The First Step: The Bullet Journal
I decided that if I was going to do this lifestyle change, I was going to do it right. I was going to get organized and as I was doing research on methods of organizing your thoughts, one phrase kept popping up everywhere I looked: bullet journal.
Essentially, a bullet journal is a journal that you completely personalize. A lot of people use them as a calendar, planner, diary, or a hybrid of those. I'm not really using my journal like that because I have a planner that I love but instead I'm using it as a way to organize the streamlining process I'm going through now.
To be frank, it did not come out as pretty as the ones you see all over the internet but I like it. It is also very empty because I wanted to show you how the setup turned out right as I started this year long project. As it gets more full, I will learn how I like to have my personal bullet journal organized and I may do an updated blog post later.
Let's start with the journal itself. I got for my birthday and it was given to me by a friend who got it while he was in Thailand. It is absolutely beautiful and obviously very special to me because it was a gift. The pages are not lined which I actually like; I think it gives me more freedom so I can freely put whatever I want in these pages and change them as I please.
I started by collecting my supplies: mostly different colored pens and sticky bookmark notes. I took out some colorful highlighters and colored pencils too but I didn't end up needing them today. Maybe another day. I organized my thoughts and decided I didn't need this to be a calendar or planner and I needed mostly to keep track of this year long project. I anticipated doing a lot of clearing out in the next few months so that's mostly what this journal ended up being: a record of the categories I would be clearing out and replacing.
When I had a better idea as to how I would be using my journal I set out seven different colors of the sticky bookmark notes and labeled them according to what I wanted my categories ( you can think of them as chapters) to be. The seven categories I came up with were: wardrobe, makeup + skincare, hair + nails, food + workout, blog, home + organization, and brain dump.
I then started thinking about what would go in each of the categories and took a ruler and drew lines to write my categories on so that it would look uniform. I intended on erasing those lines but I actually liked how it looked so I kept them. I numbered all the pages to make it easier to assign an equal number of pages to each category but I didn't include the page numbers in the index because I put a bookmark note by each category and that felt like enough. I distributed the pages equally across all categories so each category has 27 pages. I also included little subcategories under each category so that I would have an idea as to what each would hold but I did that in pencil rather than pen (which is what I did the rest of it in) because I knew that those subcategories would most likely change over time.
These categories are a bit of a sneak preview of what I plan to change in the next year and thus what I plan to blog. These categories are not rules I'm limiting myself to, but more like a prediction of what the next year will look like. I will do blog posts in the future as to how I manage each of these categories.
The last few steps I did where just figuring out where all the bookmarks would go (so on every 27th page) and creating fun labels on all them! Like I said earlier, it's not the prettiest labels but it will work and I'm very happy with my journal. The labels are the only content I have on the pages right now, so I will mostly be showing you just the labels.
The only category that isn't self explanatory in brain dump, but that is just going to be a miscellaneous section. So this is where I would put a to-do list, or possibly any story ideas I come up with when I'm out and about (because I'm an avid writer), or any ideas that have to do with any of my responsibilities can go here. It can be anything.
It makes me happy to see all the potential that the next year has to offer and I look forward to sharing all that progress with anyone who will join me on this journey. And perhaps it will inspire some other people to make some changes in their lives too. So whatever is going on in your life, I hope for the best. Good luck!
Essentially, a bullet journal is a journal that you completely personalize. A lot of people use them as a calendar, planner, diary, or a hybrid of those. I'm not really using my journal like that because I have a planner that I love but instead I'm using it as a way to organize the streamlining process I'm going through now.
To be frank, it did not come out as pretty as the ones you see all over the internet but I like it. It is also very empty because I wanted to show you how the setup turned out right as I started this year long project. As it gets more full, I will learn how I like to have my personal bullet journal organized and I may do an updated blog post later.
Let's start with the journal itself. I got for my birthday and it was given to me by a friend who got it while he was in Thailand. It is absolutely beautiful and obviously very special to me because it was a gift. The pages are not lined which I actually like; I think it gives me more freedom so I can freely put whatever I want in these pages and change them as I please.
I started by collecting my supplies: mostly different colored pens and sticky bookmark notes. I took out some colorful highlighters and colored pencils too but I didn't end up needing them today. Maybe another day. I organized my thoughts and decided I didn't need this to be a calendar or planner and I needed mostly to keep track of this year long project. I anticipated doing a lot of clearing out in the next few months so that's mostly what this journal ended up being: a record of the categories I would be clearing out and replacing.
When I had a better idea as to how I would be using my journal I set out seven different colors of the sticky bookmark notes and labeled them according to what I wanted my categories ( you can think of them as chapters) to be. The seven categories I came up with were: wardrobe, makeup + skincare, hair + nails, food + workout, blog, home + organization, and brain dump.
I then started thinking about what would go in each of the categories and took a ruler and drew lines to write my categories on so that it would look uniform. I intended on erasing those lines but I actually liked how it looked so I kept them. I numbered all the pages to make it easier to assign an equal number of pages to each category but I didn't include the page numbers in the index because I put a bookmark note by each category and that felt like enough. I distributed the pages equally across all categories so each category has 27 pages. I also included little subcategories under each category so that I would have an idea as to what each would hold but I did that in pencil rather than pen (which is what I did the rest of it in) because I knew that those subcategories would most likely change over time.
These categories are a bit of a sneak preview of what I plan to change in the next year and thus what I plan to blog. These categories are not rules I'm limiting myself to, but more like a prediction of what the next year will look like. I will do blog posts in the future as to how I manage each of these categories.
The last few steps I did where just figuring out where all the bookmarks would go (so on every 27th page) and creating fun labels on all them! Like I said earlier, it's not the prettiest labels but it will work and I'm very happy with my journal. The labels are the only content I have on the pages right now, so I will mostly be showing you just the labels.
The only category that isn't self explanatory in brain dump, but that is just going to be a miscellaneous section. So this is where I would put a to-do list, or possibly any story ideas I come up with when I'm out and about (because I'm an avid writer), or any ideas that have to do with any of my responsibilities can go here. It can be anything.
It makes me happy to see all the potential that the next year has to offer and I look forward to sharing all that progress with anyone who will join me on this journey. And perhaps it will inspire some other people to make some changes in their lives too. So whatever is going on in your life, I hope for the best. Good luck!
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