Bullet journals.

One Saturday a month, a long table at a Bras Basah cafe fills with notebooks, pens and washi tape — one of Singapore's regular journaling meetups. Rachel Teo, 26, a UX designer, has been coming for three years. Her notebooks from year one are half-empty; her current one is nearly full, and she credits the difference to a printer small enough to live in her pencil case.

We spoke to her across a table scattered with sticker rolls, hers and everyone else's, because at these meetups her printer is communal property. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your first journals are half-empty. What happened?

What happens to everyone. You start in January full of intention, you spend forty minutes hand-drawing a monthly header and a habit tracker, and it looks nothing like the ones online. By March the forty minutes feels like a tax, so you skip the setup, and a bullet journal you have not set up is just a notebook you feel guilty about. My 2023 journal ends in April, with a title that says May and nothing under it.

So the problem was the setup, not the journaling.

Exactly. The thinking part — the planning, the logging, the little daily notes — I loved. It was the production work that killed it: the same twelve month headers, the same tracker grids, the same section titles, drawn badly, every single month. I am a designer; I spend all day making things consistent. My journal was the least consistent thing I owned.

Walk us through your monthly setup now.

Ten minutes, first Sunday of the month. The app has my saved templates: month headers in my typeface, tracker labels, section titles. I print the strip, stick them in, rule a few lines, done. The setup stopped being a barrier and went back to being a ritual. And because the printer is inkless — it is thermal, the print is in the label itself — there is nothing to refill except the roll, and a roll lasts me months.

It comes to the meetups too.

It is the most borrowed object at the table. Someone will see a tab and ask, and then it makes its way around while we talk. The D11 is genuinely pencil-case sized, so it travels. Half my meetup friends have bought their own by now; the other half are still borrowing mine, which I take as a compliment and an invoice waiting to happen.

Which rolls earn a place in the pencil case?

Cartoon rolls for the decorative work — borders, little motifs, the things I used to draw badly at midnight. Index labels for tabs: every month gets one, and so do my collections — books read, savings tracker, the CNY gift list I reuse every year. A journal you cannot navigate is a diary; the tabs are what make it a system. Those two rolls cover ninety percent of my pages.

And the photo stickers everyone asks about?

That is the B21 Pro, my desk printer. It takes photo label rolls, so an actual photo — the meetup group shot, a holiday, my dog — prints as a sticker in seconds, straight from my camera roll. It turned my journal from a planner into something closer to a scrapbook. The dual colour rolls are the other trick: two-tone labels, so a spread gets an accent colour without me owning forty pens. My friends with full marker collections find this offensive. I find it efficient.

Three years in — what has survived beyond the journal?

The habit leaked into the rest of my desk, the way it apparently does with everyone. My pen drawers are labelled by type, my finished journals have a printed spine label with the date range so I can pull down 2024 Jul–Dec like a reference book, and my washi collection — the irony is not lost on me — is indexed. My mother saw the spice-jar potential immediately and now sends me label requests like I run a print shop.

What would you tell someone whose journal also dies in April?

Print the furniture, keep the handwriting. The headers, the grids, the tabs — automate them without guilt, because nobody ever kept a journal out of pride in their straight lines. Save your templates the first time so month two takes ten minutes. And put a tab on anything you will want to find again; future you flipping pages is the reader you are actually designing for.

Rachel carries the pencil-case-sized D11 and keeps a B21 Pro at her desk for photo and dual colour rolls. Every roll mentioned in this interview is stocked locally and ships island-wide. Her journaling kit is below.