Hello everyone! Today, I thought I would share a little update on my bullet journal with you!
I am currently on my second bullet journal, and I did used to share quarterly updates on my bujo in video format so you may recall some of those videos. However, I stopped doing videos in general because I found it to be so stressful! Blogging and vlogging are such different experiences for me. I love watching video content, but I like creating written content more than video.
Back to the bujo. I also didn’t like sharing my bujo after awhile because I felt like I was editing too much out of my bujo already. It was so annoying to have to be aware during filming (because my editing software didn’t let me blur out stuff after the fact) of what I wanted to share. And if I missed something, I had to go back and re-film that part. Plus, my bujo was becoming more and more personal, so I had to stop sharing at some point!
However, I did miss showing off parts of my bujo, so here’s some insight on how I use my bujo now.
A Little Bujo Update
For many people, a bullet journal is more of a planner. They carefully create pages for each week and plan out their days on those pages. Well, at least that’s what I see in the videos on YouTube. For me, my bullet journal is a mix of a monthly calendar, a “line a day” tracker of what I did each day, a scrapbook, a journal, and a creative outlet. My handwriting is not the cutest, although I have gotten a lot better with practice over the year and a half that I’ve had a bujo already. I also try to doodle a bit, but I’m really terrible at that still! Even so, it’s fun and I do look forward to using my bujo each day and creating pages for it.
As I mentioned, I do use my bujo at least once a day. Usually it’s once a day actually. I think I mentioned it in my Morning Routine but I tend to wake up, get ready for the day, take my puppy niece out for morning walkies if she’s here, make some coffee, and then I sit down at my desk and open my bujo. If I don’t have a lot of time, usually on week days before I start work, I will just update my daily log with what I did the day before and what I’ve done so far that morning. If it’s a weekend and I have more time, I will typically fill out a bit more of my bujo. I’ll create pages or set up for the next month or just fill out previously created pages a bit more. I do have a sort of set format that I follow so that does make it pretty easy to fill out the pages in general and makes me feel more organized and that my journal has a purpose beyond just a planner.
For each month, I set aside nine spreads, or eighteen pages total. The only months that get more are May, because I need more space for my birth month to plan BirthMay or just document it more in general, and December, for similar reasons with Blogmas and because I know it’s the last chance to fill out my journal. Here’s the general monthly setup/pages that I create:
- Monthly intro page – for the most part this page will just have the name of the month and then the doodle of that month. Every month I switch to a different predominate color too, so I try to stick to just using that color on the page.
- Monthly calendar – on the opposite page I’ll create a monthly calendar. I like doing this because it is a great spot to remind myself of what is coming up in the month and I can throw it all there instead of trying to remember it or having a separate planner.
- Goals/Reminders/To-do – the next page behind the calendar is general reminders, goals for the month, and to-do items. I should have it with my calendar but when I came up with this system I had been planning to share my bujo on video still so I hid it behind the calendar so I could just skip the page and move on instead of having to worry about blocking off the page on camera. I also do still like having it hidden to leave the first spread of the month more minimal and clean though.
- The Daily Log – I treat this like those “A Line A Day” notebooks but to track my activities of the day. For example, on one day I might have “ACNH, Walkies, Blogging, Reading [Book], watched [TV show], cleaned office, watered plants” and so on. I like to do this because I can look back and see if I’ve had less productive days easily.
- My Activity Log – On this page I track the activities I did as well, mostly so I can easily reference what I did from my Daily Log for my Lively/Life blog posts. I create little boxes for things like Movies, TV Shows, Books I’ve Read, Life events, Gaming, and more. I’ll write down everything I’ve done that I want to make sure I share, and it makes it really easy to write my posts later on.
- Blog Post Planner/ACNH Stats – So I know I said I don’t use my bujo as a planner, but sometimes I do! The top half of this page is a grid to track my blog posts, the date they will need to be posted on, and check boxes for “written”, “photos”, “scheduled”, “posted”, and “done” to track where those posts are on their creative journey. On the bottom half of the page I used to leave blank for notes for the posts but found that I didn’t really use it so I switched it to keep my Animal Crossing New Horizons stats on there. I am still loving the game so I like tracking where I’m at and comparing to the previous month.
