My Bullet Journal Through 2018

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

The Evolution Of My Bullet Journal: After 1 Year

About a year ago, I took up this little thing called Bullet Journaling.  I am a big list-maker in my life.  When I got planners in the past, I made sure that there were big boxes so I would have a lot of space to create to-do lists.  And I would put everything in those lists from things I needed to do to school, for work, for wherever I was living... the number of things that could be on that list was endless.

Then one of my favorite YouTubers created a video where she was setting up her first bullet journal.  It was artistic, it was organized, there was an order and a system... I liked it a lot.  And the best part was that it was a planner system that was completely customizable to the user.  There were a lot of factors that got me interested.  One year later and I'm on my third bullet journal!  With this post, I want to go through how my personal bullet journaling style has changed and also talk about why I love this system for organization.

If I had used the bullet journals like the ones to the right in the picture above, I would have been finishing up my second journal, at the rate I'm going.  The reason why I have three bullet journals right now is because my first one, the teal one on the left, was my experiment.  Really, you can bullet journal with any notebook you have.  The popular choice is the Leuchtterm 1917 (yellow and orange notebooks) with a dot grid inside, but I'll just be upfront... they're not exactly cheap notebooks.  I didn't want to start bullet journaling after buying this rather spendy notebook and then hate it or not have it work for me.  So I just bought a really cheap notebook at Target to start.  When I started out, my journal looked a little something like this:

I borrowed pretty heavily from a blogger called Boho Berry on YouTube.  When I started, she had a monthly plan, a weekly plan, and then dailies.  She only created a day and a week at a time.  She included decoration like the weather and temperature of where she lived (or wherever she was if she was traveling), some kind of a decorative date covering, and then listed her to-dos for the day.  She also had a time tracker, which isn't pictured here but it was something that I tried.

At the time, this was an effective spread for me to use.  The Notebook was big enough, it was easy to write in and easy to carry with me wherever I went, I loved the look of the book inside and out... What didn't work for me about this notebook was that the more I used this notebook, the more it fell apart.  Whereas with my current journals, I can fit 5-6 months worth of to-dos and lists and even some journaling, in this cheap notebook, I was only able to get through two months before too many pages were falling out and had to be taped back into the book.  The binding was terrible.  It couldn't hold up against the way I wanted to use this journal.  So I decided to take the plunge and get a more expensive notebook.  

I chose the Leuchtturm 1917 for a few reasons.  

1. The binding was strong.  No matter how often I transported it and how much I stuffed into that journal, it didn't fall apart.  The book was stretchd and it got wider when I added stickers and pictures and things like that, but no pages fell out unless I tore them out on purpose.  This was major for me.
2. It was slightly bigger than my first notebook.  Hey, more space is always a plus, right?
3. The dot grid.  I didn't realize just how distracted having solid lines running across the page was, so when I had a dot grid, suddenly my bullet journal felt cleaner.  And that was nice.

So I moved onto my second bullet journal.  After two months of experimenting, my style of bullet journaling was already changing.

It was in this bullet journal that I feel like I truly fell in love with bullet journaling.  My style changed even within this notebook.  This was generally the layout that dominated my weekly and daily spreads.  The time log is now pictured above, just without color and there is tracking for taking my medication and for how much water I was drinking.  My bullet journaling became much more personalized.  This particular spread is from the summer when I didn't have too much going on.  It was fine for me to put down one day at a time and then create the next day after the present day was finished.  I liked that I could easily see what my entire week would look like in advance and then I could get more specific in my dailies.  This is something that has remained similar.

In this bullet journal, something that went away that was in my first experimental bullet journaling was the presence of actual journaling.  I didn't stop and use my bullet journal like a diary like I had been doing prior to this notebook.  Instead, I kept notes in here from events I went to and I did more journaling when I went on trips.

In this second notebook, I also experimented a lot creatively.  I added pictures, drew more pictures.  Got creative with my writing.  Suddenly my notebook had personality.  I loved that.  My notebook was changing with me.

The summer went by and my second bullet journal filled up soon after and so suddenly, it was time to start my third bullet journal, which is the orange journal pictured above (and it's also the one I'm using at the time I'm writing this).  And still, my bullet journal changed some more because my needs changed.  In June, I was hired to my first teaching position and in August I started training and my students arrived.  After stumbling through my first few weeks in my job, trying to continue my bullet journal, something needed to change.  My lists were getting ridiculously long because I was putting work, personal, and other responsibilities altogether in one big list... it got confusing.  That resulted in a spread that looked like this (and it's a spread I continue to use to this day):

I separated the things I needed to get done at school and things I needed to finish at home that was more personal or related to my chores.  I kept the weekly spread with the boxes at the beginning of the week (in the picture above, it's on the page before).  As the weeks went on, I realized I needed a little more separation in my weekend.  I would make one big list to be accomplished over the weekend, but that was leaving way too many things left undone (nevermind if they were critical to complete or not).  So I separate my Saturday and Sunday and then created a short list of things that I absolutely needed to do (my Must Dos) and things that I wanted to do (my May Dos) that I thought I could also get done that day, but it wasn't a big deal if they didn't happen or if I did them the next day.  That way I was able to prioritize the things that needed to get done.  I think that I became more productive with this new system.  I like it a lot and right now, I don't see this spread changing for quite a while.

Another change to this notebook was that I was looking for ways to add more color and more artwork.

This mandala started out as a mood tracker, but when I failed to actually keep up on that tracker, it turned into an art piece that added color to my book.  I did this a couple different times and I love the balance between personal pieces, art pieces, and the utilitarian features.  

The other thing that I did with this piece was I used it to plan for a project.  I did National Novel Writing Month this past November and I did all of my planning in my Bullet Journal as well as my tracking.

This was another way to add color (I colored in a square for every milestone I met) and it was a good way to have all of my planning and notes in one place and in a place that I carried with me every day and everywhere I went.  This system worked out better than I could have hoped.  I loved having easy access to research that I had done on topics related to my story and easy access to the character descriptions and family trees I had created for the characters of my novel.

The most important way I've been using my bullet journal is to keep track of my goals for the year.  I don't think I would have done nearly as well at accomplishing my goals with my bullet journal.  A lot of it comes down to being able to turn to my goals whenever I want to, since I carry my bullet journal with me everywhere I go.  This next year, I'm trying something a little different where I have a focus word.  All of the goals I have planned for 2018 are related in some way to finding balance in my life between my personal goals and my professional life.

Spreads like this one are creative, but it's also a good reminder that this is my mantra this year.  I am seeking balance and that is something I have to strive for in every area of my life.  Bullet Journals are good for keeping your goals at the forefront of your mind at all times.  It's also a good way to track things that are important to you (and things that aren't specifically important to your well-being but are nevertheless interesting to know).

Even in just a short year, my bullet journal has changed so much and it's changed because I've been changing.  I've needed different things at different points in the year.  I love that flexibility that a regular planner I can buy at Target just can't afford me.  

There are so many great reasons to keep a bullet journal.  I can see myself using the bullet journal system for many years to come since I can keep it so personal to me.  

If you have any questions about bullet journaling, please don't hesitate to ask!  This is very much an overview.  In the future, I might go into how I use this system for my job and even more specifically about keeping track of my goals.  

Thanks for Reading!

--Jude