.
Helen:We have very different lives, Rob, don't we?
Rob:Sellotape, the unsung hero of the stationary world.
Helen:You're not wrong, actually. Love the stuff.
Rob:That's it. Well, teased it in, I think maybe the last episode we did, maybe the one before, about something called the wallpaper method, which you scoffed at. Interestingly, I had a couple of people contact me after listening to the episode or reading the newsletter, saying that they're really interested in it and they'd like to see how it's gone. Okay. Now this is all part of my other brand, Creator Soul Projects that I do, a YouTube channel, and I am gonna be recording a video on the wallpaper method next week.
Rob:And just to tease you, it didn't go well.
Helen:A shocker, Rob. For those who perhaps didn't hear that podcast, do you want to recap? I think we probably
Rob:Indeed, indeed. So I had this rabbit hole journey into Victorian notebooks, they tended to be more of a giant notebook collection, sort of big scrolls, they were big thick notebooks. They did have smaller ones, course, but generally, that was the only medium, so they used the real estate as best that they could. And so I embarked on this idea that if I grabbed a roll of wallpaper, the kind that you would stick on the wall, nice and white, no patterns, nothing funky about it, and I created this ongoing scroll in a kind of time series, when I have an idea, when I have a learning note, whatever, I put it in the scroll, and then I roll at one end and I keep unraveling until I've used the, I'm just looking at it now, the 10 meters of wallpaper. The first challenge, to tease you, I don't wanna go and spoil the video, but the first challenge was getting the wallpaper to stick together at the used end.
Rob:So I got two pieces of wood either side of the wallpaper, stuck them together, stapled the wallpaper to it, and that became the lever for the rolling mechanism. Now that was the first challenge because wallpaper has a mind of its own, and after a certain amount of wallpaper's been used, it wants to unravel itself. So then came the elastic bands, and then weights, and all sorts. And I'll be honest, the friction was so high and the reward was just not there.
Helen:I can't help but feel that you may have chosen the wrong thing. I mean, wallpaper's all well and good because it's nice and thick, but it's not designed for this, Rob, as you've discovered. You could go into Early Learning Center, a little toy shop, and you could get one of those boneless rolls of paper for kids to paint on.
Rob:You could
Helen:get one of those. That would have done it.
Rob:Yeah, but I wanted the wallpaper method as mine. It's like the bullet journal, the wallpaper method, it felt like it was a movement. But it's gone well. We're talking about friction reward. The hardest part about the reward was, I mean, it's a joyful thing to do.
Rob:It's quite involved. There's a lot of friction, as you can imagine, just getting it out, putting it on the table, working through it, rolling it all up, finding somewhere to store it. But the reward just wasn't there because actually how am I gonna find stuff? If I write something on the first meter and then I get to meter 10, I've got to unravel the whole thing to try and get to it. So you're then having to take pictures of it, you've got to come up with some sort of taxonomy and it just felt overbearing, and then I thought, you know what, I've got 124 notebooks, I just use one of those instead.
Rob:Yes,
Helen:do it, Rob!
Rob:Yeah, it'll be interesting. I'm gonna do the video on it because I think it warrants an explanation as to why it was ambitious, intelligent, well thought through, but just
Helen:Ultimately doomed to failure.
Rob:Yeah, and now I've got a roll of 10 meter wallpaper that I don't quite know what to do with. I'll be chopping them up in sort of broadly A3 sized pieces of paper and just using them as paper.
Helen:Well, mean, you know, there's a lot of experimentation before you get to success, Rob, and it's nice to see you still have that spark.
Rob:Yeah, yeah, at least. Okay, we promised goal setting. Anything else you want to cover, Helen, before we jump into goal setting?
Helen:No, that's fine.
Rob:Goal setting, some people do set goals, some people don't. The evidence and data around goal setting is sporadic, mixed. Some people say it works, some people say it doesn't, but we do set goals. Historically, we've done, I think we've pretty much done a podcast every year, haven't we, in the January?
Helen:We have. Slightly varying ideas of what we're gonna try this year, what's worked, what hasn't worked, those kind of things.
