It's been a little quiet in this corner of the internet! So I thought that I would show you my bullet journal from 2018, since I have migrated into a new journal. This is my second year of bullet journaling and seriously, I don't think there is any going back for me. I can't imagine going through life without this system of organization and this outlet for creativity. I'll show you how I started off 2018 and how things have changed for me throughout the year. I'll leave my 2019 set up for January of next year. I rather like doing posts like this just to see how my journal changes with my need.
2018 started off a little weird journal-wise because I was still less than halfway through the book that I finished off 2017 in. I use a Leuchtterm 1917 and truthfully, these are not the cheapest books. I couldn't justify abandoning my journal three months in with more than half a book of blank pages, so I started 2018 a short way into my orange book. As things usually go, I started out with a very ambitious 2018 splash page. This was also where I picked my focus word for the year, which was "balance." I was halfway through my first year of teaching and I was also in the middle of other obligations that I had started 2017 with, so I was quite busy. My goal for the year was to part with most of these other obligations that I didn't need to have so I could be more involved at work and be at home more as well. So my mission was to pursue balance.
Organization-wise, I started out the year with a similar weekly set-up where I have a weekly overview and then separate my tasks between school and home. This worked for me and I continued this through the end of the school year, at which point I took out the school section and just had one solid to-do list each day as opposed to two.
In addition to my weekly lists, I also had a weekend list. I still separated this into Saturday and Sunday, but because the weekend tends to be flexible, I started including language that I learned before starting my teaching job and separated my list further into "Must-Do's" (things that need to be done or there will be some kind of consequence) and "May-Do's" (things that would be nice to get done, but if it's pushed to the next week, it's not a big deal). This worked out for me too. It helped me prioritize things that needed to be done, which was helpful as I was figuring out my first year of teaching especially. There's so much to take in as a first year teacher that you really just need to figure out the bare minimum in order to survive. The next year is a little bit easier because you have a foundation and you're not in survival mode most of the time.
One thing that I love about this journal is the appearance of more art. The picture below was originally supposed to be a mood tracker in the form of a mandala, but I fell off that wagon early. But I didn't just want to leave a partially finished piece in this journal, so I took the mood tracking pieces off and just finished the mandala with nice designs and coordinating colors. I'm really happy with how it turned out.
The art continued in the form of taped in coloring pages, but also in the form of art at the beginning of the month.
This is another art piece below (SUPER proud of this one... it took quite a while to do), but this is also the start of monthly calendars so I have more of an up-close visual of what my month will look like. I liked this because I was able to plan ahead and decide if I could take on other events without having to flip through all of the weeks in that month in order to check my availability.
May also brought the end of my orange book and it was time to start a new Leuchtterm 1917. This time I chose a blue one. I got fancy and fascinated with Etsy and I found some stickers to decorate the cover. Summer was fast approaching (this journal started in June) and I knew I was traveling a lot over the summer, so I focused on demonstrating my love of adventure and my intention to travel.
Since I was starting a new book, it was also time to transfer over my yearly spreads like my movie and reading trackers and my new year resolutions. I also really wanted to try using a Calendex like what Boho Berry on YouTube uses, so I set that up very early on. Unfortunately, I really didn't end up using the Calendex like I thought, so this will not be joining me in my 2019 Bullet Journal. I think it's enough for me to keep track of things month to month or have a simple list rather than something that's so visual and spans over such a wide space. This will be adjusted in my new journal.
I traveled to Boston, Wyoming, England, and the Netherlands over the summer and that meant there was an increased pressance of packing lists. So I have three that looked a bit like this:
I liked that it resembled a list I might have made in a regular notebook or put in the binder I travel with and I thought the faux washi tape was cute (I didn't actually want to use real washi tape because I wasn't actually holding a piece of paper on this page and I thought that would look dumb). Even though I don't really have travel planned at the beginning of 2019, I'm already finding other ways to include art like this outside of packing lists.
