Baby's First Bullet Journal

Hello!

I have been bullet journaling with relative consistency since January 2018. Since it has been awhile since my early attempts at bullet journaling, I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of my earlier bullet journals. Today, we are looking at my very first bullet journal.

This is my very first monthly spread. As you can tell, I barely left any room for a calendar. At this time, my bullet journal often prioritized aesthetics over functionality.

On the left page of this spread, I have written "january" in cursive and decorated it with a circular pattern. On the right page of this spread, I have drawn a small calendar for the month of January 2018, with important dates written inside.

Here is a typical weekly spread from my first month of bullet journaling. If you look closely, you may notice that I was constantly moving tasks from one day to the next, without actually getting them done. At this stage in my bullet journaling venture, I remember consistently not having enough room to write down all of my tasks.

This weekly spread is constellation themed. Both pages of the spread are divided into fourths. I have cut small pieces of black cardstock to make cards with a different constellation, drawn in silver marker for each day of the week. Next to each card, I have written the day's activities and to-dos. There are many checkboxes with arrows, indicating that the task was moved forward to a different day. At the bottom of the second page of the spread, there is a larger piece of black cardstock with the lyric "If you're lonely, come be lonely with me" written on it in cursive with silver marker. A planet is drawn beside the quote, and it is surrounded by silver dots.

This mood meter/sleep log spread was only effective for a couple months before I eliminated it. I found that, since my mood meter was filled out before bed each night, it often only expressed my mood right before bed. As a result, as the semester wore on, I wound up writing "tired" or "unproductive" in my mood meter with increasing frequency. Blog readers who have read my sleep posts may also be interested in my sleep log. As the log shows, I was rarely asleep before 1 AM, and I often has to supplement my sleep with long afternoon naps.

On the left page, I have written "mood meter" at the top and created 31 small boxes for each day of the month. In each box, I have drawn or written a little bit about my mood for that day. For instance, the box for January 14 features a snake with swirling, hypnotizing eyes and the caption "distracted". Meanwhile, the box for January 26 features a wrench and the words "what a weird day".

My monthly log for February 2018 remained relatively unchanged from my January 2018 monthly log, except for the fact that I spread it across two pages. Clearly, I had determined that I needed more room.

A header, with silver marker against a pink patterned background, reads "February 2018 Calendar". I have drawn a calendar, with three columns on the left page and four columns on the right page, and filled it with my important dates.

Here is a typical weekly spread from February 2018. I was still trying to fit a full week on two pages, but I quartered the page instead of dividing it into fourths horizontally. My favorite day from this page is Saturday, February 17. In lieu of to-do items, I wrote "I went to the garden on my walk and harvested 2 tomatoes, which I ate whole. I also went to see the keynote speaker for the Soka Education Conference. It seems like he has led a contributive life, but not a life that is conducive to public speaking". 

I have divided each page of this spread into quarters. I have labeled the first seven quarters Thursday-Wednesday, and the eighth quarter is filled with a line from "I Wanna Get Better" by The Bleachers. In the background, I have repeatedly written "i wanna get better" in cursive. Over it, I have written "I didn't know I was BROKEN until I wanted to CHANGE", traced all of the letters with black marker, and scribbled around the words "broken" and "change" to frame them in black ink.

This monthly spread from April 2018 was an attempt to "simplify my life" by having a less complicated monthly spread. As you can tell, my life did not become less busy by virtue of my choice to not make space for everything I needed to do in my bullet journal spread. Instead, I found myself scribbling things in the margins in an effort to make this spread work.

On the left side of this spread, I have drawn a decorative depiction of a raincloud for the month of April. On the right side of the spread, I have written a header that reads "month at-a-glance". Below the header, I have allotted one line for each day of the month, with a space between each week. On this page, appointments are scribbled out, and I have had to make many marginal notes to accommodate the lack of space.

This spread from April 11 and April 12 has many of the fundamentals (social media/media consumption trackers, morning routine, accomplishments as-needed) of my present-day bullet journal spreads. Still, it is infinitely more complicated than the spreads I create now, and I have put far too many tasks on each day.

At the top of each page, there is a header with the date. Below the header, I have drawn 10 boxes each for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Each box represents a minute that I can spend on that social media platform. I have also written down any events that I had that day. Each page includes a box labeled "watchlist", with the shows and YouTube videos that I planned to watch that day. On the left page, I have sections for "Morning", "French (for Friday)", "Fed Up Paper", "Environmental Policy", and "Accomplishments". On the right page, I have sections for "Morning", "Environmental Policy Paper", "French", and "Accomplishments". The overall look is messy and cluttered, with boxes, columns, and detailed lists dominating the spread.

I hope that you have enjoyed this look into bullet journals past. You can find more bullet-journal-related posts here. If you would like to be notified whenever I publish a new blog post, you can sign up to receive notifications by email using the "Follow by Email!" box on the homepage, or follow the Slanted Rays Twitter account.

Until next time,

Lydia