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…

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Personal Goals for 2018

This post took a bit longer to get written and posted than I had anticipated… I kept getting distracted reading everyone else’s posts on their goals for 2018… I posted my financial goals for 2018 already, and now I want to go over my personal goals for 2018.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

As I mentioned when I wrote about my financial goals, it is very hard to predict what this year will hold for me, or know how everything will play out with baby-to-be, and so it is very hard to think up personal goals that will be applicable for the whole year.  I was considering only doing monthly goals, but I think I can find a few goals that I can work on all year.  If you followed along with my personal goals from 2017, some of these might seem a little familiar…

Old Posts & Updating Things…

I have a lot of blog posts that I have started writing, but either they required me to do some more research, accomplish some sort of task, or work through some thought processes before finishing them up.  Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of these may never be finished…

Whether or not it was his intention, a recent post published by Steve over at ThinkSaveRetire got me motivated to revisit these posts…  (I realize that his post was intended to help us revisit posts that have already been published, and it may help me do that as well, but it reminded me that the drafts that are sitting unloved in my WordPress account could still be worth salvaging if I update them to my current status and mindset.)

But… As is typical with me, I always have grand plans but then fail to follow through.  So, I’m going to use you, my faithful readers, as accountability partners.  Here are a few posts that I am now committing to finish up and publish in the next few weeks:

Travel Prep in my Bullet Journal

I never seem to get ahead of the game… every time I think I’m finally getting a handle on being organized, something comes up, or I say yes to one too many things…

Anyway, the latest thing that snuck up on me (other than missing a Tuesday blog post, shhhh) was our spring break vacation. I am currently typing this on my phone while I wait for our flight to Hawaii. (I know, I know, it’s not good to tell the interweb where we are going and when, but we have housesitters in our house, so it’s not abandoned, and that’s all the details you are getting… )

In order to help me get organized, I made a couple spreads in my bullet journal.  The first was just the trip details for planning purposes. 

This is where I put down the pertinent information about our flights, accommodation and car rental. It made it easy to check on and share with those that needed to have that info. 

The second spread that really helped me get sorted and not stress out was my packing list. 

I’m sure that I ended up over packing for this trip, but at least with the list I knew I wasn’t going to forget anything important. Or, at least I haven’t discovered that I’ve forgotten anything yet… 

Anyway, I probably won’t do another post while I’m on holidays, but will rest up and get lots of good ideas for when I return. Enjoy your spring break!

Home Renovations – The Plan…

As I mentioned in my last post, we have big plans for renovating the inside of our house.  I discussed what we have done so far, mostly to the exterior of the house, and so now I will go over some of what we have planned for the inside.  Although, it may take us years to actually get it all done…  Jordann at My Alternate Life did a similar post when they bought their house this past summer, so I’ll follow a similar format…

The Main Floor

Our house is a classic 1950s home for our area.  There are so many of them around, that the layout is super familiar (and when we were house hunting, we went through a bunch with similar floor plans).  Here is the floor plan of the main floor of house as it was advertised when we bought it:

And just for fun, I also found some of the photos that were used for the listing… So you’ll be able to see how we have updated things so far (by doing next to nothing).

Bullet Journal Update: The Evolution of my Weekly Spread

This post was supposed to go up last week… but I got busy and couldn’t finish it in time… In any case, here it is… I’ll work on getting my posting schedule back up to twice a week… 

As I promised last week two weeks ago, I am going to share with you today an update on my bullet journal.

I started my first bullet journal in January, and have really been enjoying it.  On my honeymoon I bought myself a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook (one of the most popular notebooks for BuJo enthusiasts) and I started using it in May.  I’ve shown various bits and pieces of the bullet journal over the course of the last few months, but I wanted today to discuss how my daily/weekly spreads (the meat & potatoes of the BuJo) have evolved over the last few months.

