Making a workshop that's also a zine that's also a techo kaigi

the cronut sandwich of workshops!

Davis and I in our hanboks 😆 We did a hanbok photoshoot and it was one of my favorite things ever

HELLO my friends!

I just got back from a few weeks of traveling through South Korea! Davis and I toured around Seoul, Busan, and Jeju-do, and we brought back with us warm memories, amazing photos, new clothes, a purse full of D-tier gachapon capsules, and a totally reasonable¹ amount of stationery. It was an amazing, beautiful, unforgettable trip!! But it’s also so good to be home 🥰

I’m slowly catching up, and as part of that, today I wanted to talk about something I meant to write up before the trip: My Techo Kaigi Workshop at Yoseka Land! 📚

Last month, I ran a techo kaigi workshop at Yoseka’s new event space, Yoseka Land. As far as we know, this was the first workshop of its kind! I pitched the idea to Daisy and after we hashed out some details, I created the workshop from scratch.

Something to know about me: I… have a habit of jamming a lot of different concepts into one thing lol². Arguably too many concepts. Like I can never just make a donut; and I won’t even settle for a cronut. It MUST be a cronut sandwich!

Indeed, the Techo Kaigi Workshop had 3 parts to it:

1. 🍩 Planner Show & Tell: Attendees bring their planners, journals and notebooks to the event, then show & tell their systems with others.

2. 🥐 Techo Kaigi: Attendees learn to do a “techo kaigi,” i.e. a review of how well their system of notebooks worked for them last year, and what changes they might want to make in the next year.

3. 🥪 ZINE: I capture everyone’s techo kaigis into a digital zine that I send to all attendees.

Now on one hand, it is very challenging to make a successful cronut sandwich. But on the other hand, it’s a very fun challenge!

So how did it go? Well, read on to find out!! Today’s newsletter is a deep dive on how this workshop came to be and how it all went.

🌸 Stationery fans: 🌸 Keep reading to get all my prompts from the techo kaigi workshop, in case you want to conduct a techo kaigi for yourself or with friends 💖

Hope you enjoy today’s newsletter, and may all your mashups be a great success — culinary, stationery, or otherwise!

♡ vrk

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👩‍🍳 How the mashup came to be

Back in late August, Daisy reached out asking if I was interested in running a workshop at Yoseka Land as a part of planner season. (I had run some workshops for Daisy in the past!) Of course I said YES, and I sent her ~5 different ideas that I thought could work.

One of these ideas — the one we went with — was a Techo Kaigi Workshop. I knew that Yoseka’s Techo Kaigi YouTube videos were some of their most popular videos on their channel, and for good reason! Notebook lovers LOVE to see how other people use their notebooks, and Team Yoseka has some of theeee most beautiful planners imaginable.

So I was thinking, How might Yoseka customers get the experience of sharing their planners and notebook systems with other analog enthusiasts?

A Planner Show & Tell felt like the natural solution!

That’s how the first layer of the workshop came to be:

1. 🍩 Planner Show & Tell: Attendees bring their planners, journals and notebooks to the event, then show & tell their systems with others.

In retrospect……. this absolutely could have been the event on its own 😆 But this is where my stationery-nerd-brain interfered and made things more complicated.

Technically speaking…. a techo kaigi is a retrospective on your analog systems. You are not merely sharing your system; you’re evaluating it. You’re asking yourself, How did I like using my planner last year? What did I like best? What’s not working? What changes do I want to make?

What I pitched to Daisy was not Planner Show & Tell; it was Techo Kaigi Workshop! Which means, if I’m being literal, well we gotta do the techo kaigi part!!

That’s how I ended up adding component number two:

2. 🥐 Techo Kaigi: Attendees learn to do a “techo kaigi,” i.e. a review of how well their system of notebooks worked for them last year, and what changes they might want to make in the next year.

OK great, done!!

…At least at that was the plan! Then Daisy and I worked out the details.

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📚 What does a techo kaigi workshop look like?

The poster for the event! I hid a little easter egg lol

In early September, I met up with Daisy to plan the Techo Kaigi Workshop.

Here’s the simplest format we could think of for the event:

• There are 15-20 attendees in the workshop.

• Each person goes in the front of the room and explains their planner system / techo kaigi to the audience, sort of like a lightning talk.

But we didn’t love this for many reasons:

• 😱 Stage fright: Presenting to 20 people can be SCARY! We didn’t want the event to be stressful.

