So I think I am like many other people when it comes to bullet journals. Especially when it comes to ADHD and people that are neurodivergent or with mental illness.You get REALLY (and I mean REALLY) into setting up and using your bullet journal. It goes so well, you feel so accomplished and organized!! Until the next week comes.

and the next week...

and another one just for good measure.......

and then before you know it, four months have passed since you last even looked at your journal.


    I saw bullet journals as something that were hard, stressful, and most of all overwhelming. I liked the idea of them, but I never thought it would be something I could actually do. Maybe they would be useful for "normal" people, but my unmotivated ADHD brain could not keep up with that. It sucks because as a tool, I know it something that works really well for me! There is a part of me that wishes I could buy a premade bullet journal with all of the pages all set up and designed for me already. But I also know that something like that wouldn't actually be helpful for me since it wouldn't be customized to my own personal experience. It also sucks because I know EXACTLY where my problem lies.


So what was the problem?


    I tend to get really into looking at bullet journal inspiration. I see photos upon photos on Pinterest of these beautiful bullet journals, with their elaborate page layouts, cute designs, fancy script writing and drawings in the margins. And that is exactly where I get stuck. I feel like I become a perfectionist about it. I can't set up my next page because what if I mess it up! What if I smudge the ink or spell a word wrong? Or if I don't leave enough space or if I think of something else that I want to add in later? So I fixate on making the few pages that I'm currently using super elaborate and detailed with color coding and drawings and all the bells and whistles. And then I never use it again after that. 


    This year I am hoping to change that, and I have started up a brand new bullet journal! While I'm sure I won't be perfect with it, I'm really hopeful about trying it this time and I am going to really try and keep up with it. I realized it might not actually be as hard as I was making it out to be when I took a look at my work notebook that I've been using for the last few months. The small notebook with cute Sanrio Kuromi designs on the cover and in the pages has been my trusty little helper for a good portion of 2020. But it is definitely a mess, especially now that I am coming up on the last few pages of the notebook. 

The ole faithful Kuromi notebook that has gotten me through the last half of 2020.


    My 2020 notebook (which is only really half a work notebook, the first half of the notebook was used for random school notes from back when I was in college and then abandoned for a while when that semester ended.) is a disorganized mess. But despite being a mess, it has been super helpful for me. I start every day by going over a to do list and planning out each of the tasks I want to make sure I do that day. Then as I complete each task I would check them off. If I thought of something I had to do the next day, I would sometimes start writing out the next day's list early. These daily to do lists were super helpful for me in not only making sure I didn't forget anything I had to do, but also for showing myself what I had actually accomplished and completed. I would sometimes do a bunch of stuff in a day and feel like I hadn't done "enough" but ever since starting the to do lists I could start looking back on my lists and seeing just exactly how much I DID accomplish each day! and it helped me so much!

 

    In addition to my daily to do lists, I also used this notebook for a bunch of other work related notes. Plans for upcoming projects, lists of videos I was currently working on and which step in the process they were at (had they been filmed, edited, and uploaded), lists upon lists of ideas I had for content, outlines for photoshoots I wanted to do, props I was working on, goals I had. I could go on and on. And while those things were very helpful for me, this notebook was like I said earlier, ridiculously unorganized. The concepts were useful and worked well for me, but if I ever had to go back and find something it would be basically impossible to find anything. This led to me rewriting a lot of the same lists that I already had in there, which just added to the confusion. Also adding to the confusion was the fact that while I considered this my "work notebook" I also included a lot of things that weren't necessarily work related. I would include things like making sure I exercised or reminders about what meals I had planned for each day onto my to do lists sometimes. But I was very sporadic with that, so it isn't something I could reliably track in my notebook if I needed to.

This is one of the MORE organized pages in my old Kuromi notebook


    I think I'm finally at a point where the idea of checking a journal every day doesn't feel like a stretch, considering I've already been doing at least that much every day. I also feel that a lot of different page outlines and ideas would be very helpful for me keeping tack of certain things in my life. But HOW to get over that absolute mountain of my own perfectionism when it comes to making a journal like this? Well if my absolute mess of a disorganized little Kuromi notebook that has been by my side every day for the last five months has taught me anything, it doesn't matter how messy the notebook is. Sure it can be fun to make everything super elaborate and pretty, but that isn't very helpful if I can't actually use the notebook, is it? 


