I’m team horizontal so I’ve always wanted to try planning in landscape page orientation in a bullet journal. I could never find one with stitched binding that laid flat until I came across the Northbooks dot grid notebook.

Related: Northbooks dot grid notebook review

Before the Pen

I specifically chose to use the Northbooks this week as it has lay flat binding, I’m talking completely flat and not just the middle pages.

After the Pen

My favorite method for dividing up a page when I’m bored with ruling lines? Washi tape.

Skinny washi tape is functional, looks good and doesn’t waste a lot of space like normal size washi does.

This horizontal layout is ok if you don’t have much to plan. I wouldn’t recommended it if you need a lot of space to plan each day (especially list space for each day).

Related: My Favorite thin washi tape for planning

The pink shade of the washi tape is actually quite hard to match to a highlighter as most highlighters are either pastel or neon. I tried one DONG-A Twinliner (which is the highlighter brand I used for the rest of the headings), but the colors looked off. So I used the frixion erasable highlighter in bright pink. Which looked off too. When I erased it, it took some of the thin layers of paper with it (the Northbooks paper isn’t the best quality). Then I tried another DONG-A twinliner which ended up being a better match.

In addition to all that, I remembered why I don’t use fineliner pens over highlighter – the ink tends to feather:

It’s not as bad if you let the highlighter dry before writing. So after all of that, I ended up whiting out the heading and redoing the whole thing.

You can see the difference between waiting for ink to dry and writing over the top straight away. The fineliner ink has spread more for Monday than the other days.

Related: My Favorite Fineliner Pens for Planning & Bullet Journaling

This is what I meant when I said the paper isn’t the best – very prone to ghosting & bleed through

Supplies Used:

• Illustrated Faith Thin washi tape
• Faber Castell Grip Fine Pen 0.4
• DONG-A Twinliner Soft
• Daiso soft marker (gold)

Would I use this layout again?

It works well in the A5 notebook I used but I wouldn’t try it with a bigger page size than that – it gets a bit awkward if you want both pages open to see the entire week. It suited this week’s needs but it’s not a layout I would use regularly. Maybe if I shrunk the days of the week section and increased the list space it’d work better.

Past weekly spreads

• Using my custom Agendio Planner (would I order from this company again?)
• Bullet journaling with planner stickers in the Happy Notes Book
• Bullet journaling on black paper with white & gold pens

Planning tips

• Monthly blog post planning using sticky notes (my 6 step process) 
• ARC by Staples versus MAMBI – Which discbound system is better?
• How to choose the right planner pens: what to look for when buying planner pens

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