Rob:And we've always had this history where I've set 20 odd goals, you've set one or two, I think we might see a slight change this year. So why don't we start, Helen, with reflection, because setting goals is great, but we tend to reflect on the year that's gone to make sure that those goals aren't, you know, completely out of whack with where we are in life at the moment. So how do you do that reflection piece?
Helen:Very poorly this year. I sat down to do that and I thought, you know, I don't care. And that sounds awful. I don't care what I've achieved. I'm surprised and delighted that I've made it to the end of the year with my sanity intact.
Helen:And actually, this realization that I don't actually care what I achieved has colored very much how I'm going to set my goals for 2026. Because it didn't matter to me what I had achieved. What mattered to me was that I had had the maximum opportunity to do the things that I wanted to do. And how could I maximize that? So I reflected differently and came up with an entirely different problem rather than a solution.
Rob:Okay, interesting.
Helen:What about you? How did you sit down and do things?
Rob:Well, I've talked about it on the podcast before. I use Collins Ledger. It's a financial ledger. It's a beautiful I don't quite know what size it is. It's kind of tall and narrow.
Rob:It's a really nice little book to use, and it is 100% a financial ledger. I saw lots of videos of people using these things as commonplace books and just ignoring the lines, ignoring the columns, and just using them, writing in them, so I bought one. And I do track a bit of financial stuff, but mostly I just track a neutral order of the day. I've been doing this for about a year now. So the reflection process was quite straightforward because we have this thing called the recency effect where we tend to remember the things that are most recent.
Rob:And I think there's a trap there that obviously the last few months might not have been great, in which case that's what you tend to focus on. But this ledger being neutral, there's no emotion in there, it's not like happy positive day or a sad day, it's just a list of things that I've done. And it was really wonderful to look back and go, actually, I've done a lot. I've done a huge amount this year and I'm quite proud of that. So it wasn't so much an emotional reflection, it was more a neutral, this is what I've spent my year doing and do I wanna repeat that year?
Rob:Really
Helen:Did the you? That's exactly the question I wanted to really, if you could have your time again, did you do mostly the things that you want to do? Because that's exactly the question that I'm asking myself differently.
Rob:Well, yes and no. I think I've always struggled with having far too many ideas and not- Oh
Helen:yes, absolutely true, Rob.
Rob:Casing point, the wallpaper method, that distracted me for a week at least. I've wanted to do many, many different things, and I've fiddled around with all of them in various different levels of focus, should we say. I think last year highlighted to me that my focus is getting spread everywhere, and that's not good for achieving anything singular that I want to try and achieve. And we coach and consult companies on this all the time. You can only really have one priority, The Latin word for priority is singular, there's no plural So for you have a priority, so I think looking back I reflected that I've achieved a lot and done a lot, published a lot, worked a lot, done all this stuff, but it hasn't been singular towards something that I really want to achieve.
Rob:So I think that was really a clarifying, galvanizing moment where I looked at it and thought, yeah, I've done a lot and I'm proud and I'm happy and I don't regret the year, but I could have been more focused, and that's the drive for 2026.
Helen:So your aim for 2026 then sounds like North Star or equivalent kind of give me the one thing.
Rob:Yeah, in different layers, and we'll get into that because that's the goal setting process. Being all about work is one thing, there's health, there's also creative projects as well. So it's about layering it and making sure that at each level or each layer, there isn't competing priorities or competing projects That don't feel like they couldn't be postponed until some of the point.
Helen:Forever, well, forever. So that's quite interesting. I'm really interested to hear how you're going to go about that because that sounds to me like you've realized the same thing as me, or you're approaching the same thing as me, and we're gonna go about it differently. I came at it from a completely different angle, but I think we've come to roughly the same idea. The same idea that what is most important to us for the next year, most important, not what are the things I want to have achieved kind of thing.
Helen:Now you can break that down, which I bet a million dollars you have done, which is one of our massively diverging things that you and I do. But I think that idea of having a much closer focus on less things, but bigger.