    I also got a lot of inspiration from one of my best friends who I saw successfully using a bullet journal. She told me some advice that I think was really helpful for me as I was feeling very resolute that this is something I wanted to do, and something that I COULD do. She told me basically that same idea. It doesn't matter what the notebook looks like if you aren't using it, and it also doesn't matter what the notebook looks like if it's actually working for you! As much as we all might want to be a cool Pinterest mom with a super cutely designed bullet journal, this journal is supposed to be something that is for YOU the person using it, not for the internet and for views and clicks and all that stuff. Sure, maybe I will smudge ink. Maybe I'll spell something wrong. Maybe I'll mess up the formatting on one page. But no one is going to be seeing it besides myself, so why does it matter? I can still use the notebook even if I may have spelled the word "February" wrong on one page. So with those thoughts in mind, I got started on my new journal for 2021!


My new bullet journal for 2021! It was given to me by a family member for Christmas this year and it has a cute flowery kitty cat on the front!

What did I do? What kind of pages did I put in my new notebook?


    I started by going through that old notebook. What kind of lists did I make in it? What are things I noticed myself repeating? And also what are things that looking back on those pages that I WISH I had tracked? That was really helpful for me to get an idea of where to start. Then I thought about, what were my goals with my new bullet journal? What did I want out of this? With this new notebook I knew a few things for sure. 

  • I wanted it to help me keep myself focused
  • I wanted it to help make sure I didn't forget important things
  • I wanted things to be organized
  • I wanted it to be easier to find things if I had to look up a past thing
  • I wanted to have everything in one place
  • I wanted it to look at least somewhat nice
  • I wanted to make sure it wasn't something that would overwhelm me
  • I wanted it to be something I could keep up with and would actually use
  • Even more than that, I wanted it to be something that I felt excited to open up and fill out each day

    With those thoughts in mind I started looking up some inspiration. I still wanted my notebook to look nice, so I have done some things in setting it up that aren't totally necessary. I've written the page titles in nicer handwriting with colorful pens and markers on some pages and put a few doodles here and there on some pages to make some of them look nicer, but definitely not all of them. I looked for page inspiration to see how other people were organizing the same data and information that I wanted to keep track of, and planned out some of my pages similar to those. I looked up some ways that people tracked their lists with different markers to signify that a task had to be done, was in progress, or was completed. And I also took some time to find a few particular pages of notes in my old notebook that I knew I would still need or would use for projects I'm currently working on. Those pages I then copied down into the new notebook with nicer handwriting and keeping it more organized. This is something I can already see being super useful to me because now that I know exactly where those lists are I know I'm not going to be searching forever for them or rewriting them over and over. 


    I technically started my 2021 bullet journal when it was still 2020. I think that was actually a really good thing for me to do, because as I have used it for the last week and a half I have seen just HOW helpful it has been to me and it has made me feel even more resolute to make sure I keep up with this throughout this year. Seeing how helpful it is and how easy it is to look up old information or keep track of things has already helped me so much both in terms of work and life, and makes me wish I had figured out a way to start this sooner! 

The cover page of my 2021 bullet journal

    I started my bullet journal with a nice cover page. This is totally unnecessary, but I do think it's good to let yourself be a little bit extra with a journal like this if you can. It's kind of a form of self care in a way. You deserve the extra attention to detail if you can do it! But you also need to make sure you don't get too hung up on that to the level of perfectionism. Anyways, the title page. It just says my name written in my favorite color, the line under that saying "2021 Bullet Journal", the date I started the journal on (December 22nd for anyone wondering), and a short list of what I was hoping to track in the journal- for me this was work, life, and health things.


    Then I started with a few general lists that I could go back to if I needed. A list of tasks I wanted to make sure I do every day (things like making sure I brush my teeth twice a day, eat full meals, drink enough water, upload social media posts, etc.) and a list of things that I wanted to make sure I did at least once a week (upload a new video to my YouTube channel, do a certain amount of cleaning, etc.). These two main lists have been helpful because if I am in the middle of the day and have the thought "I know I'm forgetting something today, but what is it?" (the rememberall problem) I can look back to these lists and see if I have done those tasks yet. Then similarly we get in to the first month! For my month list I wrote out a few things that I knew would be happening in that month or things that I knew I had to do. Is there any holidays going on this month? Special events? Birthdays? Anything that is particular to that month would go here!


    Now if you are like me and you are starting your bullet journal at the start of the year, it might be good to do a couple of pages for any start of the year stuff that you want to keep track of! I took one page to write out a list of each month in the year and under each month heading I wrote out lists of my friend's and family's birthdays! I think this will be useful for me because I always end up forgetting when people's birthdays actually are until after them. Then for the next page I wrote out a list of my 2021 new years goals and desires. Some of them are goals I can work toward while others are things that I'm just hoping will happen this coming year. If you would like to learn about my new years goals be sure to check out my last post! Like I talked about in that last post, tracking new years goals and hopes is something that has been very helpful for me the last few years. I like to look back at my old lists at the end of the year and see just how many of those things I actually did. It is also really helpful for me to have goals to work toward because it reminds me of what I'm doing all this for!