GTD at Work

When I started this blog, one of my first goals was to be more productive at work.  I didn’t really know how to go about doing that, so I put together a bit of a plan to achieve that goal, but it turns out that I wasn’t very good at following my plan… In the end, I gave myself a pass because the goal wasn’t super clear, and this year I didn’t even make any professional goals here on the blog.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was reading the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, and I promised that I would keep you appraised of my progress with the method of organizing and being productive… Well, I am still waiting to get the book back from the library, but have done quite a bit of online research and reading, and so have started implementing bits and pieces of it already.  (I’m sure I will change everything once I have actually read the whole book, but I figure starting something is better than procrastinating any further…)

Anyway, I’m still looking to increase my productivity at work, so I actually started implement the GTD process at work first, because I keep that separate from my personal stuff and it isn’t quite as overwhelming.  And if you read back to my plan for productivity that I made last January, it has some parallels to the GTD system, so I already was heading that direction before, I just didn’t quite make it all the way.  (GTD is the short form for “Getting Things Done”.)

I don’t really talk about the details of my work, only that I travel a lot.  I’m not going to change that; this blog is currently anonymous and I don’t want to accidentally say something about a project or a client that I shouldn’t.  So, no details for you, sorry, but I did want to share what I started for my GTD process, in case it might inspire someone, or maybe someone will have some pointers to share with me…

The Irony of Not Getting Things Done

One of my goals for 2016 was to read 12 books.  It has started me on a library kick (well, I guess I started the library kick last year when I got started on the KonMari method), and it has been really fun.  The online system that our local library has is awesome.  I can search books, put holds on them… it emails me when they are ready for pick up, and then I just head down on one of the evenings they are open late, or on the weekend to pick up my books.

However, the unfortunate part of all this is, I seem to keep picking books that are popular and so they have reservations, which means that I only have 1 or 2 weeks to read them, and since I only read very sporadically, I have yet to actually finish a book.  Yup, that’s right… We are six months in to 2016 (well, 7 tomorrow I guess) and I haven’t read a single book yet.  I have read lots of partial books… but have not made it to the end of any of the books.

One of the books that I just recently had to return when I wasn’t quite done is Getting Things Done by David Allen.  The irony of this is not lost on me.  I was laughing about this with a coworker one day at lunch when I was reading the book (a last ditch effort to get as much out of it as I could before I had to return it).  I guess I really need to apply the theories in the book, so I can at least finish the book…

I’m Back… Almost…

Well, we have arrived home from our European honeymoon adventure and are attempting to adjust to the time and our normal lives…

I have a lot of things to catch up on here on the blog, but since I’m still getting back in to the swing of things here at home, I don’t think I will attempt to get back in to a regular posting schedule this week.   But you never know, hopefully I get organized this weekend and can get back in the swing of things next week.  Fingers crossed.

First, I need to get my bullet journal back up and running.  I have some exciting news… My favourite souvenir from our trip is a new notebook, and not just any notebook… A Leuchturm1917!  (Is it bad that a notebook is the best souvenir of my honeymoon?  Besides the memories of course!)  Okay, and if I am completely honest, I actually bought two of them!  I was in Germany and figured since that is where they are from, I might as well buy one… And then thought I might as well buy two… Right?  But I still have some pages left in my old notebook, so I will continue using that one for a little while yet.  Don’t worry, as soon as I start on the new one, I will share the details with you.

Getting Organized: An Update…

I’m sure you were all waiting anxiously to find out how my first week of “getting organized” went… Or maybe not… but in any case, I’m going to give you a quick recap…

In summary, it didn’t go so well… but I still feel like there was some progress made, so maybe with a couple more weeks it will go a bit better…

I started the week off strong, with my Sunday plan completed on Sunday evening, I thought for sure I was in for a 100% success rate.  And while I did do some of my evening to-do list on Sunday night, I didn’t get it totally completed… my lunch was only half made, and I definitely left a few dishes in the sink… (not a good start)

So, Monday morning, when I slept through my 5:30 am alarm… Or hit snooze in my sleep… I’m not sure which really… the morning didn’t exactly follow my morning schedule… And then I didn’t have that extra time to make up for my slacking on the evening to-do list… Which of course means that I didn’t leave on time for work… and didn’t make my goal of 8am arrival at work.