Rob:Yes. You mentioned earlier that you'd approached it and come up with a different problem rather than a solution. Yeah. Was that essentially the problem that you've come up with?
Helen:It was. So my idea was, I don't care what I've achieved. What I care is that I have had enough time to do some fundamental things that matter to me. So have I had enough time to eat healthily? Have I had enough time to exercise?
Helen:Because I enjoy the gym. Have I had enough time to write? Have I had enough time to take care of my mental health so that I have the capacity to write, which has been a little bit challenging of late. So I am looking at the things that matter to me and building. So for me, if we go into this, how I intend to solve this problem is to build some routines.
Helen:Now, what I started doing at the beginning of the year, and I hasten to say have already abandoned, is this habit tracking idea. Today, have I done some writing? Have I done some movement? Have I eaten something reasonably healthy? And there was a half a dozen, a few more, maybe eight different things that I wanted to say.
Helen:These are things I want to make time in my life for. But actually that was really, really unhelpful to have it tracked on a daily basis I for think somebody else seeing that it would really work for. But I need much more forgiving than to see that I failed for three days in a row. Because it doesn't help me be better. It makes me feel bad about myself, which has really knock on effects for my ability to stick to habits.
Helen:So what I'm trying to do is build routines into my day. So for example, if I go back to October, I was writing most weekdays for an hour after work and maybe for an hour, hour and a or two on a weekend. That's quite a lot of writing time. Since October, October, I have not been able to do that consistently for a whole other load of reasons other than I don't want to. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I sit down and I can't do it.
Helen:My brain won't focus. There's a whole load of reasons why. And I'm stuck in my writing even though I desperately want to do it. And it's not because I don't have time to write, it's because there's too many other things that I haven't prioritized So the whole thing needs to be an ecosystem of a routine and I'm really good with routines and habits. I'm gonna attract them.
Rob:It's that accountability partner that isn't helpful, Absolutely. Isn't Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I think we're converging on broadly the same structure. In some respects, I've structured it, I guess, similar.
Rob:Talk about systems rather than routines and habits. Okay. Because the system to me is routines and habits plus the friction involved in doing the thing that I'm trying to do.
Helen:Okay, that's a better word. I like that as well, because I do build in, I make it much harder for me to do things that I don't want to do or that I I want to avoid. So yes, system is a better word, yeah.
Rob:In some respects I've structured it, obviously we've got to make a living. If we could do stationary freak stuff as a business, I think both of us would probably jump at that. But unfortunately we don't have an investor with enough money to support us with that journey. This is for me an oxygen, I call it an oxygen project, it's life. It gives me room to breathe outside of work.
Rob:And there's a number of oxygen projects and this is where I might come unstuck, but I don't know, bear with me. So the basics really for my goal setting system and the reflection point I came to is I've got to focus on the business. I think what I've been trying to do is to turn my creative projects into a business, which is possible, but that doesn't bring money in to support the house and the kids and all the other stuff. So I've got to really focus on the business. And what do I want to get from the business?
Rob:I think I've realized that the corporate world is suffocating, for me particularly. And so I'm trying to grow the business into something that is more flexible, but also brings in money and supports my livelihood. And also helps business world as well to be better. I mean, that's my ultimate goal with it. So I spent pretty much a month restructuring my websites, my videos and everything into what I'm calling an institution around my brand as a consultant, as a business owner.
Helen:Okay.
Rob:That's taken it from a consultant with a blog to a business that offers consultancy and that's the pivot, that's the big shift for me this year and that's the focus is to grow the client base, but also to give me time to publish, sell blog posts, sell books that are all creative outlets, but they're all business assets as well. And so really that orientation has been really gold for me. It's given me a lot of energy, it's given me a lot of focus, and it's given me this ability to treat it like a business, as well as have products and stuff that I enjoy building and consulting, which is part of that. If that's all I do, I'm gonna burn out and it's gonna be pretty painful. There's an oxygen level, is the Creative Soul Projects YouTube channel, which is actually going really well.
