anyone else doing the bullet journal thing?

Spoiler: some more spreads I did

Weekly spread stolen from this.

 

So I started trying one of these about a week ago -- I have ADHD so I desperately need some kind of organization system or I will forget everything, but paper planners never worked for me, and online to-do list apps never work quite how I want. So bullet journaling seemed like a good idea for the customizability aspect, plus I love tracker charts like burning.

Some pics of my setup so far: (layouts pretty much all shamelessly stolen from instagram)


- Left side is for tracking habits + when I last watered my succulents
- Right side is for visualizing how fucked up my sleep schedule currently is


- Mood chart + tracking what stuff I've ordered from the internet lately


- Weekly spread; this is from last week, but I accidentally copied down all the dates for this week instead ahaha


- Daily logs; top half is to-dos/notes and bottom half is diary-type stuff

I also have various log pages for stuff like how my plants are doing, what I did for Japanese practice + new words I learned, and tracking effects of new meds.

I'm really loving it so far! It easily replaces my Todoist account for basic "remembering what I need to get done today" stuff, while also letting me do a lot of extra things that really helps my brain out. The weekly/monthly spreads are good for quickly seeing what I need to do later on, as well as helping me actually like, remember how the passage of time works. And the diary and log pages are really good because I can never remember what I did yesterday or when I last did X thing, and now I don't have to remember any of it because it's written right there. I was expecting having to handwrite everything (and witness my own terrible handwriting) would bother me, but it actually hasn't been an issue so far, so I am tentatively hopeful that this might actually work as a sustainable system for a while.

(I'm gonna give it a few more weeks before I go out and buy tons of cute washi tape and stickers though. I reeeeally want them, but I don't want to spend too much money on something I'm not sure is going to work yet in the long-term. So I am being good and restraining myself to pawing at Etsy.)

 

I'm glad this seems to be working for more people ;w;

like for me I think it's been crucial for getting me out of the nearly four year funk I was in after graduating college

it gives me back some of the structure I desperately need and it, like, prevents days and weeks and months from slipping through my fingers as much

 

well, it's been about a month since i started the bullet journal thing, and it's helped me stay organized quite a bit! i'm not doing anything fancy with it, but that's what works for me. i enjoy seeing yall's fancy spreads though. ^^

i'm also gonna try out applying some of the ideas of bullet journaling to keeping better notes (i'm teaching myself machine learning/AI stuff and realized i need to actually do this in an organized manner or else i will forget everything nigh instantaneously). i got a new notebook for it today! i did my page numbers and index headings in blue, but the pen bled through enough to make reading the numbers kind of annoying. :/ oh well. (i realize i could have stopped after the first couple pages and used a different pen but by then i was committed shh this totally makes sense.) also the new notebook is purble. :3 i wanna print out amethyst to tape in there, even though she has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter.

 

My spreads for this week and last week. I want to do more actual journaling, I'll probably set up pages between the weekly spreads for it.

 

@Ruevian idk if you know of them already, but Evil Supply Co. might be what you're looking for re: planner supplies, but gothy. they don't have much, but what they do have is thoughtfully designed and adorable as hell.

 

DELIGHTED GASP

 

I'm in the process of moving to a new state, so I decided Kiki's Delivery Service is a good theme for this month.

 

That looks so cool!

 

*0* that looks lovely, definitely one of my regrets of my current bujo is that its pretty tiny and can't really fit too much Fun Aesthetic.....

whispers next time

 

Me too @rats

 

I'd been mostly ignoring the bullet journal thing because I don't actually do much day to day, and I was like "this will just be yet another depressing reminder of how little goes on in your life", but this thread has made me realise how useful it could be as a symptom/sleep/mood/meds tracker! I've tried a bunch of varying apps for them but I can never find any that work for me properly. Sleep trackers don't work too great if you slip around the clock a lot/take naps regularly, and mood trackers are ??? because why do "anxiety bad, depression isnt too noticable" and "too sad to move but not very afraid of stuff" look exactly the same on the chart? It's been frustrating because what I want in them is *so* simple but nothing does it right

But with one of these I can make my own graphs!! I can keep track of the things I personally need to keep track of without pushing an app to do things it doesn't want to do!! I don't need to focus on the day to day stuff at all if I don't want to (or I can just allot a tiny space for the few things I do need to track) and best of all I can change stuff up easily if I find I need to keep an eye on specific things!

I just bought myself a Leuchtturm1917 (in dark grey because I'm boring will spice it up with cyan stuff bc thats The Best colour theme), which is more than I'd normally spend on a notebook, but I'm hoping it'll persuade me into actually continuing to use it.

I'm excited :D

 

@whyguy aaaa that layout is super nice!

This sort of thing is the reason I decided to try one, too. I don't have a ton of day-to-day stuff either, so my journal mostly has a lot of trackers. (Seriously, I just finished setting up March and it ended up being a two-page monthly spread and then six pages of trackers. And then two pages for a weekly spread, which has more trackers on it...)

It definitely works well for sleep and mood charting for me! I never had much luck with mood trackers before for the same reason you said -- the premade ones don't track the stuff I want and don't distinguish well enough between different types of bad. But I made my own little chart in my bujo that keeps track of exactly what I want it to, and it's actually been helpful to me, unlike the stuff I've tried before. For sleep, I do have an app I like for the actual data collection, but the charts it produces are kind of hard for me to read, so drawing my own charts helps me visualize my sleep patterns a lot more easily. (And I feel you on the naps thing, it is annoyingly difficult to find sleep apps/charts that handle weird sleep schedules properly.)

I hope the journal works out for you! Have fun drawing all the graphs :D

 

So my thing isn't really a bullet journal due to size constraints, general aversion to organisation and feeling overwhelmed, but I'm guessing it still sort of fits here? Planning on using it as a very simple reminder of things to-do/coming up the next day, a mood tracker and just general journal thing for complaining (usually about myself). Let's see how it goes.

Spoiler: I wish I had the patience to do intricate designs, but a simple bulletpoint list + an area to draw on is about as much as I can do.

 

Used my journal to put together cleaning plans! :D

 

another kiki spread c:

 

I start back to school first week of april so i am excited to pop something on my dailies that isn't just the best part of my day.

 

my own tiny cute spreads :D

 

Ok so I just got an amazing Zelda-themed journal as a gift, and @Ducks suggested using it for journalling and I am really nervous about how do the thing.
Can anyone help me out, just very small starter's tips?

 

The first couple pages of the thread have some "how to get started" discussion, so I'd definitely suggest looking through those if you haven't already.

Some general links about why/how to get started with bullet journaling that I found useful when I started:

Getting Started
WTF Is A Bullet Journal And Why Should You Start One? An Explainer
Why the Bullet Journal is the Best Planner for ADHD Brains

Specific tips would depend what you want to use it for (writing about what happened today? keeping track of stuff you need to do? tracking health stuff? there are many possibilities), but my general advice would be to start small and see what works for you. Try out different things to see what's more helpful for you personally. (If you don't to "ruin" pretty journal with early experimenting, you can just work on regular paper for a few days until you have a better sense of what works for you. I did my journal on graph paper for about a week before moving into a Proper Journal, and that really did help a lot.)

...in other news I realized I never actually posted my March spreads in here and I must remedy this, brb