Leuchtturm1917 Journal Review: I Tested It as a Procurement Skeptic

Before You Roll Your Eyes at Another Journal Review

Everyone online seems to love the Leuchtturm1917. I know that. The reason I'm writing this Leuchtturm1917 journal review is that I came to it from the opposite direction: I approve purchase orders. I've managed office supply purchasing for a 44-person architecture studio for six years, and I did not want to spend $20-plus on a notebook.

Then, in early 2024, our design director put a Leuchtturm1917 bullet journal notebook on my desk and said she wanted one for every project team. I initially said no because the price looked unreasonable. By the end of the year, I had changed the standing order. Here's the part I didn't expect: the switch was not primarily about paper quality. It was about waste.

The False Economy of Cheap Notebooks

From the outside, a notebook is a notebook. The reality is different: an inexpensive notebook that nobody uses is a donation to a landfill. An expensive notebook that people write in every day is cheap at twice the price.

In 2023, we ordered 480 notebooks for a studio of 44 people. That sounds excessive, but our teams use them for client workshops, site notes, team meetings, and ongoing project journals. The average cost was about $6.80 per notebook, which made me feel responsible. When I audited our supply closet at the end of the year, 190 of those notebooks had never been opened. Another 60 had fewer than five pages of writing in them. That's $1,700 of paper sitting in boxes, not counting the time people spent looking for notes in half-finished pads.

That was my actual budget leak. It wasn't the unit price. It was the abandonment rate.

What I Tested and What Actually Won

Instead of approving 44 expensive notebooks immediately, I ran a small pilot. I bought three samples of the Leuchtturm1917 bullet journal notebook—the A5 dotted hardcover, since that is the one designed for actual journaling—and two cheaper alternatives from common office suppliers. Then I asked eight people in different roles to use each kind for two weeks and score them on three questions:

1. Can you find a note from last week?
2. Would you take it into a client meeting?
3. If it fell open on your desk, would a colleague know it's yours?

The cheap notebooks were fine on the first day. But the difference became obvious when I looked at what people actually wrote. The cheaper options were treated as scratch paper and left behind in meeting rooms. The Leuchtturm notebooks came back with dog-eared pages, coffee rings, and names written inside the cover. That sounds like a brand story, but it had a mechanical cause: page numbers and an index.

People underrate the Leuchtturm1917 page numbering until they need to cite a handwritten note. The first pages include a blank table of contents. When someone writes client feedback on 9/16, they can add a short index entry. That tiny feature turned notebooks from random paper bundles into project files. This is the main reason I now order the Leuchtturm1917 bullet journal notebook for project leads.

On actual paper quality: it's 80gsm, so not thick. A heavy marker will ghost on the next page. I won't claim you can use any pen on it. But for normal daily writing, gel pens, ballpoints, and most rollerballs work well. Lay-flat thread binding is a plus for sketching, and the A5 size (148 x 210mm, standard ISO 216) fits in a bag without feeling like a binder.

Where My Cost Model Almost Went Wrong

I was tempted to build a cost model that compared every variable: paper weight, labor cost per lost notebook, storage space, reorder cycles. That thing was becoming a system of equations calculator with more assumptions than data. I deleted it because the only variable that mattered was usage.

The math is simple: cost per used notebook equals purchase cost divided by the number of notebooks that actually get used. A $6 notebook that gets used for 3 pages costs worse than a $22 notebook that gets used for 200 pages. If you can't find a note in a cheap notebook, it may as well not exist.

Twelve Months Later: The Percentage Decrease I Didn't Expect

At the end of 2024, I ran a comparison in my procurement files. We ordered 260 notebooks instead of 480. Our direct notebook spending went from $3,264 to about $2,570—a 21% drop. But the part that shocked me was the cost of abandoned notebooks. That fell from around $1,700 to roughly $400.

I used a percentage decrease calculator to verify the waste drop because it was bigger than I expected: ($1,700 - $400) / $1,700 x 100 = about 76%. Yes, I verified it. The expensive notebook looked wrong on a purchase order and then reduced the amount of money we were throwing into the supply closet.

The Only Useful Thing I Learned About How to Journal

I'm not a bullet journal instructor. But in this pilot, the difference between notebooks that got used and notebooks that ended up in a drawer wasn't paper quality or dot grid—it was findability.

When people ask me how to journal, I don't tell them to buy a fancy notebook and decorate it. I tell them to make their notes findable. Write a date at the top. Don't worry about making it pretty. Use the page numbers and the index at the front. If a note survives in a usable way, it's because future-you can actually find it.

That's the whole lesson. The Leuchtturm1917 just happens to make that lesson easier to follow.

The Bottom Line for a Procurement Person

I'm not saying every company should buy Leuchtturm1917 for every possible use. We still buy cheap sketch pads for casual work. But I learned that a tool which gets used is seldom the expensive one—the expensive one is the tool that gets ignored.

The Leuchtturm1917 is not a one-size-fits-all answer. But if you're running project journals, client workshops, or long-term team notes, the page numbers and index are enough to justify the price. This Leuchtturm1917 journal review started with me saying no. It ended with the design director saying, I told you so.