Now that I’m finally no longer feeling paralysed over life, I finally put together a little design for a weekly March spread. It’s spring so I just drew with that in mind.
I really like how it turned out :) The ink materials I used are pictured. The Mildliner Brush pens I got from Amazon.com are still on sale for $22.98 so if you’re interested, now is still the best time to buy them. The Paper Mate pens I used are these ones but they’re very much optional.
I used my favourite Muji ball point pen for the calendar dates, and this is also the pen I use for writing all my tasks and the weekly contents of my bullet journal too. I didn’t even use a pencil for this one, or have any particular designs in mind, so I’m really glad it just worked out.
I realise that most people put their bullet journal designs up in advance, but… ah well. I’m not a trend-setter anyway lol.
Wow, am I posting this spread on the first day of the month for once? Goodness me, it has been a productive start to the month! You may notice a couple of new pens below… that’s right! Last week the Zebra 15ct Mildiner Brush Pens that I’d been eyeing for months went on sale (still on sale right now for only $23+tax; they used to be $42) so I took the plunge and purchased them.
It’ll take me some time to get accustomed to using them I’m sure, but so far I’m liking them. The red colour isn’t as vibrant as I was expecting/hoping but it’s fine. I probably should have tested it before just going ahead and drawing but what’s life without a few risks.
I really enjoyed setting this up actually. I didn’t really have anything planned when I drew it out and it looks a little empty from the above picture, but I’ve already almost filled the two pages to the max with the things I want to accomplish during this period.
Essentially on the left side I have my monthly to-dos, which are just high-level things I want to accomplish at some point this month, and on the right I have a weekly spread.
I’m still using the rolling task list I learned from Plant Based Bride here to track my weekly tasks. This will be to assign my monthly to-dos to a specific day of the week, and also break down high-level tasks into smaller action steps where necessary. When I complete them all of the action items for that task, I’ll also tick it off my monthly to-do.
I date some of my monthly to-dos if I know they need to be accomplished within a certain week so that I can make sure I assign it when that week comes along.
Finally, my February mini-resolution tracker will be done on a weekly basis, since I plan to post weekly updates on my blog, so I’ll track them on my weekly spread.
I’m probably making a pig’s ear out of this description, but I know what I mean and it works for me haha. Sorry if it’s really confusing, but it is basic and I really like it. It’s been a while since I had to break down my monthly to-dos to a weekly task list, so this is kind of exciting for me.
It’s been a while! Yes, I have still been using my bullet journal but I haven’t really been writing about it. I haven’t done elaborate spreads, and if anything they’ve become a lot more basic, but they’re fit for purpose. It’s a new year! But instead of doing a bunch of new year spreads, I kind of just continued my single page 1mo spreads because there isn’t enough going on in my life for each week to warrant its own double spread anymore.
I decorated January’s a little more than usual, but pretty much my spreads just look like this:
This is to be used for the entire month, and if I end up needing more space I’ll just add another page to it as I go along. I don’t add mood or habit trackers anymore because I don’t think I do enough of them per week/month to warrant tracking. That said, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have started to do my skincare a lot more now that I’ve broken out my new ESPA products heh, and especially since it’s been colder lately so my skin has been really dry. Maybe I will start tracking again at some point, but for now it’s not necessary.
One thing I will be tracking, though, is a monthly resolution. Last year’s resolution to memorise Romans 8 failed, but this year I’ll be aiming to have mini-resolutions on a monthly basis that are easily achievable. For January, I will be aiming to read Romans 8 once through every day. This is totally doable, and by the end of the month, having read it once per day, I’d hope that I’d be able to remember a good chunk of it already.
Plus, taking time to read it will give me time to internalise the words as well, rather than just memorising and spewing out words meaninglessly. It shouldn’t take me more than 2-5min per day, and if I really can’t find the time to do that on a daily basis there’s probably going to be a deeper heart issue that I’ll need to look into.The monthly resolution I can track at the bottom of the page by writing the days in and just crossing off each day that I’ve done.
I like my basic spread! It’s simple but it’s cute and it should work well for me, that’s the most important part I feel :) It doesn’t take long to set up and is easy for me to use. Hopefully this new year will bring a new degree of productivity.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