Rob:It's Stationery Freaks, it's the writing and various other activities, and I'm making sure there's time in my planner and energy and attention for that creative oxygen level. And then underneath, very similar to yours, is what I describe as the pillars of life, and essentially these are the pillars that underpin me, and I've got six of them, and they'll be different for everyone else. But if any one of those pillars starts to crumble, then the foundations that the other two layers are built on is pretty pointless. So obviously you've got health in there, we've got financial stability giving back to society, there's six different pillars that I use. And so the systems are geared around the pillars first, because looking up to health and spending time with the and all that sort of stuff is foundational for me as a human.
Rob:Then it's the business, and then at the top is really that creative layer, which is an expression of me and an ability to keep developing creative skills and sharing my stuff with the world. And that's what the goal setting is organized around. That's the fundamental principles.
Helen:That sounds quite good. That is taking what I've said that I'm doing, but doing it your way, which is with the much more attention to detail. So I have just had a revelation that I don't care what I do at the end of the year. I just want to know that I've had the opportunity to do the best things that I, you know, the things that I choose to do rather than achieve a thing. I want to live a thing.
Helen:So my goals are much more lifestyle than they are achievable tick list things. So I'm never going to be done with health. I'm never going to be done with the writing. It's not a thing to be done, it's just did I give myself enough time to be able to achieve that? And I think it's going to be interesting.
Helen:The other thing I'm going to do is reflect every month. So what I've done to support this is I have implemented, I can't believe I've said that, I've implemented a new system using Obsidian. So I had a copy of Obsidian for a couple of years. It's an online tool that allows you to link up a whole load of documents that you make. So I decided to keep a diary for this this year.
Helen:Well, from December actually last year for work. And actually, that's proved so useful. What I'm gonna do now is build in the same thing for my personal life, but to say have reflections every month. At the end of every month, how is this gone? What have I done well on?
Helen:What haven't I done well on? And why was that? So that I can start picking out common things that send me off off track and the things that once they're in place, these are like keystone things that mean everything goes swimmingly well and everything is balanced. So Obsidian has been particularly good. I usually like very much as you know, I'm a stationary freak.
Helen:I like paper, but Obsidian has been really good for cross referencing stuff for work, which means that the stress levels at work are slightly lower because I am now able to find not somebody told me a thing, but I can find out who told me and what they told me. Because I don't keep the details really, really well. I have the impressions of what I've been told and the understanding, but I can't go back in time. So this has proved to be really useful, and has taken some of the stress out of the fact that there's a lot to know at work and I keep forgetting.
Rob:That's like a commonplace book for work, isn't it, essentially?
Helen:It's not pretty though. I mean, it's really
Rob:Yeah, it doesn't have to be as long as you can find stuff, yeah.
Helen:And it is. And so that bit for work has been really useful, but using it just to capture the reflections, because you can have as many of these kind of worlds as you like, a vault, I think they're called vaults. So having one for home as well, so I can just do each monthly reflection in there, I think it's gonna be really good. And it only needs to be, you know, forty five minutes, an hour to spend and think, actually, let's just capture. And then at the end of the year, hopefully I can go back and say, how did this do?
Helen:Is there common themes each month?
Rob:That's interesting. It's interesting you've chosen Obsidian because I noticed in my reflection, one of the things that I was quite good at, not in a good way, was switching systems constantly. We talked about all sorts of systems on this on the podcast, let alone through my business type stuff. Part of my reducing the friction piece was to strip away all of that stuff and just go back to really basic tools that are part of, for me, the Apple ecosystem, so I use Apple Notes now. And just getting back to extreme basics of not fiddling around with things that are shiny and interesting.
Rob:And I found Obsidian just way too complicated for what I needed it to do.
Helen:That's why I shelved it. But the thing is that it had an actual purpose this time. And because it is digital in my work environment, because I tried a lot of last year to keep notes each day so that I would have all of this. And I just couldn't do it. I couldn't keep handwritten notes because I just couldn't bring myself to do that extra thing.
