Bullet Journal: Organization for 2015

my key of shorthand symbols

I want to preface this by saying I hate making titles for posts. I'm not a particularly pithy person, hence why all my posts are very matter of fact and decidedly not catchy. Find me a concise and fetching way to title a post on journaling and, and.. I don't know you can come blog with me I guess?

Anyways, in what is my decided addiction to tumblr I run a side blog which catalogs and archives all matter of material related to studying and being an academic. Study and organization tips, advice on test prep, and generally inspiring and motivational images for kicking your ass into gear for revising.
(Studyblr, is the term for that kind of blog, if you were interested)
And as a lot of people are on break, there's a lot of prep on the go for how to hit the pavement running in the new year, which of course, has incited the purchase of a number of daily planners.
But I was more interested in the methodology of staying organized. I have a filofax, which is now lying unused and though I loved the quality of it the one thing I hated was having to buy refills of particular pages if I wanted to continue with it. Enter bullet journaling. I'm not really sure how to sum up what exactly it is, per say because it's such a flexible system and (as you'll see) you can tweak it to fit your needs. So it's not quite as prescriptive as buying a planner with the pages already designated for you. Essentially, it's meant to be an efficient, short-hand method of staying organized, where you can see large groups of information "at a glance."

Here is the link to the official web page that will be able to describe the original system much more efficiently. However, there were aspects to that I did like, re: the monthly events in a column on oen page. I'm a visual person so what I decided to do was draw out an actual calendar to jot small things in and double as a tracker page. Specific tasks and events are on the other side of the spread with room for notes and additions.
The tracker page idea was something I stumbled upon in a random video but in that version the page was flipped so it ran horizontally, so you would have had to turn the actual journal to view it correctly and I just wasn't feeling that. So instead I designated my tracker symbols to the actual calender I drew out, which you can see below.

monthly two page spread

As you can see, I'm tracking the quality of my sleeping, completing my workouts, water intake, if I'm sticking to eating well and my overall mood for that day. And, yes, you can see I've scheduled in my nuvaring dates in already. Fight me, it's a medical marvel. I don't have any dailies pages yet, since January has't arrived yet but once I do get back into the school year and actually really get into this system I'll do an update post and let you know how I've been finding it and if I've made any changes. The main reason I think I'm going to like this system is it's flexibility and the customization aspect to it.

Like I mentioned earlier, it's not quite the same as the original system but it's fairly similar. Rather than set pages or whatnot I can put everything in the order that works for me and the shorthand, bullet style of the dailies pages works for me, as I'm that person who has a million sticky notes to remember little things. The kind of artsy, personal feel to it was another thing that drew me in; taking my sharpie and Staedtler pens and taking the time to make it aesthetically pleasing is kind of cathartic for me and feels more "me" than buying inserts or pre-planned journal.
 The pictures are a little out of order but below (starting from the left going clockwise) is my first dailies page I've drawn up, then my index and some collection pages I've started. The index is literally just the table of contents for your journal, which is another aspect I really think is going to come in useful. You just designated particular pages for certain things and than label at the front. My moleskine is blank so I number my pages myself but plenty of journals are pre-numbered. The collection pages in the bottom right corner are (for right now healthy recipes I want to try and a to-do list of things I need to pick up when I go back to uni. If I don't end up filling up that pages, I can half it off, draw up something else to put there and simply add it to the index. Like, do you see how efficient this is?!

dailies sample page // index // collection page spread

I don't plan on tracking my dailies pages in the index, that'd be too much, but collection pages, yes indeed. I think this will include things like self care ideas, lovely advice to myself, workout ideas/tracking and pages for planning papers for school. Hopefully this will keep my ass on track in 2015.

That's it for now on the bullet journal front! You darlings have any particular plan to stay on track in the new year?

r.