My first year of bullet journalling – what I’ve learned so far!

January 3, 2020

First of all, a very happy new year to you all – I appreciate you so much. Writing to no-one isn’t much fun, so it is lovely when I see how many of you come along to my blog for a little look around. Thank you! I hope you have an amazing 2020! …

I started bullet journalling for the first time last year, 2019. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what took me so long to jump aboard this method of getting organised. Maybe it’s because I used to buy a book called ‘Your Best Year’ by Lisa Jacobs, which had spaces for you to fill in all your planning and reviews for your business. Then sadly, it stopped being published and I needed something to take it over. A bullet journal was the perfect solution as I could write out my own pages to fill in and completely tailor make it to fit me! As I mentioned in February, I enjoyed doing it so much for my blog and business, I began a rough and ready personal one as well. I made YouTube videos last year If you’d like to have a look at my layouts for my bullet journal for blogging and business; and also for my personal bullet journal. And this is how I got on:

Well, I gave up on the personal bullet journal at the end of June. I had a break for Glastonbury Festival and I just never bothered doing the July layout. I didn’t miss it either!

What I learned from using a personal bullet journal

I found drawing out the layouts every month time consuming and boring, and I didn’t have the time to do fancy drawings and doodles to make it interesting.
After a couple of months I continued to tick off my daily task lists at bed time, but I stopped looking at the list during the day when I still had time to complete the things I hadn’t done yet. The gaps in my ticks weren’t persuasion enough to make sure I did them the next day.
However, on a positive note, those first couple of months was enough to get into a few good habits that had previously fallen by the wayside; and I’m still continuing them now!
I found flicking past the ‘Losing weight’ section depressing.
I never filled in anything of my ‘Savings tracker’!
Almost immediately after writing them, I forgot to refer to my plans and lists that I made at the beginning of the year.

What I’m taking away from the bullet journalling experience

I’m keeping the daily ‘Thankfulness log.’ I’ve just moved it to my diary. This is much better anyway, as I kept running out of room in my allocated space in the bullet journal, so now I can just keep going.
I’m also keeping the ‘Pat on the Back’ list, which I think I added later on. This is basically a list of things I’ve done, achieved, accomplished etc that day. Even things as simple and basic as cooking a proper dinner, or taking the recycling out, or filling up the dishwasher. Nobody says well done or thank you for doing that sort of thing (actually the family are pretty good at saying thank you when I cook for them as they know how much I hate it!) So I write a list of things each day, and as I am working on improving my self-esteem, this does actually help. And again, this list has moved to my diary.
I’m going to continue using the notebook for lists and notes that I don’t want to throw away straight away. Things like ideas for Instagram photos or research on holiday destinations – the sort of thing that I might want to refer to in the future.

Bullet journalling for blogging and business has been a success!

Keeping a bullet journal to stay organised with work and workish-related content such as this blog and my YouTube channel, was so helpful! On the whole, every day I filled in my ‘Task Tracker’ and ‘Activity Log’ and at the end of every month I wrote my review and planned the following one. However, I added a ‘Weekly Focus’ and ‘Weekly Review’ later in the year and I did sometimes forget to fill those out, but overall I’m pretty chuffed with myself!

If you’d like to see exactly how I layout my pages in my bullet journal, please take a look at this video I made a couple of days ago. I compare what changes I made with my page spreads from 2019 to 2020, so if you do a similar thing to me, hopefully you’ll find it useful.