• 🔎 Hard to see! If one person is trying to show their journal to an audience of ~20, it’ll be hard for anyone to see the details of the pages. Would we have to bring in a projector? But it’d have to be one of these fancy camera projectors, unless we made everyone make a Powerpoint ahead of time or something lol.

• 👯‍♀️ Socializing: If you’re presenting to a BIG group, it’s harder to have conversations and make friends.

• ⏰ Time & attention: If everyone presents their techo kaigi, even capping at 5 minutes per person, that’s over an hour of just presentations… and no one will finish in 5 minutes 😆 Plus, listening to 15-20 mini “talks,” no matter how interesting, just felt like too much.

Seeing the problems, Daisy suggested: Rather than having one person present to a group of 20, how about split up the group into 3 small groups? Brilliant!

Version 2:

• There are 18 attendees in the workshop.

• We split the attendees into 3 groups of 6.

• Everyone shares their planner system / techo kaigi with each other in their small groups.

This felt much better already and solved all of the problems above.

But there was a new problem:

• ⏳ Too short? Would the workshop take too little time now? We were thinking the workshop would be about 2 hours, and if everyone took 10 minutes per techo kaigi, that’s about 1 hour… and probably some people would have simpler systems with less to explain.

Thinking about this, I noticed that the “techo kaigi” part was still under-emphasized in this version of the workshop.

I then suggested we add a writing component to the workshop, namely:

• Before sharing, attendees fill out a worksheet that guides them through a techo kaigi, covering questions like: What did you like? What didn’t you like? etc.

• Then they would share in small groups.

We really liked this idea! It wasn’t that big of a change, but it felt like it gave people more time to learn how to conduct a techo kaigi and practice doing one themselves. Plus, we thought folks would feel better prepared to share if they got to collect their thoughts in writing first.

Perfect!!! Workshop done, right?

Like... where does the zine come in?

Well… let’s go on a quiiick little tangent to help explain 😂 It’s directly relevant, I promise!!

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A Legendary Zine: WE❤️SPORTS ANIME

This zine is one of my FAVORITE ZINES of all time!

WE❤️SPORTS ANIME is a collaborative zine from The Pickled Paper. Thirty-five artists filled out a worksheet about their favorite sports anime and collected them together into a zine.

Every artist answered prompts such as…

• Synopsis of the show

• Favorite character

• Why is this sports anime your favorite?

• Did you get any inspiration from the story and/or characters?

• Describe the story in 3 words

The resulting zine is divine:

Everyone answered the prompts in SUCH different ways! The illustrations make it SO engaging! There’s structure to keep things easy to follow, but there’s also so much room for creativity.

One more spread:

✨ ✨ 😍 ✨ ✨

IT’S SO GOOD

Ever since WE❤️SPORTS ANIME, I have been enamored with this idea of using a worksheet as the format of a collaborative zine. Moreover, I really wanted to try making a worksheet-based collaborative zine in a workshop! I imagined everyone attending the workshop would fill out a worksheet, and then at the end, I would scan in all the pages and BOOM, we’ve got a zine!

So back in 2024, when I was brainstorming workshop ideas with Daisy for Stationery Fest, one of the ideas I pitched was “Let’s make a STATIONERY ZINE!” We’d made a collaborative stationery zine using this worksheet-based approach, like a mini issue of Pouch lol.

Both Daisy and I really loved the idea, but we ended up scrapping it because I was already doing 2 printer workshops, so adding another workshop in addition to running the Pouch booth seemed like… a lot LOL

Okay tangent over! Let’s go back to September 2025 😆

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📄 WAIT did I just say ‘worksheet’??
😎 Oh we’re making a zine!

Recall what I just said we should add to the techo kaigi workshop:

• Before sharing, attendees fill out a worksheet that guides them through a techo kaigi, covering questions like: What did you like? What didn’t you like? etc.

So naturally at this point I’m like, OHHH omg!! I could scan all the worksheets and make a ZINE out of it!!!

Daisy knew exactly what I meant by this because of the “Let’s make a stationery zine!” idea we scrapped a year ago 😆 and she was so down!!

And thus the cronut becomes the cronut sandwich, and the 3rd and final component is added to the workshop:

3. 🥪 ZINE: I capture everyone’s techo kaigis into a digital zine that I send to all attendees.

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⏲️ Time to get baking!!

A few weeks pass, it’s the end of September, and I have to make the workshop now.

Only at this point do I realize… hmmmm… there’s a lot going on in this, huh? 😂 OH WELL it’s fine!!

The backbone of the workshop was the techo kaigi, so I started with that.

