🦃 5 Years of Planners & the Slow Discovery of Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Letter

I’ve been thinking this week about how fast life moves—especially for those of us in medicine, raising little kids, or trying to juggle a dozen hats at once. The days can blur together so easily. One long streak of rounding, driving, documenting, deciding, parenting, repeating.

And that’s why this realization hit me harder than I expected:

I don’t remember most specifics of passing days… but my planners do.

Well— technically I do remember what I ate for lunch because I count my calories lol, so maybe that’s a bad example. But you get the point.

Planning to Plan

For closing in on five years now—imperfectly, inconsistently, sometimes sloppily—I’ve been writing pieces of life down. First in the Clever Fox planners, then Ink+Volt, then back to Clever Fox, and now…the Hobonichi Techo.

And here’s something interesting: humans have always done this.

From clay tablets in ancient Persian Empire to Roman wax tablets to modern Bullet Journaling—we’ve always tried to trap time precisely because we know we can’t.

And somewhere along this journey, without really intending to, I built a quiet kind of gratitude practice. Not because I set out to “be grateful,” but because the pages remembered what I didn’t.

Across these iterations, something else formed—something that eventually became the backbone of how I think on paper:

my 3 P system — Personal. Professional. Polymath.

I’ll explain that more in a bit. But first, the planners that got me here.

I. The Planners:

Years 1–2: Clever Fox

Shout-out to my sister—she’s an avid Clever Fox user and got me hooked early. And honestly, it’s a fantastic planner. The structure is clean, motivating, goal-oriented. The Pro version even has a cool visual monthly reflections tracker.

Clever Fox taught me how to show up—especially on the tired days when all I could manage was a single sentence.

But eventually, the reflections, habit matrices, and end-of-month prompts started to feel…like homework.

Valuable homework, sure. Just not the right fit for me as I was trying to build the simple habit of consistency.

Years 3: Ink + Volt

2023: I tried a new brand— Ink + Volt.

Aesthetically beautiful. High-quality paper. Thoughtful design.

But heavy on prompts.

Very heavy on prompts.

By mid year , I had more blank pages than filled ones—not because I lacked things to say, but because my brain couldn’t meet the planner where it wanted me to be.

And at the time, I quietly told myself:

“It’s not me. It’s the tool.”

Year 4: Back to Clever Fox

By now, the 3 P’s were forming—I just didn’t have the language yet.

• Personal habits were stabilizing.
• Professional identity was sharpening.
• Polymath started showing up: ideas, drawings, projects, teaching concepts, little creative experiments.

It was a year filled with ICU reflections, parenting scribbles, leadership notes, workouts, doodles, and raw exhaustion. Clever Fox contained all of it, but something in me wanted a planner that didn’t just hold my development—but could grow with it.

Year 5: ENTER the Hobonichi Techo COUSIN

This is where everything shifted.

Not because I suddenly became more disciplined, but because the Hobonichi let me be more human.

Despite its fanbase’s reputation for meticulous handwriting and curated spreads, it never demanded neatness from me. Instead, it invited creativity.

• The daily pages
• The open structure
• The beautiful, thin Tomoe River paper
• The freedom to scribble, doodle, plan, reflect, and mess up

It all matched the way my mind actually moves.

I started with the original Hobonichi, but the A6 size (about 4"x6") felt cramped. I needed the larger A5—closer to 5"x8"— also known as the Cousin, to give my thoughts room to breathe.

The daily pages became the perfect home for my third P: Polymath—not a title, but a pursuit. The person to be. The aspirational version of me who reads, writes, draws, learns, teaches, builds, dreams.

Then came a very special moment: the Glue Stick Moment.

My daughter, then three, wandered over while I was journaling. She climbed into my lap, grabbed my karimoku Jetstream pen with a cute confidence, and added her own “notes”—little circles, wiggly lines, a few crayon swirls. Then she took a glue stick, pressed two pages together, and proudly announced:

“Look Daddy—I’m making art!”

And I left those pages exactly as they were, stuck together forever. 😀

Because those pages reminded me of something simple and important:

Life isn’t supposed to be neat.
It’s supposed to be lived.

2025 is the year I finally realized:

I didn’t just find a planner. I found my system: the 3 P’s.

II. The Thanksgiving 🦃 Lesson: Gratitude Shows Up Later

Looking back through five years of planner books, one thing struck me:

The planners never held the stress. They held the life.

My tiny, easy-to-miss moments:

• My daughter’s drawings that she literally would tuck into between daily Professional entries
• My son flying down a hill on his bike
• A patient who shifted the way I think
• My wife laughing with us after a brutal call week
• A workout that changed my entire mood
• A quick sketch of lungs on a random Tuesday
• Days I wrote “tired”
• Days I wrote too much
• Days I was too busy to smile
  

None of these moments felt profound in real time. But they were real.And together, they became the backbone of my gratitude.

Marcus Aurelius wrote:

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.”

I used to think that meant only positive thoughts. Now I also think it means noticing the ones that matter—before the day rushes you past them.

III. A Quick Word on Medicine 🩺

(Because Gratitude Lives Here Too)

Medicine forces you into the deepest layers of the human experience—suffering, resilience, heartbreak, hope, compassion, love—often in the same shift.

But we rarely pause long enough to integrate it.

Writing, even briefly, became my way of saying:

“I saw this. I felt this. I heard my patient. It mattered.”

Not every day. Not perfectly. Just enough to form a pattern—and maybe that pattern is the beginning of awareness.

IV. Doctor’s Order 🥼: Carry Into Your Thanksgiving

You don’t need the perfect planner.

You don’t need flawless entries.

You don’t need a complicated ritual.

You just need one moment—one scribble, one sentence, one circle drawn by your child or yourself, one page stuck to another—where you pause long enough to say:

”This mattered today.”

Because gratitude rarely shows up in the moment. It reveals itself later,in the quiet evidence you leave behind.

Wishing you a most Happy Thanksgiving 🦃✨