My Bullet Journal 2017/18

"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall" - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

My bullet journal has sadly passed away. My water bottle spilled in my bag soaking it and bleeding purple fine liner all over my pretty drawings and neat boxes. The pages are crinkly and wavy and crisp in the wrong way. They do in fact resemble the leaves that are now starting to fall from the trees. It was making me sad to look at so I decided not to continue my journal through until the end of this year, but to start, as I have always done, with a fresh system in September. 

I may no longer be in the academic world, but the academic year always made much more sense to me. Autumn is the time for fresh starts, for shedding useless things and starting anew. I have put aside my crinkly journal to start my life over again, and here I will explain how my new (dotted this time, not squared!) bullet journal is organised. 

Yearly Spread

My front page. I don't anticipate using the monthly layout you can see on the left as anything more than a reference, but along with the 2017/18 title to the right I just needed something at the beginning of my journal before I jumped right in to September. It's like the copyright, title page of a book.

The space underneath the 2017/18 is for quotes, the cream paper you can see is stuck in with masking tape so I can change it throughout the year. I've started with a long extract from the book The Secret, which is supposed to be looked at before I go to bed and first thing as I wake up.

The quote is as follows.

"Every night before you fall asleep, give heartfelt thanks for the wonderful day you just had (no matter what kind of day you had). Think about the next day, and intend that it is going to be wonderful. Intend that it is going to be the best day of your life. Intend that it is going to be filled with love and joy. Intend that all good is coming to you and everything is going to flow perfectly, etc. Then when you wake in the morning, BEFORE you get out of bed, again declare your intentions for the day and give deep thanks as though you have received them all. As you do this, you will begin to create your life deliberately, and you will experience first-hand the power that is within you to create the life you want."

Post-it dump page.
Pages like this exist because I know that sometimes I will just be too lazy to put something where it is supposed to be right away and stuff will just jump out of my brain at inconvenient moments. My brain is a crazy place, which is why I NEED this organisation to stop my life falling apart.
So for this page, whenever I have random notes I have written to myself, I can keep them here so I don't lose them.

e.g. one of these notes is for October but I haven't drawn my October pages yet so have nowhere to schedule it.

Monthly Spread

Goals and Events. This page is new this year, and took a lot of thinking about. In the end I decided I needed a better way of recording all day events and leaving scheduling and appointments for my weekly pages which we will see next.

Similar to my yearly page with months on, I like the visual of seeing the month at a glance. I find it easier to plan ahead.

My goals, (this is honestly a whole other blog post) but basically, I have 5 goals which come under the heading of Job, Money, Writing, Blog, Instagram. Hence the 5 colours. In order to meet these goals I have broken them down into steps for each month and in this box I write the specific steps to reach my goal that month. e.g. Writing, my goals is to practice it so it becomes a habit. I want to write 3 poems a weeks, so my goal for Writing for September becomes - write 12 poems.

My monthly/weekly spread. Each month involves one quote page, 4-5 weekly pages which are folded and one page for notes .

Here is my monthly quote page, it serves no organisational purpose but is useful when I am running out of instagram posts for that month. I just like having a front page, a theme for the month, something which gets me in the mood for that season. Whether it's Christmas, Easter, Summer, I enjoy searching for the appropriate quote. (Check out my quote pages from last year here: https://words-that-dance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/above-we-have-my-quote-of-month-for.html#more)

I've experimented this month with watercolour as opposed to fineliner after my traumatic experience where the colours ran everywhere when my journal got soaked.

Schedule and Appointments. After my quote page, I take 4-5 pages depending on the month, and I fold them in half to the left. Then I draw boxes as you can see for 7 days and title each one with the day of the week and the date in the top left hand corner.

This half of the page is for my schedule and for writing down appointments at specific times. It is more detailed than the previous page with my monthly spread.

If we open up the weekly page we find my Deadlines and Tasks.

Deadlines. These are things like blog post publishing days, job application deadlines and writing competition deadlines. Having them right next to my daily tasks helps me organise my tasks in terms of priority as well as motivating me to complete them on the scheduled day.

Tasks. I turn my journal anti-clockwise and write my tasks down the page towards the centre of the book. It may seem a small space but I find this actually prevents me from overloading myself with unrealistic amounts of work. I used to use boxes which I would colour in when the task was completed but a) waste of ink and b) took up too much space. Also I always felt like the empty box was staring at me, judging me. SO I decided to use the other classic bullet journal method of dots for tasks and crosses for completed tasks.

Here is my key for reference:

Notes Page. Similar to my post it dump page, this is for me to write anything I need to over the month, tasks I haven't scheduled yet, ideas, things to buy, events to arrange, anything.

Doodle Page. This page is used to record how many Instagram posts, poems and short stories I write a month. The actual drawings will change depending on the season to fit the monthly theme. Here, the leaves are for recording my Instagram posts with twenty eight potential leaves to colour in, the swirls are for the poems, three per week and the two lines on the left are for the two short stories I should be writing every month. (Below you can also see an example of my August themed doodle)

Gratitude Page. At the back of each weekly page I write my gratitude list for each day. I haven't filled it in for this month yet as you can see but here is an example from my previous journal of how I use it. I would write small things which I had been grateful for that day and then draw a star underneath, one for each thing.

(ok this will SOUND stupid but trust me it works.)

As I drew each star I would focus on the thing it represented and really try and feel gratitude for that event.

Back of the Journal

Here I have various useful tables and pages that I will need to use throughout the year. I haven't completed this part yet and I expect I will add more pages as the year goes on but here is the journal so far. 

Part Time Job. This is pretty self explanatory, One box is to keep track of the jobs I apply for and the other is for any interviews I get called to. This page is a separate thing to my next one which is....

Career. THIS page is for full time, grad level jobs and relevant work experience. Similar set up though, a table for jobs I am applying for and a table for interviews, I also have boxes at the side for websites and twitter accounts which post updates on jobs I might be interested in.

I have a space at the bottom for an inspirational comment; I'm thinking I will tape in a different one every week.

You see at the top where there is bunting? The bunting also has quotes in:


Lady Catherine De Bourgh: "Obstinate, headstrong girl!"
Richard Gilmore: "What she tackles, she conquers"
Elle Woods: "What? Like, it's hard?
Alfred Tennyson: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"



Here is a list of other pages I plan to make:

Travel Page. 
The way I used this last time was that I would stick post it notes of my train times on top of an illustration. Below you can see last year's, the countries are filled with the lyrics to Hey there Delilah.

Library Page:
To prevent me from getting massive fines I NEED a table of books I have borrowed and their return dates. I miss the stamps we used to get :(

Birthdays and Gifts:
I need this because I have deleted Facebook from my phone and will no longer get the reminders of birthdays, plus this page may help me to give gifts actually within the month of someone's birthday.



And I'm sure there will be many more pages I will add to the back.

I also know that the way I use this journal will change over the year, just as it did last time, but for me that is the joy of the bullet journal. I love being organised, but I love to be flexible too, my system needs to work for me, not me work within it. I hope my pictures inspire you with your layouts or you might just look and think "why would anyone ever do that, it looks way too much hard work?"

I'll tell you why. Because it's pretty. so there.