January 2018 Bullet Journal Set-up

It has been a while since I did an updated show and tell of my bullet journal.  I still use it daily, and have made some adjustments throughout the months, but rather than going through all of the various iterations, I will just show how I have set everything up for January.

I don’t normally have a title or intro page for my months, but I figured the start of a new year deserved something special.  I got inspiration from Pinterest (so I cannot take full credit for my designs).  I also added a washi tape border so that I could flip easily to the beginning of the new year.  I am very happy with how it turned out, so I may continue doing something like this in the future… We will see…

In the past, my monthly calendars have been the traditional bullet journal vertical kind on a single page.  However, I found that I would often run out of room if I had multiple things to list on each day.  I’m not sure if this layout will work any better, but I decided to switch it up for January and make a double page spread that follows the design of a traditional wall calendar.  So far it has worked out, but I haven’t been particularly busy the last couple weeks…

You can see that I left a bunch of blank space around the right side of the calendar… Not sure what to do there, but maybe I’ll fill it with notes or doodles throughout the rest of the month?

As I mentioned in my personal goals, I have been using my habit tracker every month, with mixed results.  For January, I put together another one with 12 of my regular habits.  And you can see it is still with mixed results, but it’s a work in progress…

Because I used to have a single page calendar, my habit tracker used to be on the opposite page.  Now that my calendar takes up a full 2 page spread, my habit tracker was all alone… So I decided to add in a brain dump / to do list page.  I thought it might house a couple things, but it filled up pretty quick with items (though this picture is from before I did that) that had been bouncing around in my head for a while… (Which is why I made my goal of doing 4 things I’ve been procrastinating each month.)

The next spread I made was a summary of my goals for 2018.  I won’t go over these again, since I already did a post for each (financial and personal), but here they are written out in my bullet journal so I can easily review them and remind myself to work on them.

 

To show a bit of my process, I’m sharing 2 photos… The first was the original spread, and then I thought it was too boring, so I added some colour.  I like the colour, but sort of wish I had planned for colour ahead of time so I could have done something prettier…

After that, I move in to my dailies.  My daily or weekly spreads have evolved a lot over the time I’ve been bullet journaling.  I did a post way back in September of 2016 that went through some of those changes, but it has even changed multiple times since then.  Maybe I can go over some of those more recent changes in another post, but for this post I will just share how I am doing them right now.

I have decided to take a full page for each day.  This started when my doctor wanted me to pay more attention to how I was eating in preparation for my gestational diabetes test (which came back negative! yay!) and so I wanted an easy way to track when I was hungry, and what I was eating, as well as being able to lay out tasks for certain times of the day… It does take up a lot more pages of my notebook, but so far I really like it and will likely stick with it as much as I can.

I’ll explain a little bit about some of the bits and pieces on these pages… On the left side of the page I put a little timeline of the hours of the day.  This lets me put in specific tasks or appointments at specific times.  A lot of my tasks are not exactly time specific, but if I try to schedule a certain task for a time that I know I’ll be free and able to do that task, it is more likely to get done…

Beside the timeline, I like to put in some markers for when I drink water (or tea) with a little coloured box, or if I get hungry (the H in a circle), or if I get really sleepy (zzz).  Sometimes if I am not feeling great I’ll put a little unhappy face or something similar just to note that.

 

I also like to track what I eat throughout the day by putting it in colour on the right side of the page.  I’m not specific about how much or anything, but just generally put down what I’ve eaten and approximately when.  I guess this is my new version of food journaling.  It means that the pages can get a little messy sometimes, but it’s meant to be useful, not pretty…

Oh, and if you see a little check mark down by the page number on the page?  That means that every task on that page has either been completed or migrated to another page.  It’s an easy way for me to flip through and see what I haven’t done… And what pages have tasks that I need to migrate or do…

And that’s where we are at in my bullet journal.  I want to flush out a bunch of my goals with more spreads in my bullet journal, but part of me is hesitant to spend too much time on those because, doing a quick count of the pages left in this book, it is looking like I’ll have to do another transition to a new notebook for the beginning of February… So, I may save doing too many pretty collections until I do that switch.

Do you have a bullet journal?  Has it evolved over time?  Do you have a spread that you really love?  Please share!  I love looking at how others organize their journals!