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Janice Wong, or better known online as Good Mondays Paper (and formerly, Janice Studies), has always enjoyed creating. As a child, she always “had a taste” for artistic work. “I made my mom buy me Corel PaintShop Pro. Photoshop was too expensive for me at that time.” As a gamer, her tastes have also veered towards the creative: world-building titles like The Sims and Animal Crossing are her favorites, she professes. “Customization is what gets me every single time. It doesn’t matter if it’s a video game,” she says. “If it’s a product, and I can just make it my own then, then I’m all for it.”
Today, Janice is building a career out of customizing — out of creating and making things into her own. Only now, she’s evolved from artistic work and world-making video games, and instead mastered an entirely different medium: digital notes. “It’s satisfying to bring a vision in your head onto the screen,” she says. As a content creator, she creates minimalist, user-friendly digital stationery and iPad note-taking tips to her 176,000 Instagram followers. As a business owner, her website sells digital planners and digital stickers, and shares free wallpapers each month.
Behind all the numbers, all the glossy Instagram reels and the neatly packaged digital products for sale, Janice is a registered nurse living in Vancouver, British Columbia (“non-practicing,” she prefaces. “I’m taking an indefinite break from it”). Her first rodeo with digital paper began in the spring of 2018 after getting an iPad. “I started digital note-taking in my second semester of nursing school,” she says. “Before that, I was just using paper, notebooks, real pens — carrying stuff around.”
GoodNotes 4 was the first app Janice downloaded. “I was basically hooked on being able to create your own notebook, and then having as many paper templates as you needed without wasting real paper,” says Janice.
The app’s features, she says, were especially helpful to her academic career. “As a nursing student, you also learn a lot of anatomy and physiology and that’s a lot of diagrams,” she says. “Goodnotes was my platform for drawing my own diagrams as a study method.” Being able to color code notes with highlighters, “[Goodnotes] was good as a visual learner too… At the same time, I could import all of my PDF textbooks into the app. Near the end of nursing school, I recorded some lectures [with audio recordings] — that was helpful in studying for exams as well!”
“You can’t really do all that with paper,” she adds.
But Janice’s journey with digital note-taking also narrates her journey to where she is today, in paving a path as an influencer-entrepreneur-nurse hybrid. Her content creation career started out with her posting her study notes on a tumblr blog. “They called them studyblrs,” she says. “I managed to get a pretty good following there, and then I saw people moving over to Instagram.”
Now on the new platform, “I started posting my notes, and I tagged Goodnotes on everything,” Janice recalls. “I distinctly remember the first time Goodnotes reposted my story — and that’s where I got a surge of followers.”
Inspiring Others, Making Mondays Good Again
“In the beginning, [my content] was more like a personal diary, sharing my academic journey,” she says. “Over time, it evolved into sharing tips with other students who wanted to get into nursing school or just college in general. I became more of a resource or mentor for people.” This was especially the case for students interested in nursing and those looking to adopt a digital study routine with the Apple Pencil.
“At some point, I was also creating study templates for my followers that they could download and use on their iPad,” she says. Janice remembers thinking, “Okay, if I can write notes digitally, then I can also write my plans too, right?” After digital notes, exploring digital planning became Janice’s next step. “Instead of trying to find a paper planner. I basically just taught myself how to design something that I could use in Goodnotes” — after teaching herself, she began sharing them with her followers.
Soon enough, Janice’s planners became so widely used that she eventually made a business selling them. She started GoodMondaysPaper, selling digital planners of all kinds. To name a few, there are mid-year planners, digital notebooks, and weekly planners available on the site. All of them are pastel colored, user-friendly, and easy on the eyes, carrying the same minimalist design ethos found throughout Janice’s content.
Looking back three years after starting GoodMondaysPaper, she feels deep gratitude: “I’m so grateful for customers who are returning for the third year in a row for, you know, my products,” she says. “It means something I’m doing is helping them.”
Offering help is another key driver in Janice’s work — and it’s made quite literal in the naming of her website: “Part of the reason why I’m named Good Mondays Paper is because people usually joke about Mondays as being the worst day of the week,” she says. “But if you have something nice to plan in and you feel organized, it might make Mondays something to look forward to.”
Finding Self-expression in Digital Paper
Janice’s life looks very different now from what it once was in nursing school. She’s long graduated from the chaos of academia — in Vancouver, she lives with her husband and her dog and enjoys spending time with her family.
But Goodnotes is still an important tool in her life for journaling. “I mean, journaling is a form of self-expression, right?” she says. “It’s just fun to do! It’s relaxing, it’s self-care in a way, just getting everything out.”
Naturally, digital planning is still a big part of Janice’s life — for scheduling content, meet-ups with family, and the occasional doctor’s appointment. And for her, there’s a certain art in making her plans “aesthetically pleasing,” one that can’t be found in a reminder or calendar app. “It makes you look forward to your days. Writing everything down in a style that speaks to you makes you feel organized and satisfied,” she says. Using the unlimited supply of stickers on Goodnotes is one of her favorite features now. “It doesn’t run out, you can keep on duplicating it!”
Although journaling and planning are a form of expression for Janice, she doesn’t have a set style. “I like to jump from style to style often; I play around with things,” she says. While most of her products offer a minimalist aesthetic, Janice says she “really like[s] experimenting with different layouts of planning.”
But only last year did Janice finally make the jump to focusing on her business and content creation. “Pivoting from nursing to something completely different, even after you finished education for it,” she says. “I just need to remind myself that I was courageous.”
“And I hope other people can find the courage to do that too, if they’re ever in a similar position.”