Helen:Whereas because everything is digital at work, having a digital tool to remember stuff for work has fit really easily. And at the end of the day, I've got a little bit in the diary to remind me to just do the notes for the day. So the daily write up, the tidy up, prep for tomorrow, so that I can make sure that I've had twenty minutes to just capture the essence of the things that I've learned that day or the things I need to So my to do list, everything like that is all still paper based. It's only this kind of journaling, I suppose. Obsidian lets you link backwards and forwards with keywords and things.
Helen:So it doesn't matter how messy my head is, or even how messy the tool is, you know, the documents that I'm producing, they all, I can look up links with people names or projects or, you know, anything like that. But I'm very surprised, Rob, to find it so useful and so friction, low friction, not friction.
Rob:Yeah, that's it, if it works. That's it, 100%.
Helen:It's still only January though, mate, you know?
Rob:Yeah, we do change our systems quite a lot. So when we come to goal setting, how are you setting goals? Have you got one goal? Have you got 10 goals? Have you got How have you gone about?
Rob:I guess for me a goal is something that describe a goal, maybe that's where we start actually. I describe a goal as something that gives you something to aim at and it helps you grow in the process of that. That's how I would define a goal. But I want to let go of the outcome because that's often outside of my control. That's how I look at goals.
Rob:They're things to shoot at, but the outcome may not be what I expect, but in the process I'm going grow.
Helen:I think that's really good. I think that's a good definition. I hate goals with a passion that I cannot explain. I have goals for work because they are requirement for HR and I'm in a like a full time permanent job. So I'm not like consulting anymore.
Helen:So I have to do the things that HR mandates and they mandate goals. So I have goals which are things that I want to do. I've broken them into some sub tasks. Yeah, it's reasonable, it's fine. That doesn't help me in my personal life.
Helen:It won't help me in my work life either. Because if there's more important things to do, I'll do those. Won't do my goals because they're just objectives really. What I really want, so what I use for home this and particularly this year is I want a lifestyle. I want a way of living.
Helen:I mean, lifestyle's the wrong word because people think of like, you know, money and candles and I don't know what else. I want a certain way of living. I want my way of living to include time to prepare healthy food from scratch. I want to be able to go to the gym at least twice a week. I want to be able to fit exercise into my day every day.
Helen:I want to be able to write every day. And I don't want perfection, but I want these as objectives. So those are my goals, and my job is to try and achieve those each day and to build a routine, a system, a life that will allow me to do. And there's about six things that I want to do. One thing I have done for the last month, which has stuck, is I am writing down every time I spend money that is not normal, if you saw what I mean.
Helen:So there's everybody's got direct debits and there's like food you have to buy and subscriptions and things. Every time I go and buy, blow a 100 at the garden center, I did on Sunday, because last Saturday, because I was, I enjoyed it, what can I say? But that's a lot of money to spend Oh God, stop.
Rob:Trees and shrubs.
Helen:Trees and shrubs, seeds and seed beds actually. But anyway, having done that, I wanted to keep track of all of these things that I'm spending. And it's been really, really educational to do that. Now, I don't know if I'll do this all year, but being able to see how often, because I think I haven't spent very much this month. And if I look at the credit card statement, I haven't spent anything very much this month.
Helen:When I look at it written down on a monthly planner on each day, what I spent, not everything, it's just what I spent extra than I normally would. That has been so enlightening, so enlightening.
Rob:Yeah, I can see that.
Helen:Don't do it, don't do it.
Rob:Well, ledger does that. I record things that are unusual that aren't regular expenses and money coming in as well. Yeah, it does, it helps you go, actually, hold on a minute, I'm spending a fortune on Amazon.
Helen:That's why I'm on this buy local thing, which is actually I would rather buy less often, even if it costs me more, and buy locally and support local businesses.
Rob:You've got goals around building a lifestyle and to accommodate that, if we look at James Clear made it quite popular, the Atomic Habits of them building systems that allow you to achieve the goal, but if you shelved the goal and never looked at it again, the systems would allow you to achieve that outcome.
Helen:That's That's exactly the exactly the plan. Because I don't care what I actually deliver tangibly, because as long as I'm on that path, and the path is more important to me than the objective at the end, I don't care. I don't care. I don't care if I never publish or finish a novel. What I want to do is be writing.
