Hello hello! This post is late, I do apologise! I have no excuse except I was in the throes of an awful YouTube addiction last week, so I never got round to writing this post. Then I quit digital entertainment (story for another time) and I’m finally back on track with writing.

September’s set up is fairly different because I realised that I really wasn’t using my journal much in August. Probably because of aforementioned YouTube addiction that was causing me to not want to do anything except lazily let my brain rot through hours of entertainment on a daily basis so production level was at an all-time low, but also I realised there were just some pages that weren’t working for me.

Bullet journalling is all about exploring and amending to fit your individual needs, so for September, I have made a few amendments:

1. Removed my reading and dates tracker – I realised I really… didn’t need those.
   • In terms of reading, it was to track reading books as a habit, but it’s no longer something I care to track. I am not really interested in how many pages of a book I read in a month anymore.
   • In terms of dates, Jacky and I hang out together regularly at home and we still aren’t really going out-out due to COVID; I realised it wasn’t really important for me to track all the different TV episodes we were watching together and put a ‘date’ label on them.
2. Added a “Bobbieness post ideas” section – so I can write down post ideas that I want to do for the month without necessarily scheduling them for any specific day.
3. Added a ‘key dates’ section, as well as a mini calendar on each page. I wanted one, so I added one. It makes life much easier than having to refer to my Google calendar each time I wanted to check the dates.
4. Shrunk my brain dump section – I’m trying out a notes section on every weekly spread so I don’t need a large monthly brain dump page anymore. I’ve mainly been using those for recipes and meal planning anyway.
5. Changed up my habit trackers – I didn’t want to keep turning to the front page, and I realised I was trying to ‘track’ too much. I decided to just turn the habits I wanted to keep tracking into tasks on my weekly spread, but noting which ones I wanted to track on my month summary spread.

Goodness, where did July go? It feels like time is passing so quickly and yet slowly at the same time. So what happened in July with regards to my bullet journal? Well, it turns out I ended up using it much more than I had anticipated I would.

As I wrote in my July setup & August draft post, I really liked the rolling weekly tasks spread by Plant Based Bride and was doing that for my blog/YouTube notebook. However, that one wasn’t a dotted notebook so it was getting messy, so I decided to put all of that into my one bullet journal.

I also began to realise how important it was for me to have more space for my to-do’s and be able to assign the tasks to a particular week or day. As such, July ended up being an additional 6 pages to accommodate the weekly spreads.

I also wanted to give myself ample white space and I loved the extra breathing space the weeklies provided. So, without further ado, here’s my August setup:

Click here for my overall setup & June half-month spread.

It’s getting to the end of the month (what!) and I figured I’d set up my July spread in my bullet journal. I am only planning to use it for monthly trackers because I have other notebooks for other things, so figure this one journal can last me a long time.

There’s a bit of a story behind the setup of this one, but I feel that as I’m getting more accustomed to my journal, I’m also learning and better understanding how I want to use it. If you just want to see the spread, here it is! My original draft and the final spread:

July’s colours were green, so I just did some basic doodles in green and left it at that. I used a light and dark green Paper Mate pen (I have this set), and a green highlighter.

I don’t plan to change the habits I’m tracking for the moment so they’re the same as last month, but I’ve written them on alternating lines on either side of the tracker so each row has a bit more breathing space. I’ll be indicating each habit done with an ‘x’, as per the x’s by my “habit tracker” title.

For July I highlighted the weekends of the month by outlining them with my dark green pen, which I felt would be helpful for myself. I went back and did the same for June with my purple pen too. The washi tape conceals a semi-private task.

Now onto the story and my August draft…

Yes, pretty late to the game but I have now hopped on board the bullet journal train. Actually I started watching BuJo videos for entertainment a few months ago because I really enjoyed seeing the creativity of YouTubers but also love seeing how people organise their lives.

But what I really found could have been helpful for me was the habit trackers and mood trackers spread. I really liked the idea of tracking my habits (and also having on paper the dates I watered my plants rather than arbitrarily remembering, “Oh, I think I watered it a couple of weeks ago.”)

I started trialling just the habit and mood trackers in mid-April on a very basic spread, and again in May… and June… before, finally, I purchased my own journal.

(I also prepped a July habit / mood tracker while I was prepping my June one, but obviously now no longer need it.)

I have separate notebooks for my devotionals/misc/blog/YouTube stuff, which I’m keeping separate because I want all of my related materials to be in one place. However, I also have a random monthly to-do list that didn’t fit in with the other notebooks as well as a period tracker which I had been tracking in yet another notebook for 7 years now, so I decided to buy a bullet journal to keep all my misc monthly stuff in one place.

What I discovered the few months I tried it:

1. I really did not need the mood tracker – my mood is typically very stable except the day or two leading up to my period where I’d get a bit more emotional.
2. I did not find it helpful to track watering my plants because I have so many at this point and they’re all on different watering schedules.
3. Using so many different colours, whilst looking pretty, is a bit of a pain in the rear to fill in everything.
4. I stuck the tracker paper my wall or on my desk so it was even more of a hassle to fill in at the end of the day because I’d have to be in the study colouring with 5 different highlighters.

Once I committed to buying a journal, I did a bit more research and realised that I could just make my habit tracker even more basic hahaha. So just one or two colours was more than enough, and I can just stick my colours of the month in the pen loop and take the journal with me to fill in before bed. I also really liked a few general tracking spreads that were inspired by other YouTubers so I incorporated some of those too.

With all that in mind, my bullet journal has been split into 2 sections: the overall trackers, and the monthly spreads. The notebook I purchased is this one from Amazon (only $9.54!) which, given the simplicity of my needs, I felt would have been perfect.