WHAT IS A BULLET JOURNAL?
The bullet journal is a personal organization method made by Rayder Caroll.
According to him bullet journaling helps you
“track your past, organize your present, and plan for your future”
the bullet journal method helps you
organize, brain dump, and track your habits, mood, and more all in one notebook.
WHY IT NAMED”BULLET JOURNAL”?
it’s a good question in fact
after a small search and practicing it for about two years I can say that this name comes from two things
-usually, people use a dotted notebook for their bullet journal, so they call the system
“bullet journal”.
-In bullet journaling, we write most things as bullets, our tasks, our events, and such things.
and with this let’s move to the huge question
HOW TO START A BULLET JOURNAL?
let us take this as steps
step one: “Figure out what you want out of the system”
simply ask yourself
“What do I want to improve out of bullet journaling?”
Do you want to improve productivity? organize my life? or plan or other creative reason?
step two: “Bring your things!!”
bring any notebook you have, any pen you want, and some highlighter if you have
the notebook I recommend using an A5 notebook, for the papers use 120 g/m² to use watercolors or markers.
for the paper type, I recommend using a dotted page, you can go with lined ones.
I don’t think it’s proper to use a white page because it will be hard to divide it.
and be sure to get a notebook over 140 pages.
to decorate you can use washi tubes or stickers.
and let’s move to
HOW TO SET UP A BULLET JOURNAL?
the cover page:
the first page is going to be “The cover page” where you write your name, you can add some information like your phone number or email if you travel a lot, so you can find your bullet journal if you lose it.
The key:
flip around the page the next one is going to be your key
in another way a group of symbols you will use for the plan.
Ryder Caroll use:
(.) for tasks
(X) for completed tasks
(task) for cancel
(-) for notes
(*) for important
(¤) for events
(>) for moving tasks to the next day
(<) for moving tasks to future log
you can add, omit, or change the symbols to fit your life and your purpose of bullet journaling
WHY HE USE THIS SYMBOLS?
simply Caroll uses a dot for tasks because it’s easy to change to an X or arow
The welcome page(optional):
a lot of people do it and I’m one of them
just write the year and add a quote or a line from a book you will take as a role for this year.
The future log:
it’s where you write all the events, tasks, and other things you want to do this year
such as exams, weddings…
How to make it:
you need at least two pages for your future log
divide each one into three columns and write at the top a month and in the middle another one
it will fit 12 months, at the spaces left write your events and tasks using a short sentence.
The goals:
of course, all of us have some things we want to do this year.
like eat more healthy, get good marks…
so you will write all these things on that page.
How to make it:
you can write your goals inline simply or you can organize them in containers
like a section for health goals, a section for religion goals…
The custom collection (optional):
I think you hear this in a lot of places but
WHAT IS A CUSTOM COLLECTION?
a custom collection is a page you make to fit your life you can add it to your setup for the whole year or to your monthly setup.
There are many ideas, such as books, period tracker, and mood tracker.
now we can move to our monthly setup
The monthly log:
it has the same idea as the future log but it contains the events of the month
How to make it:
take a page write all the days of the month and after each day add the first letter of the day
after that back to your future log and immigrate the events from it to your monthly log
simply write the events of this month in your monthly log after checking them in your future log and adding the new ones.
The daily log:
the same idea as the future and monthly log
just write all the events and tasks, notes..for the whole day
it will help you a lot if you have a weak memory.
How to make it:
check your monthly log immigrate if there are some things need to then write your to-do list.
so we realize that the future, monthly, and daily log work together.
and we call this immigration
WHAT IS THE GOAL OF IMMIGRATION?
I know you think that it’s a tedious task but we need to do this
like if you keep immigrating a task for three consecutive days, you should think about it for a while and maybe this task belongs to the future log or it’s just a waste and you need to cancel it
humans are really lazy, so at the end of the day when you come to see yours achieves and plan for the next day
you will think about the tasks that you didn’t do if you feel hesitant about moving the task to the next day usually this task is not important at the moment.
and this is all you need to know to start your bullet journal
I shared a YouTube video I made an example of bullet journaling, you can watch it for more.
and my setup for 2024 for more ideas.