Helen:I don't mind if I've got four outlines and three half finished, almost doesn't matter because I'm writing and the point is I like to write. So that makes me happy. It's not the getting published or getting any of that, none of that matters. Doesn't matter today. It might not matter next year, but this year it doesn't matter.
Rob:So you've turned the goal in a sense from an outcome base into a way of life if you can build systems around it. Yes. It allows you to achieve a vision that you've got in your mind of how your life should be.
Helen:Yes, exactly so. And it's not by ticking things off a list or having big things that I can look back and go, oh, look, I made this thing or I did this thing or I earned this much money. Don't care, don't care.
Rob:Interesting. I think we may have converged on a very similar system here, Helen.
Helen:Yeah, it's interesting. Hey, be interesting to see, we should do something towards the end of the year about how well we're doing. How this has gone, Has it worked? What have we learned? Maybe we could do a touch point in the middle of the summer,
Rob:and
Helen:see if we can talk through what's going well? What have we learned? Have we needed adjustments? Has it worked?
Rob:I think so, I think so, yeah, yeah, we should do that. Because I'm just pondering, I was looking out the window pondering as you were saying that, as to what my system looks like now. And I think it's very similar, except I think I've abstracted it a little bit further and jumped down an extra level than you have, but I think we're very close.
Helen:Yes, interesting, hey. But it's not what I thought we were gonna do. When I suggested we did, let's do goal setting in January, because that's really the thing, we all do it, we do it every year. When I came and sat down for that reflection, it was an epiphany. It was like, actually, I don't wanna do what I've done before.
Helen:And I really genuinely hate goals. So I'm always fighting to find a way of making my goals something that I actually want. And it turns out I don't want a goal. I want a path, that's what I want.
Rob:My goals aren't so much goals, they're quarterly, I guess quarterly activity sets, is that the sort word I
Helen:would Oh yeah, okay.
Rob:So you've got this vision in your mind, and you may have written it down, and anybody who's read any of my other stuff or knows the work that I do in business, I always talk about something called a painted picture. Yeah. Businesses need this, teams need this, it's a bright future that's compelling, exciting, and interesting that you can see in your mind that isn't pipe dreams and unicorn dreams of the future of living on a yacht and owning 100,000,000 in the bank. Things that are broadly achievable but are still pretty ambitious, and that to me is what I call a painter picture. Mine always starts with that, you've described it yourself as that lifestyle that you want.
Rob:So I've described that in a painter picture, which is maybe half sheet of A four, and it doesn't describe what I'm gonna do, it doesn't describe necessarily what I'm gonna make or own or anything, there's not a lot of detail in there, it is a vision of what I would like my life to look like. Part of my reflection was looking back at old painted pictures I'd written.
Helen:Oh really?
Rob:And there's this really fascinating idea that the life, not for everybody of course, but the things that we have right now are things that we may have wanted in the past that we didn't have. And it grounds you in that appreciation, guess, of actually this is something I want, even when it's difficult or life doesn't feel like it's going well for you, there are a lot of things that actually you may have wanted in the past that you now have. And so going back and looking at these older painter pictures, I am absolutely living quite closely to some of those early painter pictures from maybe five years ago. How is that and why is that, we don't want to necessarily go through the mechanics of that, but that's what I do. I've got another painter picture for the next year, so that in a year's time, this is what I kind of like my life to look like.
Rob:And from there become the I'm not going to call them goals, but they become the quarterly things that I think I'm going to need to do in order to achieve that vision. So that's things like get the publishing platform set up.
Helen:I agree. I think that's exactly the friction point for me, Rob. Once you start breaking out that, I get anxiety and stress about this list of big scary things to do. And instead of making progress, I bury it. So I'm really interested to see if less specificity, but a direction, a North Star for, or maybe eight North Stars for me or six or whatever it is.
Helen:Will write them down. I think that's better. Always, always used to break stuff down. And if I had a big job to do, I would want to break it down. But I don't want to break this path down because as soon as I give myself activities, the resistance is high.