I also finished school for the year, so suddenly I had new needs that my bullet journal has never needed to fulfill for me before. My school likes to give us summer reading to do, so I partially used my bullet journal to take notes on the reading that we would be referring to throughout the school year. I also did a mid-year review of my new year resolutions. I think this is something I will keep. It's kind of a kick in the pants so that I am actually pursuing my goals for the year. But this way I could be aware of which goals for falling to the wayside and I could let go of the goals that I was not feeling very serious about pursuing anymore. For example, at the beginning of 2018, I said I wanted to reach an entire book in French and in Dutch. That was one of the goals that I never ended up pursuing in 2018 and I don't feel bad about it. Goals change and that's okay.
My favorite thing about my blue journal was the presence of journaling. Before, my journals were pretty much purely for planning and productivity purposes, but this journal made the transition to being more of an actual journal and memory keeper as well as for planning and productivity. This isn't something that I really continued once the school year started, which I never expected or planned to have happen, but I LOVE having this as memory keeping for when I travel. Next time I travel, I will absolutely be doing this, especially since traditional planning is not something that I really need when I travel.
And in the same vein, art continued to be a presence in this journal. I'm definitely not going back on this no matter what time of year it is. This was the first time I tried out watercolor painting and I cut it out and put it in my journal. Watercolors appear several times throughout my journal in big pieces like at the beginning of a trip and at the beginning of a month, but also smaller pieces throughout my journal.
In 2018, I acquired an Instax (like a polaroid camera) and an HP Sprocket (which prints small pictures from my phone) and that's when I started including highlights in my journal in the form of pictures. I rather like this addition too. I'll be continuing this in 2019.
One change I made was I created a full-page calendar. I realized that there really wasn't enough room to track events on my tiny cramped calendar before and this really helped fix that problem. I could also keep track of my ongoing projects, my reading, and do some more intentional thinking about each month.
Summer was also the time where I was exploring different weekly layouts. I was able to make my weekly layout span two pages one-sided (as opposed to 3 or 4 sides of a paper as is typical). I tried a Dutch door set up which was fun for a month, but it also felt a little disorganized when I couldn't pair which sections were part of the same week. But the Dutch door was cool because I could track so many things without taking up a huge amount of space.
This was my layout once the school year started up again. I forgot to separate my lists into home and school, but so far that hasn't really mattered. In 2019, I'm going to try separating my lists again because I have started to stay really late at work again and I want to push myself away from doing that. I want to see what I absolutely need to do while I stay at school and determine what can be done at home. I hope this will help me leave a more reasonable time so I can be with my husband more.
I have been trying to be more intentional while at work not just with my time, but about my interactions with my students. So I have started tracking whose families I need to contact and I've also been writing praise and encouragement notes to my students, so I list who I want to write notes to. I have a separate list on my phone so that I make sure I get to every single student in my classes. My tracking started looking like the picture below, but now I have made a smaller section at the end of each of my weeks and that has worked a lot better. I probably will not include this type of tracker in the future though because so much of it is centered on my phone. I will add "write a note to ___" as an item to include on my To-Do list and that has worked just fine. Not everything needs to be tracked in my bullet journal. It's not always going to be a one-size fits all type of tool. And that's okay.
I also used my journal to track and research for NaNoWriMo again this year. I took some of the perforated pages from the back of my journal and taping them in as a fold-out addition to some pages. So below, the left two pages are the pages that are firmly attached in my book and on the right is the taped in page. I fold it in when I close my book and on the other side of the tracker page, I had a brain dump page devoted just to the story I was writing. This was helpful because I could have everything spread out in front of me in one spot. I would do that again the next time I attempt NaNoWriMo.
To sum everything up, my bullet journal became a lot of things I didn't know that a bullet journal could be when I started out 2018. You'd think that everything that needed to be figured out about bullet journaling would be figured out in the first year, but I'm still learning every single day. Here's to another good year of bullet journaling!
Happy New Year!
--Jude
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