At its core, a techo kaigi is a “notebook meeting” that you have with yourself to…

1. Document your current system of notebooks and planners

2. Reflect on how well your system is working for you

3. Plan your system for next year

There’s no standard format for a techo kaigi, so I had to determine the structure myself. But this was no problem because…

Did you know that software engineering does “techo kaigis” too?!
Well, they’re not called “techo kaigis,” but they’re they exact same thing.

In software engineering, it’s very common to do something called a retro³. A retro is a meeting that you hold with your software team where look back on how a project went, reflect on what went well and what didn’t go well, and then plan changes you want to make for your next project.

Is this not the exact same thing as a techo kaigi?! 😆 Change “software team” to “yourself” and “project” to “planner system” and the definitions are identical.

Now, while the techo kaigis don’t have a standard template, engineering retros have hundreds and hundreds of them lol. There are entire products built around the practice of a retro; there’s at least one book dedicated to the topic; if you search Google you’ll find endless articles… There is no shortage of prior art.

I based my techo kaigi off of an engineering retro format that I liked⁴ called 4Ls. The 4 L’s stand for Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For.

It would have felt VERY “corporate training”-y had I literally conducted a 4Ls eng retro for our workshop 😆 so instead, I just loosely adopted the structure.

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🌸 Techo Kaigi prompts 🌸

Here is the full list of prompts from the workshop! You’re welcome to use them yourself for your own techo kaigis 💓 (And if you post it online, a link back is always appreciated, but not required!)

Don’t feel pressured to answer every single question and subquestion; this is just a guideline to help you reflect. Pick and choose whatever speaks to you. (And you can see the 4Ls sneakily appear in the “REFLECT” questions…!)

1. CURRENT SYSTEM~!
   List the planners, journals and notebooks that you currently use, and briefly describe what you use them for.

2. SCHEDULE
   When do you currently use your journals and planners?

   1. Write when you tend to use your notebooks, generally speaking. Do you tend to write at night, in the mornings, on weekends?

   2. It’s OK if you don’t have a set routine! Just think about when you actually used your notebooks.

3. REFLECT: WHAT YOU LIKED
   What did you like best about your system this year?

   1. What parts of your system makes you happy?

   2. What was easy to keep up with?

   3. What was most fun to do in the moment?

   4. What was most fun to look back on later?

4. REFLECT: WHAT YOU DIDN’T LIKE
   What parts of your system were you dissatisfied with?

   1. Is anything impractical or overwhelming?

   2. Redundant or repetitive?

   3. Annoying, boring, or frustrating?

   4. What was not fun to do in the moment?

   5. What was not fun to look back on later?

5. REFLECT: LEARNINGS

   Write 3 things that you learned about your journaling or planning habits this year.

6. REFLECT: WHAT’S MISSING?
   What do you feel is missing from your system, if anything?

   1. Is there anything you want to track or record from this year that you didn’t?

   2. Are there any fun practices or rituals you want to bring into the new year?

7. NEXT YEAR’S SYSTEM~!
   List the planners, journals and notebooks that you think you’ll use next year, and briefly describe what you want to use them for.

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✏️ A conundrum: A good zine vs a good workshop

With the techo kaigi figured out, I needed to make the worksheets. In doing so, I quickly realized that there was going to be a tension between making a great zine and conducting a useful techo kaigi workshop.

A bunch of iterations of the card design

The beauty of the WE❤️SPORTS ANIME is that each artist fills out exactly 1 page. Even though there are 35 artists involved, the zine is still a reasonable length at a little over 35 pages long. It’s easy to digest, easy to skim.

Gahh, but if I tried to make a single-page worksheet that contained all of the techo kaigi questions… it would have made for a more streamlined zine, but it would have been a lot worse as a tool for reflection. When you’re thinking about what you liked in an anime, I think it’s fun to distill it into 3 words! But when you’re thinking about what you liked in your planner system, I think trying to pack this into 3 words is frustrating and unhelpful. You wanna deeply ponder, and you need space to do that!

The techo kaigi packets I made for everyone in the workshop

BUT if gave everyone like ~10 sheets of paper to fill out, the zine would become overwhelmingly large! Like over 100 pages maybe. Too much!

So which do I choose, the better workshop or the better zine?

Unsurprisingly, I decided to make a better workshop. I put each question on a half-size sheet of paper so that there was enough room to write without feeling claustrophobic. That meant everyone filled out at least 8 half-size pieces of paper. The final zine was going to be looooooong and probably unwieldly, but I thought that was the right trade-off.

