I've been dreaming about a bullet journaling for some time now, but I really could not justify spending 15-20$ on a notebook. Yet, there was no notebook with "bullets" available on the market. Using a lined notebook is a solution, but using it for bullet journaling seemed quite the hassle.
Lucky for me, today, on a random grocery run I had to stop at the dollar store and I found that they were selling bullet journals.. hard-cover, too! I got really happy and super excited. I went and told all my friends about it.
So... why bullet journal? Well, because they are practical, hard-copy, ways of planning the future, visually. An application, whether a web app, mobile app or computer software, can be useful, but it often limits us due to the way it's designed by the developers. When you use a bullet journal, as Natasha Bedingfield sang, "pen's in your hand, ending unplanned". The possibilities are endless.
I decided to go with the original version, for now, as described in the video below.
I will probably adapt and change in the future, but for now, this is a start.
We begin by going to the first blank spread and title it "INDEX". Wait! What is a spread? Well you know how when you open a notebook you have a single page on the right and the back of the cover on the left. Well that page is more or less useless. A spread is the first set of two pages that you can write on both left and right side of the page, rather than just right side for the first page and left side for the last page of the journal.
Instead, we will use a spread, which is basically the first set of pages that spread from the left to the right side of the notebook.
Alright. We go that covered. I was talking about an INDEX, right? Well, for that just put the title on both sides of the spread as a title and call it INDEX. You can design the title however you want. Just, as a side note, this page has no page numbers. We will use it this page a contents page for the content that is bound to come. Exciting, right?
Next page spread is the "Future Log". We will place this on pages 1-4 (pages 1-2 for first six months, and pages 3-4 for the next six months). How do we create the Future Log? I'm so glad you asked! We have to start by counting the number of bullets we have vertically and divide that into three. We will then split the spread into 6 fragments of the spread. The video shows this very well:
We will go back to the INDEX and write down on the left top FUTURE LOG - 1-4. To note that the future log is placed at pages 1 through 4.
Next, we will go the next available spread, after the Future Log, and create the Monthly Log, for the first month of the calendar. In my case it will be December, but you be the judge and put down whatever you want. Vertically go down and write every day of the month, from 1 to 31 (in my case) and then the day of the week for each: M T W T F S S. It should look something like this:
We will put that on the left side and that's our calendar. The right side will be our monthly task list. In front of each task we will put a simple bullet to mark it as a task. We can then go and write the month and it's calendar on the INDEX page: DECEMBER: 5.
Next page spread will have the daily journal. Date at the top and then list the items of your to-do for that day in bullet format. As per bulletjournal.com, the bullets are done like this:
Each one is handled differently. Tasks for example can be marked as:
I have not finished the full video, because this, for now, is more than enough information to chew on, but... there will be a follow-up (part 2)