It’s a bullet journal set up post!

I must admit, planner set up posts are my favourite ones to read. Hopefully this is actually fun for someone else to read!

After having my Leuchtturm 1917 for about three months it was time to finally set it up.

I had been hoarding it, worried I wouldn’t be able to find another. However, after finding them on Amazon I relaxed enough to actually use it!

I’d also been wrestling with trying to work out how to fit a bullet journal in with my Filofax. I didn’t want to lose the Filofax as I love the decorative planning I can do in it with stickers and kits and the such. After playing with a bujo last year I worked out that appointments and things didn’t really work for me in a bujo. Therefore, I decided to keep things like that in my Filofax and reserve my bullet journal for tasks, notes and collections.

I picked out a couple of bits that I liked from last year’s bullet journal which was mainly how I planned social media posts. Everything else I started afresh.

What is a bullet journal?

I’ve read so many of these posts now I feel like I have to put in the obligatory visit bulletjournal.com to read all about what a bullet journal is. I’d say I stay kind of close to the original concept of bullet journaling but there are a lot of people out there who blend it with more traditional planning. A quick visit onto Pinterest will show you all manner of beautiful weekly spreads that I just do not have the time nor energy to do. Bullet journaling is fantastic though, because it’s what you make it. You can have something elaborate and beautiful or you can pick up a pen and a notepad and just start logging away. I’d love to go into more detail and really explain it, but I just wouldn’t do it justice. The website above more than takes care of that.

The tools

As I’ve just said, you literally only need a pen and a notebook. As a stationery addict though, I have a little more than that…

I primarily went all floral with lots of Planner Society goodies!

When it comes to pens there’s three kinds I’ve been using in here.

First up is the Stabilo Fineliners. Nice fineliners are pretty much a given for bullet journals it seems. Stabilo ones are really nice quality, don’t really bleed or ghost in the Leuchtturm and can be picked up cheaply on Amazon.

If I want something a bit bolder, and also something I can write neater with, I go for Pentel Energels. I love these pens.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQLLyRuDxMa/?taken-by=lethbridgecards

If only these pens fit in the Leuchtturm pen loop!

I also jumped on the Mildliner bandwagon when I started bullet journaling. I was seeing them everywhere and had to see what the fuss was all about. I’m really enjoying these so far for adding a little extra colour to my spreads.

In the Planner Society wallet I’ve got my Planner Society stickers and stencils.

Other than that, I keep it really simple. I just use a few new sheets of stickers I made for use in the bullet journal and maybe some washi from time to time.

The set up

The first pages of the bullet journal had to be something around my goals for the year. I rewrote my goals for 2017 and then added in some more tracking elements so I can regularly review my progress.

I’ve obviously blurred out my actual goals as they kind of contain sensitive information. I’m trying a word of the year for the first time and thought passion would be a great fit. I constantly feel like I’m not really giving my all on certain things. I’m probably just being hard on myself but if I can try and do everything with passion, I’m hoping I’ll have more success this year.

I have four areas that I want to focus on and one or two goals in each area. The bits that I’ve left visible are the ways I’m (hopefully) going to achieve them.

The washi here is from The Planner Society, the letters are from a big pack of Amy Tangerine stickers, and the mini dew drops I made myself.

On these pages each month I’ll review each area’s progress and how I’ve done. Hopefully once I’ve done this self reflection, I can pick out some key tasks for the following month to help me get back on track, or progress even further.

To help keep me focused, I also have a daily tracker that relate to some of the ‘hows’.

I didn’t want to do a horizontal tracker so I split the month in two. I saw someone on Pinterest using dots instead of colouring in the squares and I really liked how it looked. Each thing has a different corresponding colour and I wish I’d written them in the colour I’d be using to mark them off! I end up squinting each day to try and work out the colour of the dots.

Daily/Weekly Tracking

The only kind of weekly setting up I do is my social media media posts. After stamping the week using my Planner Society stamps I have two lists – to post and to take. I don’t have a set plan of what to post each day, I just mark them off as and when I do post them. The to take list is great as I often have picture ideas on days when light is poor. I also buy or receive things I want to take pictures of through the week. So I make a note of them as I go along. Then come Saturday or Sunday I go through and take all the pictures I need.

From there I go straight into my dailies as you can see. My dailies are just pure bujoing really with lots of rapid logging. I tend to ‘set up’ the day the night before and make a list of everything I know I need to do. It’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve been sleeping better since doing this. Getting everything out of my brain the night before has been great and I continue adding through the day. They’re not always tasks that need to be completed on that day. As long as they’re completed within the week they get ticked off and don’t need to be migrated. I only migrate things that go over to another week.

At the start of the notebook there are the standard bullet journal signifiers. I’ve just added one of my own which is the exclamation point. This signifier I use to show an idea. So if I get an idea for a blog post, or a collection, I’ll mark it with a !.

Initial thoughts

So after 1000 words I should probably end this post! This felt like such a quick run through! I’m loving my bullet journal so far (two weeks in) and have so much more to talk about! I will save that for another post and will probably do a one month review of the bullet journal. Be sure to follow me over on Instagram for more bujo pictures. If you have any questions about the bullet journal concept, drop me a comment below and I’ll either answer, or include it in my next post!

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