I continue to use my Nolty notebooks quite faithfully. A couple of weeks ago I started seeing news online about the 2020 Nolty diary offerings, which go on sale in September. Once again, I’ve been exploring the Nolty website with the help of Google Translate to try to figure out the various options!
The new 2020 Nolty Diary items I noticed are most notably larger B5 and A5 versions of the Efficiency Notebook. Actually, these are just new to me, as I realized they’d actually began offering these in their series of diaries that starts in April 2019. (These are timed to the Japanese school year, which starts in April.) Anyway, for people who aren’t interested in the typical 144 x 95mm or 130 x 85 Nolty formats, the larger versions should be a nice option.
The other Nolty style that interests me this year is the series whose name is translated as “Lights” or “Rights.” These are very similar to the Efficiency Notebook in some ways, but they don’t offer the Gantt chart in the monthly pages. Versions with either a horizontal or weekly block layout are available. For the weekly pages, you can either get a similar basic layout to the Efficiency Notebook, with a week on the left side (each day is divided into 3 sections, a difference from the Efficiency Notebook) and a blank page on the right, or the more traditional week on two pages layout, or a very unusual layout with small blocks for the days of the week across two pages, with an open area of grid lines underneath. This week plus grid layout , which they seem to call “Lights Memo,” looks like it’s only available in the 130 x 85mm size.
I made a spreadsheet to track the Efficiency and Lights/Rights options shown on Nolty’s website as best I can figure them out. (This is not a full list of every Nolty style, but I think I’ve captured all the Efficiency and Lights options.) The ones in bold are what I’m considering ordering this year, though I will probably narrow it down to just two. The leather cover Gold version costs about $50 US (not including shipping) so I’m not sure whether I’ll go back to the regular plastic one next year, since it is only about $13. If I do plastic, I think I’ll get the one with the railway maps, even though I can’t read them and don’t need them! What I’d really love to try is the Lights Memo week plus grid layout in the 144 x 95 mm size, but it doesn’t seem to be an option.
One other thing I stumbled across on Nolty’s website was a selection of notebook covers designed to fit the Efficiency Notebook. These are really pricy, and they’d add some extra size to the notebook, but some of them look rather beautiful!
Rakuten Global seems to be the best source to order, if you are an English speaker in the US, at least. Kinokuniya should also have them on their web store, but their shopping site is closed for maintenance as of this writing. Hopefully they’ll be back soon, as you can save on shipping by having special orders shipped to a store if you have one near you.
Have you tried a Nolty diary? Will you be buying one for 2020? Which style would you pick?
I’d love to know more about the covers for The Efficiency size but can’t seem to find them on the nolty website, do you have a link to it?
Here is the link: https://jmam.jp/techo/products/list.php?mode=search&category_id=747
Hi, just stumbled upon this page. I just read through and I’m nervous that I made a big mistake. I was at a store on Okinawa earlier this week and found a great assortment of Nolty planners that I really liked – I couldn’t decide which one (or 2 or 3) to buy and decided instead to take a bunch of pictures, study then on the plane and order them in the US because, we’ll they were all in Japanese and surely there are English ones being sold her. My mistake?
From reading through your pages, it sounds like they are not sold in the US and they’re not in English. Say it ain’t so – I, too, may be ordering from overseas!
Thanks a bunch!
Alas, there are no English versions available, and the Japanese ones are hard to find in the US. But not impossible– you can order them via Kinokuniya USA (they’ll ship if you don’t have access to a store) and also via Rakuten Global.