I began bullet journaling at the end of last year. Led by the craze I created my bullet journal starting December, but organized it for the whole 2017. I watched a bunch of videos, got a lot of ideas, bought several tipes of washi tape and pens and spend a whole evening creating it – key, content, life goals, life plans, lists, brain dump, the whole nine yards.
My goal was to have everything in one place – a diary, a planner, a place to keep my notes, a place to write positive mantras, to plan my blog posts, to have reminders, to organize my life…. all-in-one in a moleskin notebook.
My other goal is to make it beautiful. From all the videos I saw, everybody’s bujo was a piece of art with drawings, colors, calligraphy and amazing straight lines, so I wanted the same!
But my experience with the reality of bullet journaling taught me several things…
It is so versatile and flexible!
Bullet journaling turns a blank notebook into what exactly you want and need and you can customize it all the time. The beauty of bullet journaling is that you make it your own and make it work for you! To be honest I changed something almost every month and learned from the previous to make it work even better.
I started creating week by week on a two page spread, but it turned out that it was too much, and I didn’t have so many things to write daily, so I switched it up and have a sheet per week.
I started with a monthly and weekly log, but the monthly turned out to be redundant, because I preferred to write the whole month in advance in weekly, and then have the notes and lists for the month after that, and left one page with important days in the beginning of each month.
I wanted to have habit trackers, but obviously was not consistent enough and dropped it, just because I never finished the trackers.
Your goals change over time!
One important thing that I came to realize and accepted is that goals and desires change over time. Blogging has actually taught me this, but I see it very clearly in the bullet journal. I started with yearly goals in the beginning of 2017, but as time passed by many things happened and some of my goals, desires and interest changed. Does this mean that I am not following through my plans – no, it means that I develop and in a year I do have different priorities and ideas, that a year ago. Life is a constant change, and we have to accept it and look forward.
Perfection with not my thing, and it is ok!
I have always wanted to have beautiful penmanship, to create amazingly beautiful and perfect images, to make everything as all the people I have seen online. But I cannot. My handwriting is horrible and no matter how hard I try it cannot be perfect, even and beautiful. It bugged me for the longest time, but in the end I accepted it and realized that I just make it work.
Your bullet journal is a reflection of yourself.
It is. To have a place in which to record important events for the whole year is an excellent tool through which to track your habits (though never to have completed a monthly habit tracker), write down your achievements and plan what you want to acomplish. And whether it will happen, it depends on the the time, the circumstances and yourself.
But mostly my Bullet Journal has taught me that no matter how many beautiful pens, calligraphic instruments or colors washi tape I have, what makes me happy is to go back months ago and see how much I grew up, how I’ve changed and how many memories I have stored in a notebook.
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