- Fun Pages – the next four spreads, or eight pages, are dedicated to “fun”! I will leave these blank at the start of the month and then fill them out as I go along in the month. Since there are 8 pages of fun and there have been 8 months in the year so far, I’ll share one fun page that I’ve created per month:
- January – In the News: The month of January was so chaotic that I created a page for news headlines to try to keep it all straight as I processed what was going on. Notable events included the January 6th attack on the US Capitol by domestic terrorists, the orange idiot being impeached for a 2nd time on the 13th, and President Biden taking office on the 20th.
- February – this was a super slow month so I didn’t love any of the pages I made but I did a Self Care At Home page with ideas such as yoga, reading a book, or calling a friend.
- March – Introducing Slow Living into My Life: this was a half a page actually but it’s crammed of ideas such as taking a walk, saying no to “busy” and so many other great ideas!
- April – New Job Celebration: after having been unemployed for a year, I accepted a job offer in April and celebrated by creating a full page dedicated to that day.
- May – Year 30 Goals: my birth month! I created a full spread full of goals I had as I turned 30, mostly geared towards my next decade as a whole.
- June – The Obama Portraits: so I hadn’t been to a museum in almost two years, and finally went to one in June. I visited the Art Institute in Chicago with my sister and her roommate so we could go see the Obama Portraits, on tour from the Smithsonian. I grabbed the pamphlets at the museum to cut out the portraits for my bujo, because they really were quite gorgeous to see.
- July – Reflections: I started to really use my bujo for reflections in 2020, starting with one page a month but in 2021 it became more and more common for me to journal in it. For July I had two spreads dedicated to reflections! Including one full page of work reflections as I realized I would be leaving my new job for a new opportunity in my previous industry.
- August – Daily Declutter Challenge: I started really decluttering my life last year and this year I’ve been doing daily decluttering challenges where I must find one thing a day to declutter. It’s been going really well! I am loving this and I hope to continue this trend as time goes on. I also did use another page to keep ideas of what else to declutter in case I’m ever stuck on what to look for sometime.
- Writing Spread: Every month I leave myself a full spread for writing ideas. Sometimes the ideas are for novels, short stories, blog posts, or non-fiction books. Sometimes the pages are pretty bare, sometimes they’re bursting with ideas. But I always give myself the room to create on my bujo if needed.
- Monthly Reflection – at the end of the month I leave myself a page to reflect on what has happened in the month overall. I try to encompass a bit of everything, and always try to be kind to myself.
- Monthly Manifestations – This is a newer page I’ve been using. It used to be my budget page but I switched to an Excel spreadsheet for that and now it’s a page dedicated to manifestations. TikTok will alert me when a good day for manifesting is so I’ll go along with that and make sure to fill out the page on that day. I’ll try to focus on whatever it is I feel I need at that time and I find that it has been pretty useful! I do think it’s working and that manifestation is real, but if you don’t I still think it’s a good way to keep your goals top of mind and refresh them regularly.
I also want to touch a bit on how my bujo in 2021 is different from my 2020 bujo. For one thing, I use way less writing utensils! I think I was convinced that I needed to make my bujo as creative as possible, mostly influenced by those crazy beautiful spreads YouTubers were creating. But I’m not that talented so it was mostly stressful trying to use a million different pends or markers or colored pencils and stuff every month. Instead, what I do now is use pens I like and mostly stick to 2-3 pens. Mostly I’ll use the one that matches the color of the month and a black one. But those two are gel pens so they’ll bleed through a bit to the next page. I do have a different black pen I also use for regular writing or when I don’t want the ink to bleed through as much too. Oh, and a pencil for my calendar as items tend to shift! But otherwise I try to keep it to a minimum of how many pens I grab.
So that’s my little bujo update! I thought about trying to add photos of my pages but decided against it in the end. They’ve just become too personal to share! But there are always a ton of beautiful ideas on Pinterest or other social media platforms so I figured it wouldn’t be the worst thing to not include any!
Thanks for reading!
Pamela
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