Bullet Journal: Holding My Life Together
Bullet journaling is another thing that aesthetic minimalist YouTubers have been posting about. This trend isn’t fake; shit really helps.
Let me get one thing straight: I’m not an aesthetic or artistic person in any way, but I am slightly perfectionist. It’s a horrible combination when it comes to trying things like this; nevertheless, I decided to give it a try.
How I Started
After starting college, I’ve been trying to find different ways to organize my life and school work for better performance. I found myself forgetting assignments occasionally and mixing up my school life with other non-school events, which made me feel like I needed different calendars for different parts of my life. Using the calendar on my iPhone was convenient, but I didn’t like how it wasn’t very customizable and how I also couldn’t distinguish events from tasks.
I wanted something that could combine every aspect of my life and more into a single place and also have it be customizable and easily accessible. Apparently, that’s what this system of bullet journaling did. It was pretty much presented as a system that maximizes productivity in every part of my life. Obviously, I had to give it a try. After the first semester of college, I needed some sort of change to my system, so I took out a fresh notebook and started a bullet journal in the beginning of January 2020.
How Does My System Work?
Y’all can definitely find different systems online, so I won’t go too much into detail. My system is very traditional with nothing too fancy. I basically have the key and the year-in-review in the beginning and each month afterwards. Honestly, I don’t use the key and the year-in-review at all; I just put them there when I first started to help myself get used to the system.
For the months, I basically just have a month in review page followed by some lists or random pages that I may find useful during the month followed by each weekly outline.
This is the link to the video for the system that I use.
It’s a very simple system that doesn’t require too much work to create. Like most people, I didn’t want to sit down for 15 minutes to draw an outline for the month at first. But as time went on, and I was able to look back on previous months, those 15 minutes of outlining the upcoming month seemed almost therapeutic to organize my thoughts and plans. I just turn on a playlist, grab my pen and ruler, and start drawing lines. It’s kinda sad, but honestly, these little things make my day. Sometimes I look forward to Sunday when I can plan out the upcoming week. I get it; I’m a weird dude.
Final Thoughts:
One downside was that I did realize that the notebook itself feels fragile because it is so important. Since all of my planned stuff is all jammed into one notebook, I realized that I’d be completely screwed if it broke or if I lost it. However, I quickly found a way around this fear by simultaneously recording important events in the calendar on my phone. It’s an easy way to have a backup system, and they both check each other.
Overall, I love it. I don’t know if I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, but it’s definitely something I’m going to keep doing for a bit. Most of my previous planners or calendars feel more and more useless during vacation months away from school assignments. However, I found that I keep this bullet journal close even during summer break. I think it’s because it’s so customizable and easy now that I have things like family events or photoshoots or church stuff or to-do lists all in one place. It’s like the holy grail of Josh’s planners.