Bullet Journal: August Setup

This is the first month I decided to do a clean title page + calendar. I also thought the verse would take up a lot more space than it did, so after it barely took up half of the page I decided to add a monthly to-buy and to-do list at the bottom.

I really like the clean aesthetic and am incredibly pleased with how the colours worked together. Those were not planned, I kinda wanted to go with grey to match the colour of my walls haha and somehow the mint just popped perfectly. I really like this look; no wonder bullet journalists use it so much…

The centred calendar + ‘august’ with all that negative space gives it so much breathing space. I feel at peace when I look at it and it brings me so much joy. I think I’d definitely like to continue doing a page like this for the following months too, and next time I’ll better plan out the spacing with the verse.

I’ve gone back to the rolling weekly task list for now. I realised I wasn’t really using the daily boxes apart from a few select days like returning-keys day or IKEA-trip day, and the rest of the time I had felt a little paralysed or too exhausted to do anything beyond surviving my day-to-day tasks.

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Bullet Journal: July Setup

Woah! I actually drew out a proper spread for the first time in forever. Life has been far busier lately with all the moving logistics. You’ve possibly noticed that my posts have become more frequent recently in the sense that I am uploading new posts 2-3x per week, both for my blog and on YouTube. As such, I’ve had to use full weekly spreads to plan and write out my to-do lists.

I thought it would be a good opportunity to do a cover page with a Bible verse as I initially planned but only did once. Jacky and I have finished reading Exodus and we’re currently in the middle of Leviticus. But I just loved the way God revealed Himself and His character to Moses, so I chose those two verses to be the verse of this month as a reminder of who He is. May my heart be drawn to the one true God as He reveals Himself, and not whatever I might have twisted him into in my own sinful heart.

I’ve also had a lot more thoughts racing through my mind that constantly need to be dumped out somewhere, so I brought back my brain dump page. It’s possible I don’t have enough space here… plus I’m really fairly disorganised these days, so if I need to, I’ll create another brain dump page later in the month.

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Review: The Daily Paper Dotted Notebook

It has officially been an entire year since I purchased and started using this notebook as a bullet journal. I am still using it and enjoying it immensely, so it’s about time for a review, I think. The product I purchased was The Daily Paper’s A5 dotted notebook with numbered pages because, honestly, way too lazy to number all the pages by hand.

At the time of purchase, it was only $9.54 + tax, which, for what you’re getting, I feel is an absolute steal. As a bullet journaling novice, I wasn’t about to spend $40 on a dotted notebook, and this one turned out to be perfect for me. I’m slightly devastated that it no longer seems to be in stock and their website is currently down for updates because I can’t recommend this notebook enough.

I apologise in advance for the inconsistent lighting in these photos. I’m bad at photo editing, especially in Mac Preview. That said, I did try to get the colour of the notebook to as true-to-life as I could.

There are 183 total numbered pages, along with multiple other helpful pages that a BuJo may need. If you are an avid bullet journalist and enjoy creating your own spreads for everything then it probably won’t be the right fit for you. I’m a very basic beginner who had very little idea what I was doing, so the default spreads helped a lot.

The 120 gsm paper has been great for me, it’s decently thick and bleeding through pages is hardly a problem unless I’m really going for it with my highlighters. I switched to Mildliner Brushes a few months ago and they’ve been brilliant on this paper with minimal bleeding.

The vegan leather cover is delightful. It’s soft and durable, and while I have made sure to take good care of my notebook in the first place, there are barely any signs of wear on the cover, and it still feels as smooth and soft as the day I got it.

I’m also impressed with the elastic band and pen enclosure. It’s a thick elastic band that has not lost any of its elasticity over the past year (though to be fair, I am not a heavy BuJo user). The pen enclosure is large so I’ve been able to squish a couple of pens in there at a time, but you’ll definitely only want to hold pens with clips to keep them in place. A singular pencil will undoubtedly fall out.

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Review: XP-PEN Deco Pro S

It’s been a long time since I had a tablet, and I really felt like I needed one again because using the Apple Trackpad 2 was starting to hurt my fingers. After a bit of research I decided to go with the XP-PEN Deco Pro Small. It comes in a small or medium size, but as you can see from the above photo, it is really not that small! In fact, it’s larger in width than my new M1 MacBook Pro. I’ve only had it for a couple of days, so this review is just my initial thoughts.

It comes well-packaged, everything is individually sealed so I was very confident my product was brand new. Upon opening the box, you’ll find the tablet and a pen holder that contains both the pen itself and 8 replaceable pen nibs. The lid of the pen holder can be used as a pen stand. As well as the tablet being sealed, there is another layer of protective film over the surface.

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Bullet Journal: June Setup

How come we skipped from March to June? Simple: because I’ve been a lazy git.

Okay, that’s not necessarily true. March – May was kind of a blur. Not enough was happening and then too much was happening and it was all a little wild. I tacked on some April notes onto my March spread, despite April being my birthday it was the quietest month for me socially because we were knee-deep in house hunting and I was finishing up my green card application. I already had a few spreads that I was referring to for my green card app and house-hunting did not require me to use a bullet journal, so that was that.

I did actually do a spread for May, but it was such a busy period that I didn’t take a photo of the spread. I really liked the style of it though, so I have mimicked the style in the above June spread :) I realised that I only really use this journal as a to-do list, and I don’t even finish all of those in a full week period, so instead of having a new page per week, I’ve just put the w/c on the left-hand side column whenever a new week begins.

I’ve moved the calendar to the left hand side, because I realised it was unnecessary to write out the ‘MTWTFSS’ twice on the same page. It’s much easier to just have my tasks list under the calendar, where the days of the week are already written at the top.

The only difference between this spread and May’s is that I’ve done a more decorative ‘June’. May’s title was just written at the top right-hand corner, and I had some key calendar dates highlighted with notes next to them. It looked a bit busy but it was helpful for me. I don’t really have any monthly deadlines this month so I’ve forgone that for clean space.

Sometimes, that empty space should just be filled with peace instead of scribbles.

Muchos love,

Bobbie