So friends, I recently, aka Friday, read an article about consolidating all planners/ideas/list/post it’s/notebooks/journals/apps/phone notes/etc/etc/etc into one master journal called a bullet journal.
Why should this matter? Well…
I’ve talked before about my google spreadsheet for meal tracking and such right?
It turned into a meal/exercise/train walk/meditation/french study/to many things spreadsheet that I stopped updating because it was inconvenient to update it at work and I always forgot to update it at home. Laziness? Maybe. Lack of willpower to update it? Definitely. But, we all know the best way to make something a habit is to make it as easy as possible to accomplish. Sooooooooo, moral of the story is: sometimes you outgrow a method of record keeping.
You thought it was going to be “don’t beat yourself up about it,” right, and at first that was the moral. I figured I would flounder along in the same system until I could figure out an easier way to get myself to remember to log things.
I found an app called Habatica where you enter in daily habits, tasks, and to do’s. When you do them you mark them off, gain experience points, level up, and get cute animal friends.
Sounds like something I’d like right? Sounds like a good way to get my habits/logging back on track? I mean I love Nerdfitness which operates on the same sort of principle: make things into experience points so you can level up your life! Gameify it and trick yourself into doing it!
Only I never kept up with Habatica.
I spent more time reorganizing what was a task vs habit vs daily chore than I did actually doing ANY of the things written down. It got to the point where every time I opened the app Habatica would inform me that I was dead and they took away all my levels (2 in total) because I never marked anything off…so I uninstalled it.
As you may have guessed uninstalling Habatica did not magically make me start logging into my google spreadsheet every day.
I just checked it and the last time I logged was 7/22/16 which isn’t that bad but it had been preceded by about 2 weeks of spotty/non existent logging. I need to log. It helps me stay on track and solidly grasp my progress.
Even though I had stopped using the google spreadsheet, I was not consciously thinking “oh let me google new more effective ways to track my life.” I was more like la la la buzzfeed is fun-what is a bullet journal-hold up-they don’t love you like I love you-I need to make a bullet journal. (Please note the Beyonce reference. It’s just there because that’s where my mind goes after that gem of a visual album #lemonadesidetracked)
So I read articles about what a bullet journal is, watched the videos on the official website, read more articles, wondered if it was for me, saw pictures of how people customized the journal to fit their needs, realized I could log EVERYTHING I wanted to in the journal, and realized I already have a journal I keep with me constantly but was confused about how to best utilize.
When I say one I mean I hoard journals like Smaug hoards gold trinkets. I sleep on them for years and hate when the sparkly ones get taken away. As I type this I’m wearing red and sitting on about 5 so this isn’t even a metaphor anymore. #dragonsickness?
“BUT WAIT,” you shout, “please explain what this even is because I’ll admit I want your interpretation before I watch that video.”
I got chu boo.
So what is a bullet journal?
It’s a diy planner that YOU organize so that everything makes the most sense to YOU and you don’t have to be constrained by the boxes and categories of pre made planners!
You begin with a lined, graphed, or dot graphed notebook.
I choose graphed because I had one for reasons unknown to myself. #dragonsickness
Open the notebook to the first two pages, mark these as your Index. The Index is really what sold me on this outside the box planner idea. With the Index you can put things in crazy places as long as you have numbered all the pages! (So really the first step to this journal is number the pages) For example: On page 3 you may have started your daily log for Monday but throughout the course of Monday you find an extensive post it chain of books you want to read. Instead of manually planning out the rest of your days for the week/month/year and THEN writing the list of books, you can just make a list of those books on page 4 and on page 5 you can continue your weekly log with Tuesday. All you have to do, in order to not feel like a crazy person, is mark it in the index like so:
Daily Log -3, 5
Books to Read – 4
And everything is organized instead of in CRAZY-NONSENSE-YOU’L-NEVER-FIND-IT-AGAIN-TOWN, USA. Which is where everything in my previous notebooks lived and thus why I had no idea how best to utilize them.
You can click the link above or this link for further explanation on the other parts of the journal.
I have set mine up for August and will check in at the end of the month to let you know how it went. But so far I am feeling very good about it.
I have a couple goals I want to complete using this journal.
- Log my food for 30 days: to do this I set up my entire month of August in the journal already, which is not something they (the bullet journal pantheon) recommend because the point is to keep things short and adaptable. The daily entries should have a to do list, a couple notes of significant events that went on that day, and then you move on to the next day. BUT since the point of this journal is customization and organization for my life I set up each day for August as a 1 page entry and made a food log chart for each day. At the end of August I will see if it worked and if I want to adjust it/continue doing it for September. Right now my feeling is “I will want to create a more compact food log.” Hopefully I’ll be able to take pictures of my journal for you so that you can see what I mean when August is finished.
- Track my Bodyweight Workouts and Runs: I’m doing two different things for this. On my daily page I made a small note at the top indicating I am supposed to have run that day and a blank space for how far I ran. For my bodyweight workouts I created a log set up for each day I plan to do a workout so I can track my reps and how much weight I have used for each exercise. I planned out which days I would do each workout for the month because when you fail to plan you plan to fail right? At least for me if I don’t plan at all I throw my hand up in the air say “who even cares?” and go back to sleep.
- Track Habits that I want to form/am not sure I’ve been consistent with: To do this I created a graph. Habits on one side, dates on the other (only for the month of August). Every time I complete a habit for that day I will color in a square. Hopefully this will give me a better idea of what habits I am actually improving upon and help me find patterns in my dedication. Sometimes when I can’t visualize how well something has been working I tend to give up on it and assume it hasn’t been working at all, so this chart will show me how true or false my sentiments are.
- Track Credit Card Debt: I made graphs to chart how far along I am in paying off my credit cards. We’ll see if this helps, I hope it at least is an encouraging way to maintain my hope/determination to become debt free instead of slipping into a spiral.
And that’s it. 4 major goals all trackable in one notebook. In a month we’ll have a check in, see if this is worth the hype, find out what worked, what didn’t, and what changes I will make and goals I will set moving forward!
Let’s get ready to bullet journal!!!!!!!
Rachel Sommons Knows Nothing 