Rob:Yeah, I know what you mean, but I think what I've done is I've left such a massive space underneath that goal that these aren't things like you would have published eight books by January, which is what I used to do. I used to set goals like publish a book by February. I wouldn't achieve it and I'd get all riled up inside and just annoyed with the whole thing. So these are kind of high level objectives that if I, in a year's time, I think about what it would be like to live that life in a year, what would need to happen in order to achieve that? And these become sort of, I'd say quarterly, that's just arbitrary.
Rob:Become waypoints as I call them, that when I get to that waypoint, I wanna have a look at what the next waypoint is and then I can decide, is that still valid, does it make sense? So they're not in any detail. And so the first one, which I actually started to do end of last year, was get the website into an institutional publishing place. So it didn't feel like a blog from a consumer, it felt like a place where anybody who's interested in better work could go and learn a huge amount of stuff. And that's all been done.
Rob:What I didn't say is by this date, I'm gonna have done this, this, this, and this. It was a very fluid moment. There were things where I thought, actually, I don't wanna do that, so I'm not gonna do that and I'll do something different. But all the time I know that that's the first step. And then now I enter a period now for this first quarter of the year where it's all about business outreach and it's marketing.
Rob:I have the foundations now, now I need to let people know it exists. And so that's this next quarter. And the creative layer is just things like I want to publish 10 videos over the space of this year. Now that is a goal and that is concrete, but I've got a whole year to publish 10 videos, which isn't actually that difficult.
Helen:Not for you, no. Would be a nightmare for me because I don't know how to do it, but this is stuff you absolutely adore. So I know for you, you breathe this stuff.
Rob:So yeah, that's how I'm doing it and how I manage that, I've actually jumped into Todoist again.
Helen:Oh really?
Rob:Yeah, I really, I've just gotta nail it because Todoist is very good for those recurring events, those timely reminders. But ultimately, underneath all of this is obviously those pillars of life, which we talked about. But it's then the system, and this for me is key. I've spent a lot of time this month removing friction. So anything that stands in the way between me having an idea and that generating whatever value it is that I'm chasing with it, whether that's creative value, whether it's business value, anything in that gap that's friction that isn't needed is being ruthlessly cut.
Rob:So that they can have an idea and I can turn it into something. So the publishing process is streamlined, the financial process, I've got rid of loads of different tools that were just getting in the way. And that to me has been a game changer, Because now if I have an idea, I can sit down, I can turn it into something really And that is helping huge, but that's all systems.
Helen:It is, I think that's, yeah, I'm a big fan of Todoist, as you know. I have broken my Todoist lately by, I discovered I could, I discovered, discovered is the wrong word. I started utilizing heavily the idea of finding something on say Instagram and sending it to Todoist to look at later. So now I have
Rob:You've got a folder full of stuff and Todoist.
Helen:Just so much stuff. So yeah, I need to dig myself out of that particular hole in to do list. I've just shoved it all to one corner and everything else still works beautifully, but there's this pile now. So yeah, I think that's a, but Todoist I do love. I mean, yeah, we get Todoist to bloody sponsors.
Rob:Yeah, but my notebooks, this system is still there. So I've still got my, I'm still using it. We talked about this last episode. I'm still using that weekly planner that I bought, that Smart Still using that, I've got Mollskinkahirs with big writing on the front for whatever project that's part of, whether it's part of the business, whether it's Stationery Freaks, whether it's creative soul projects, whatever. And in there is just notes and I've really gone back to paper as the mechanism for thinking, as the mechanism for capturing thoughts, and Todoist is pretty much almost entirely just stuff that needs to get done.
Rob:And then I use Apple Notes as basically the commonplace system.
Helen:Yeah, so I'm using Obsidian for that, but I'm using it differently. So I'm tending to just use that for work. I don't do a notes thing for home. I'm about to start just trying on that monthly review. But I'm aware that we have gone massively over on this Rob.
Rob:Yeah, know, most episodes are twenty minutes, half an hour, sometimes forty minutes. But you know what? I think this warranted a slightly deeper dive and hopefully that has been helpful to see those two systems. Now actually we've converged, which is unusual for us.
