So first of all, thanks to everyone who gave me some first suggestions here! I loved reading about all your different systems and I started thinking a bit more about my system as well.

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Right now, I bullet journal and have everything in one book. This is fine right now as my book is staying at home 90% of the time anyways due to working from home. But the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel taking my personal thoughts with me to the lab or to teaching classes. My university is planning to return to on-site classes in October, I will have to teach, finish my master thesis/start my PhD and I will by taking some classes myself. I really think it's time to separate my personal and work stuff, even though it was appealing to have everything in one book.

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My current idea is as follows:

• get the Cousin (I'm still debating the covers, either the Liberty Fabrics: Erica or the Lake Blue Cover) for work - PhD, TA stuff and my course work goes there. I plan to use it to have my schedule in there for every day/week/month, write down my work tasks and use it as a lab book. I am a particle physics grad student so lab work means coding and/or some hardware stuff like building/testing detectors, so I don't really have to be afraid to use ink (although I probably pick a waterproof ink just to be sure). I think about getting the memo pads as well so I can thread longer lab book entries in them. My lab book entries would be tasks to do, ideas, meeting notes and what I did that day in the lab - entries in the form like this: "finished phase space simulation - remember to check for numerical instabilities in larger runs".
• I am then thinking about getting the Original one for personal stuff (again undecided about the covers, thinking about Count the Lights, Cat over Kanda, Omiya Yogashiten, Liberty Fabrics: Poppy Forest, Dreamy Soda or Denim Blue). I was considering the A6 Day-free, however, it seems like one can not buy it with a cover here in Europe and I do not want to deal with customs when finishing my master thesis and registering for a PhD to be honest. I would write my personal thoughts in there (what was great today, what sucked, favourite music, songs, series I want to watch, hanging out with friends etc) as I'm doing with my current bullet journal (though not in that much detail as I unfortunately don't have enough space to have a page a day and thus have 1 A5 page per week. It was fine in the beginning but now it does start to become limiting as I got more used to writing every day, and I do keep on sticking more sticky notes in if a week was really exciting/busy.), track some personal stuff (like sport and other things), maybe getting into more long form journaling.

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I never used two books before (well, I currently have my bullet journal and a log file on my computer for my master thesis, not sure if that counts though), so I'd love to hear a bit about your experiences! I am currently not 100% sure whether I'm just too hyped to try out hobonichi or whether it's actually a good idea to separate work and personal stuff in my notekeeping like this. I don't want to go too overboard!

Also, I'd love to hear how well the covers are holding up. I am currently not planning on using cover on cover because I don't like the feel of plastic, but I would consider putting my books in a cotton bag when carrying them around.