This is now where I add to the many, many posts living on the interwebs about bullet journaling.
A few months ago, one of my social media contacts started posting pictures of planner and journal pages. For a long time, I ignored them. Why should I be interested in other people’s dumb journals? Of all the Instagram pictures to spend time stalking… But eventually, deep in the bowels of Internet procrastination, the sixth-grader receiving her first homework planner and fastidiously keeping it neat and organized popped out from where she was hidden not-so-deeply inside of me. I was suddenly curious and started googling.
I found page after page and blog after blog and picture after picture of people who started using this journaling and planning system, loved it, and wanted to share it with the world. I knew this system was the one for me was when I read that bullet journals were for “People who have a million little to-do lists floating around” and “People who like pen and paper to-do lists”.
Yes! I thought. I DO love pen and paper to-do lists, and it is SO annoying when I keep losing one of my million little lists!
I read more, and many people talked about enjoying the idea of journaling and some aspects of it, but not the feeling of pressure to sit down each night and spend hours and pages detailing every aspect of their days. When I was younger, I always tried to keep a journal – that’s what writers-to-be did. I could never keep up with it for more than a week, though, and cleaning out my childhood closet earlier this year uncovered too many notebooks containing only a handful of journal entries each.
The bullet journal concept also incorporates a calendar element; as my family knows, I started creating and keeping my own printed monthly calendar pages the summer before ninth grade. As the oldest of four, I was worried that if I didn’t keep track of my schedule for soccer pre-season double sessions, my usually all-knowing mother might end up missing something and my high school career would be ruined. As the years have progressed, though, (as years are wont to do) it has become difficult to carry around letter-size calendar sheets and so a purse sized bullet journal, calendar included, is much more useful.
So far, one of the most enjoyable elements of the bullet journal for me is one that is new to my organizational life – the monthly habit tracker. I put my habit tracker next to my calendar and I include the things I want to be doing (or should be doing) each day, such as exercising, working on this blog, hitting my 10,000 step goal, and reading. Honestly, the same way the act of drawing a star on the school snack chart at my after-school program motivated my students to eat a lot of veggies, the act of checking off a day in my habit tracker does indeed motivate me to make more of an effort to accomplish that goal.
As I mention on my blog bio, when I like something, I tell everyone about it whether they want to hear or not. Similarly, I have given bullet journals to two friends so far. I have not heard yet (months later) whether or not this is something they are actually utilizing… For those of you who may be interested, though, these are the links that covered the basics for me!
https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/how-to-start-a-bullet-journal?utm_term=.jsBzdOLjA#.fjDqYDmAn
http://www.bohoberry.com/bullet-journal-hacks/
http://www.thelazygeniuscollective.com/blog/how-to-bullet-journal