    After taking some time to map out some start of the year notes I went into my more specific charts and pages that I will be filling out each day. I started with my Habit Tracker. This is two pages I have gridded out, with a list of things that could happen and a box for each day of the month where I can check off if that thing happened or not. The first half of the page I used to list out some life things that I want to try and do every day. The items on this list are very similar to the earlier daily list I wrote out at the start of the notebook, but on this page I can check off if I'm actually doing those things each day. The lower half of the page is a list of health things I want to track. I don't necessarily want these things to happen (especially not every day) but I have already seen this be really helpful for me since I started my notebook. I tend to be a really forgetful person, so if I were in a doctor's appointment and my doctor asked me a question like "how many times a month do you get migraines?" I would never have an answer to that question. So for this tracker I made a list of health related things such as migraines, joint pain, bad sleep, and also things like bad anxiety or bad depression days. Obviously a section like this has really got to be specific to the person who is making the notebook, and it may not even be a thing you need if you aren't someone who has frequent health issues, but this is one of the parts that I am most excited about with my notebook that I think will be extremely helpful to future me! The last part in this section were pages to write one sentence a day. If you could describe your entire day in one sentence what would you say about it? So far the sentences I have written down for the days I've used this for have been about things that made me happy that day, jokes my friends made on that day, or just a short description of how I felt about that day.

My partially filled out habit tracker for the end of December 2020
(It is currently December 30th as of writing this article) Through this I realized I'm pretty good at remembering to brush my teeth in the morning, but I'm more forgetful at night! I never realized that before, but now that I know it I can try to be more aware of it!

My blank habit tracker for January 2021. Look at those pen smudges!! They don't matter! It's fine even with those! I had to tell myself it was okay, that I didn't have to rip the page out and restart it. This is all about accepting imperfection for me.



    The next part of my journal was the section for my daily lists. I knew this is something I would definitely be using every day, so it was very important for me to have space for those lists! I wanted to make sure I had enough room for everything I had to write down for each day, but it was also important for me to plan out the pages for these lists ahead of time. I used a colored pen and a ruler to evenly split each page into four, and then date each quadrant of the page with a date of the month. Having four lists on each page made it so I could fit a lot more into less pages and have a lot less blank space, and it made sure I could evenly split the pages too! Then I can just work my way through the journal as I get to each day, adding and checking off items from each day's list. 

The outline for my daily lists for January 2021! There are a few things I have written out because I know those things happen on specific days of the week (for example, new uploads on my YouTube on every Wednesday) but the rest of the lists will be filled out when I get closer to those days!



    The last part of my journal that I outlined was some pages for different notes. I'm sure that each month I will have different projects going on and different things I need to take notes on. So I left a handful of pages at the end of the month open to fill out with whatever additional notes or planning I need to do during the month. For my first month's notes this is where I copied over the important notes I needed from my old notebook. For me this was a a chart for my current video projects, a write up about a new project I'm currently designing, and progress notes on some cosplay crafting I am currently working on. I also used one page of this to write out a nice quote that inspires me that I feel like I need to be reminded of sometimes. If you're going to be looking at a notebook like this every day, you might as well add some positive reinforcement in there! You are great! You are wonderful! You deserve nice things! And you should know that!

That's great and all, but how will you keep from falling into the same problems?


    I think a huge part of my problem in the past was getting a notebook set up for one month or for one week, and then never touching it again and not taking the time to set it up for the next span of time. With this journal I decided to try and avoid that problem as much as I could and I wanted to have the pages outlined as much as I could ahead of time. After I planned out a whole month's worth of pages, charts, and notes I just decided to go right on ahead and outline the next month! Sure, I might not know what I'm doing on some random particular day in February, but I can still outline the pages and leave them for future me to fill out.


    By planning out the first month fully, I could see exactly how many pages I would need for each month. I know that I need this many pages for my tacking charts, or this many pages for my to do lists, or this many pages for my notes. By counting out exactly how much space each month would take up, I started just diving in on outlining as many months into the year as I could! Even if it's just putting the titles on the pages or drawing out the lines for the charts, those parts of the journal can be done whenever now that I know how much space I need to take up for each of them. 


    I think that is the biggest thing that will make this bullet journal different from all the bullet journals I have tried in the past. In the past I would design about a million different charts and pages for one month with way too much detail in them. For this journal I tried to consolidate as much as I could into as little space as I could. I also planned out the exact same types of charts and page outlines to be the same for each month. I also allowed myself to make mistakes. This notebook won't be perfect, but it will be useful and helpful, and most importantly it will be mine.


-Aesthel