Helen:It is unusual. I'm very, very surprised actually, to be honest, but I'm still not putting tangible goals down.
Rob:No, and let's see, let's, like you say, let's do an episode in
Helen:June, July, August, something like that.
Rob:And we can touch base on how that's going and whether or not life is throwing curveballs, which it always does, doesn't it? Always does.
Helen:Oh, and you know, I get, you know, see the next squirrel and if I'm gone, doing something else.
Rob:Oh, don't say squirrels, because you know I'm trying to write a book
Helen:about Where is squirrels?
Rob:It's not going well, that one is one of the projects that has been sidelined somewhat.
Helen:Yeah, you see.
Rob:I think when I made that decision, I think in the last episode we talked about a family of squirrels that live next to the studio that way, and they just sit and stare at me now as though, you're not writing that book anymore?
Helen:Where's my book?
Rob:I feel so guilty, these poor squirrels want their story being told.
Helen:Right, you have problems.
Rob:I do have many, many problems, yeah, absolutely. And I have 124 notebooks that I've got to try and get through.
Helen:Yes, yes, you have. Let's make that, I'm definitely looking forward to December and having a look to see how many we got through.
Rob:Definitely, and I'm actually gonna set one very specific, very measurable, very concrete goal in Todoist right now, and that is do not buy any more notebooks.
Helen:You can't take, that's not a goal, that's not a to doest thing.
Rob:Well, that's
Helen:stuck to your credit card or something. Is this
Rob:the Well, if I said it as a daily recurring item.
Helen:Oh yeah, yes. How many days since last notebook bought? Zero.
Rob:But if I stick it in there and to do this, what will happen is I'll think rationally that it will remind me not to buy a notebook, but I know in about three days time I'll just delete that task. Stop badgering me. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to our ramble chat. I hope it has been extremely helpful and useful for anybody who does set goals or is interested in painting a picture of the future and any of the stuff that we've talked about. We have covered a lot of this stuff in previous casts, which you can find at stationeryfreaks.com.
Rob:You'll also find the newsletter where Helen will share some pictures of her rocket notebook.
Helen:Yeah!
Rob:And you can find that again at stationeryfreaks.com, and our Instagram is stationeryfreaksuk, And yes, Helen, we are poor, aren't we, at posting to Instagram?
Helen:Well, yes. I'm on Instagram far more than I should be. So if anybody messages us or tags us, I am But I am rubbish at posting. I don't go out much, Rob. I swear I don't go anywhere.
Helen:I mean, I go to charity shops with my mother and bought a rocket book. That's my excitement.
Rob:You can just take pictures of your notebooks and we could post those. That's a bit dull, you know?
Helen:Yeah, I wonder if I could put Yeah, I mean, my Hobonichi, even my Hobonichi, I was so, so crazy busy this week. My Hobonichi is absolutely blank for last week. I didn't even put anything in. All the stickers and everything that I normally do, there's nothing, nothing written down, nothing. I just didn't even get a chance to think on a what am I doing each day basis.
Helen:It was just like now, and there was only now in my day.
Rob:But yeah, thank you as well to everybody who does connect with us via Substack, which is where our newsletter is. We do get lots of comments and lots of insights and lots of, I guess, clarifying questions, but also tons of recommendations websites and systems and notepads and stationery. So yeah, thank you. Please do keep getting in touch with us. It, I guess, fills our heart with warmth to know that we're actually hopefully making a difference in people's lives, so thank you.
Helen:Thank you very much.
Rob:So Helen, this has been a monster episode. Anything you'd like to comment before we declare victory on it?
Helen:I think we've done it to death. Have a very nice day, everybody, and I hope that our January podcast is not too late for you, for god's sake.
Rob:Let's hope not, you've now put the pressure on me to edit it in a day, but given that we're recording this on Friday the thirtieth, I will try and get it done this afternoon.
Helen:That would be perfect.
Rob:Let's see if we can get this out into January. If not, it'll be February. But thank you so much for everybody, and we look forward to speaking to you in the next podcast. Bye bye.
Helen:Bye.
