Reminder: I'm a newbie at this. I've been using my bulletjournal since April this year, so I'm still in the middle of figuring everything out. I just thought I would give you a look at my method.
Last time I talked about
my step into the world of bulletjournaling and I gave a quick explanation about what this concept means. In one sentence: it is a flexible way to keep track of your life with the help of collections. And those collections are the topic that I want to talk about today, because they decide the structure of your bulletjournal.
To describe the meaning of a collection, I like to point out this quote from the
bulletjournal page:
collections are pages dedicated to related ideas, can take any form you need them to, and are not just limited to lists. They can be projects, illustrations, basically any kind of related content that you want to live outside of your daily journaling.
This means that you need to sit down and decide for yourself what matters to you; what you want to have in your bulletjournal to help you in your daily life. There are different collections that I see return across the bulletjournal community and I use them myself, because they are really useful for me.
1.
I always start with a page to introduce the new month. This is a great way for me to separate the months when I flip through my bulletjournal. I also find it relazing to do, because I try to come up with new ways to decorate the page. This time I went with a flower wreath.
2.
Then I draw a calendar for the entire month where I write down big events like birthdays, tasks I need to do somewhere that month, my goals and recap. Most of the times I decorate it with an inspirational/motivational quote. Lately I've been trying out color schemes, where I pick two colours that I will use on every page that month. It looks neat. July is purple with pink.
3. Then one of my favorite pages:
a habit tracker. Here you can add anything you want to keep track of and whenever you do something during the day, you color in a square. At the end of the month you can see how many times you did a certain thing.
4. I'm trying out something new;
a memory page, where I combine doodles and text to point out memorable things I did during the month. I combine this with
the books I want to read and TV shows/movies I want to watch. A lot of times I don't finish the list, but it is fun to challenge myself.
5.
Dailies. This is the part where you can really creative, because the ways you can use these dailies are endless. I'm still trying out different lay-outs and I love to switch up! Here are two examples of different lay-outs I've tried. The purpose is to fill these out with everything you have to do, in combination with the icons you choose in your key (
I talked about this in the previous post)
So, there are the collections that return each month in my bulletjournal. What I love about this system is that you can always add more or take away the ones that don't work for you. It is up to you how you fill in your bulletjournal and how much decoration you use. There is no right or wrong way, because in the end it is basically a to-do list.
Other pages I have in my bulletjournal to give you an idea of all the things you can write down.
Challenges. I'm currently trying out two Instagram challenges called 'plan with me' and 'rock your handwriting' and it is fun! Here you can see the page where I set up the Plan with me challenge and a page where I did a prompt for rock your handwriting.
Wishlists and lists where I write down all the movies I NEED to see, books I NEED to read, random things I want to buy at some point, etc. Basically, I love making lists and this bulletjournal is the perfect way to keep them all together. Here is a wish list with books that will be published in the next months.
And
random pages, like these two. One is for motivational purposes, the other simply to talk about my love for reading. I really like setting up these pages, because I get to practice different fonts and decorations.
So that is it for my lay-out! I have returning collections and then I fill in the rest with my love for lists and random ideas I want to collect.
Was this helpful? What lay-out do you use in your bulletjournal?
Next up: Different lay-outs you can use for your collections.