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📚 Workshop day!

FINALLY it’s October 2nd, workshop day!!! And…

The workshop was SUCH A BLAST!

I included a photo album at the beginning of the digital zine, so let me share a few pages from that as a way to show off both a bit of the zine and some photos from the event:

SOOO cute, right?!

During the workshop, I took photos of everyone’s journals and included them in the zine, too. Let me show you a few examples of what those looked like, shared with permission:

LOVE the self-portrait!! Btw… I asked folks for their “favorite color” and then I made that the color of their pages 😎

DID YOU SEE HOW KYRA USED JOURNAL HELPER 😭💖

AREN’T THEY AMAZING 💖

This was such a wonderful night!! Everyone was so kind, engaged, and excited, and their journals were INCREDIBLE. I left the event feeling newly inspired and I have so many ideas for my 2026 journaling system…!

HUUGE thank you to everyone who attended the event — this would not be possible without you 💖 And HUGE thank you to Daisy, Laura, & the whole Yoseka team for hosting the workshop!! I am constantly in awe of everything that Daisy and Neil do for the stationery community. I love that they are sooo down for experiments and new ideas, too. A techo kaigi workshop that’s also a zine?? LET’S DO IT! 😆

Alright we’re nearing the end of today’s newsletter; there’s just oooone last thing we need to do….

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📝 The Techo Kaigi of the Techo Kaigi Workshop

I mean…. we gotta do a techo kaigi (well, a retro lol) of the techo kaigi workshop, no?

I’m gonna do a simple one since this newsletter is long enough.

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

1. Honestly, a cronut sandwich is hard to pull off! So let’s celebrate that the workshop happened at all, a zine was made, and it was decidedly not a disaster 😆

2. The planner show & tell was AMAZING!

3. People were great, vibes were great and I think it was just a fun event~!

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

1. There was too much planned for 2 hours 😆 Everything had to be squished and cut short. The planner show & tell is by far the most exciting part of the event, so that part especially needed more time to breathe.

2. …Well, everything was cut short except for the zine lol. The final zine was…. 169 pages long LOL. I know that sounds impressive, but NO, THAT’S TOO LONG! It was because of the worksheets; when there’s 8 worksheets per person, the zine explodes in size.

3. I think calling it a “Techo Kaigi Workshop” was confusing actually! “Techo Kaigi” is a known term within certain pockets of the stationery community, but it’s not as well-known as I thought. A lot of folks were reasonably confused, and some thought “Techo Kaigi” was a new stationery brand, like “Jibun Techo” or “Hobonichi Techo” (both names of popular Japanese notebooks).

CHANGES I WANT TO MAKE

OK this is maybe controversial….. but I think for the next one of these, I’d take out the techo kaigi portion of the event altogether! 🤫

So, I’d keep the Planner Show & Tell, and still make a zine — but the zine would be focused on the planner systems themselves rather than the techo kaigi / the reflection on the planner system. Like I could imagine that each person chooses 1-2 layouts from their planner that they want to share, then they fill out a worksheet to provide some details about how they use their planner and anything they want to call out about that layout in particular.

I think this would solve all the problems I mentioned!

I do think that techo kaigis are really really valuable, but maybe it’s a separate event? Or should I make this a 3-hour workshop instead of 2?? IDK 😆 (BTW: If you were at the workshop and have any opinions on this, send me a message or leave a comment below! Would love to know what you think~)

But yeah, I think the next version of this, I’d try removing the techo kaigi and streamlining the event. The cronut sandwich becomes a cronut!

That intuitively makes sense too, doesn’t it? I feel like it’s possible to achieve greatness with the cronut: a fusion of 2 is not so absurd! A delicious donut made out of a delicious bread, the croissant. But to add a third element, the sandwich? TOO FAR. The house of cards collapses.

………UNLESS??

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Alright that’s all I’ve got for you today!! If you got this far, thanks so much for reading!! Hope you’re having a WONDERFUL fall, and till next time! 🍩🥐🥪

1. Like 12 washi tapes, 12 stamps, 4 notebooks, an undisclosed number of some sticker sheets… tbh very tame!

2. For instance my zine Receipt Printer RPG, which is a a) choose-your-own-adventure zine that’s b) conducted half on paper, half on your phone, and is c) also a fan fiction(?) about the iconic cat printer.

3. The “retrospective” is a component of something called Agile software development, which is standard practice across the tech industry.

4. Prior to Pouch Studio, I worked as a software engineer in tech for 13+ years!