The Analog Setup That Replaced My Phone for Most Things: EDC 2026

There's something satisfying about knowing exactly what's in your pockets before you leave the house. Not because you've curated an identity around it, but because every item has earned its place through daily use and a few months of quiet elimination.

This is what I carry right now. It changes slowly, and deliberately.

The Notebook: Paper Republic Grand Voyager Pocket

The centrepiece is a Paper Republic Grand Voyager Pocket in green with a red band. The colour contrast was intentional, a small detail that makes it feel less like office equipment and more like something I actually want to pull out.

What makes the Grand Voyager useful is the refill system. Instead of one notebook doing everything badly, I carry four refills, each with a specific purpose. It sounds like more than it is. In practice, it means I'm never searching for the right page.

How the Four Refills Actually Work

The first refill is Paper Republic's Timeless Planner Monthly. This is my calendar at a glance: past events, upcoming dates, a quick scan of what the month looked like and where it's going. I use it for brief monthly reflections too, what happened, what I'm carrying forward, anything that deserves a sentence or two before the month closes. It's not deep journaling. It's just keeping the months from blurring into each other.

The second is Paper Republic's lined paper refill. This is the long-form space. I used to use it as a daily archive, writing something every day whether or not I had anything worth saying. I've relaxed that.

Now I write in it when something happens that's worth capturing: a reflection at the end of an unusual day, something I want to remember from a conversation, a moment that Matthew Dicks would call Storyworthy (he literally wrote the book on it). No pressure to fill it regularly. That's actually made me use it more.

The third is a Field Notes. Currently a Grid edition, though I rotate between Grid and Dots depending on what's available. This is where the bullet journal practice lives, and it's the refill I reach for most often.

I've been using bullet journaling for a while now. What keeps me coming back isn't the methodology, it's the function. Tasks, events, a few short notes. Quick to write, quick to scan. It gives me somewhere to put things that would otherwise just orbit in my head all day.

What I'm actively trying to use it for more is proper planning and intention setting: deciding the day before what actually matters tomorrow, not just capturing what happened. That part is harder than it sounds.

You'd think writing down "focus on X this week" takes twenty seconds and you're done. But actually following through, actually orienting your day around it rather than just reacting to whatever arrives first, that's the harder discipline. I'm still working on it. The practice itself is solid. The follow-through is what I'm still building.

What it does reliably is keep me from losing track of things and give me a light structure for the week. Without it, work bleeds everywhere. With it, there's at least a frame: here's what I intended, here's what happened, here's where the gap was. That gap is useful information.

The fourth Field Notes is for collections. Grid again. This is the experimental slot, and the one I'm most curious about over time.

Right now it holds a parcel tracker, a reading list, a basic workout tracker with different session types I can pick from, and a watch tracker: which watch I wore on a given day. The watch tracker started as curiosity and turned into something more honest. I thought I was rotating evenly through everything I own. I'm not.

Two or three pieces get worn constantly, the rest sit. Knowing that has changed how I reach into the watch box on a weekday morning.

There are also a few collections I tried for a week and quietly abandoned. I keep them anyway. They're useful data: this seemed like a good idea, it wasn't. The ones that stick expand naturally. The ones that don't get retired without ceremony.

This fourth Field Notes lives in a Paper Republic card holder, which keeps it accessible without it sliding around loose.

As for the pen I’m using classic Parker Jotter XL with Gel Parker refill. I’m currently trying it out until I run out of gel and will decide if I want to come back to normal ballpoint refill.

The Rest of What's in My Pockets

Beyond the notebook, the EDC is minimal.

Phone: iPhone 16 Pro in a leather case. The leather case is a small thing that makes the phone feel like a physical object rather than a slab of glass. It changes the texture of reaching for it.

Watch: I rotate between two, based on mood. The Hamilton Murph 38mm most days, the G-Shock 5610U on others. Both work equally well with a t-shirt, which is mostly what I wear. There's no philosophy behind the rotation. I just pick whichever one feels right that morning.

Knife: Civivi Mini Praxis. A small folding knife that earns its pocket space regularly.

Light: Olight flashlight. Small enough to forget about until you need it.

Why This Setup Works

None of this is precious or irreplaceable. The Field Notes get filled and retired. The Paper Republic refills get swapped. The setup shifts when something stops working.

What makes it feel right is that everything has a specific purpose and nothing is covering for something else. The monthly planner is not trying to be a journal. The collection book is not trying to replace the lined refill. Each thing does one job.

The part I find most useful to reflect on is the bullet journal. Not because it's solved anything, but because it's created a habit of pausing. Of checking in with what's happening in my week rather than just being carried through it. Some weeks that check-in reveals that I've been reacting to everything and planning nothing. Other weeks it confirms that things are roughly on track. Both are worth knowing.

It's a small practice. But it's the difference between having a record of your days and actually noticing them.

Try it this week: if your current notebook is doing too many jobs and doing all of them poorly, split one function out into a dedicated Field Notes. Pick the messiest one, the category that bleeds into everything else, and give it its own pages. The rest tends to become clearer once you do.