Bullet Journals

I participated in a small workshop where we created bullet journals. I am totally geeked about this art form! It’s an excellent convergence of self-development, creativity, organization, and a billion other cool things.

If you’d like to start one, first buy a dot journal and a pen that doesn’t bleed too bad. I prefer the Pentel EnerGel RTX Retractable Liquid Gel Pen. If you want to be fancy, you can also get stencils, stickers, and even printable planners to trace or stick in your journal!

You can make your bullet journal as simple or as complicated as you’d like — it’s YOUR journal! You can go in any direction you want. You can be as organized, or as random as you’d like. Think about what YOUR goals are!

The first rule of bullet journals is, there are no rules. I’m not using my journal as a calendar – I have Google calendar for that! I’m also not using it to track my exercise or sleep patterns – my Fitbit does that! However, many people do use these as calendars, or fitness trackers. I may track meditation — I struggle to find the 10-15 minutes a day to focus on that. 

I’m using mine to track fun things, like restaurants I go to, beers and wines I try, books I read, movies and TV shows I watch, and vacation memories. I’m taking old vacation journals and combining them into this journal so I can look over my memories more easily. 

If you have a dot journal and a pen, here’s how you can get started:

First, open to the first dotted sheet, and title pages 1-4 as an index or a table of contents.

If you want, label pages 5-8 as a future log. Each page holds 3 months. This is an overview of the upcoming year.

Number either every page, or every other page, in the journal. 

You can also do a monthly log and a daily log, but I skipped that, since I’m not using mine as a calendar.

Next, write down all the bullet journal symbols onto one page.

Then, finally, collections! You can start with movies, plays, concerts you go to, TV shows, books, whatever! Start with something you’d really like to track, and go from there. You don’t have to fill the whole journal up on the first day!