#bujoformat

[hawtchocolate]

I've been leaning into the roaring twenties aesthetic and varying the headers on my dailies. It's fun to have a little structured doodle time/space each day

[janedoeph]

My January spread for 2019! It's my first time doing a bullet journal and I like to keep things simple so here it is 😊

[hawtchocolate]

In my future log, each month’s list usually looks pretty short until that month is a few days away, because I only make a monthly spread the on the last day of the previous month, or sometimes the first day of the new month! But when I migrate notebooks, that effect is even more extreme. I switched out of this notebook at the end of December, so my January future log list is way longer than usual!

[hawtchocolate]

This last bujo kinda...fell apart a little earlier than I planned. I went on vacation before New Years, and I’m always bad at keeping up with my bujo when I don’t have a regular routine or todos. Then I went to visit family, so the problem persisted. So instead of barely squeezing everything in, I had a couple spare pages at the end to scribble some ideas for how to organize the next volume of my bullet journal. Spoiler alert, not much is changing!

[hawtchocolate]

The first spread of my fresh new notebook is, as usual, my index! I have kept most elements of my usual index--you can see my finished index from Volume 5 below. I did change a few details though:

I used washi tape to divide my lefthand page into two columns because I’m not sure yet whether I’ll need two columns for my index.

I moved my dailies index to the right so I have a natural third column for my collections index just in case, and can add in my Key whenever and however low down on that page that I want, when I figure out how much index room I’ll need.

And I remembered to end different months on my dailies index wherever they actually end, including February, which is 29 days this year!

[hawtchocolate]

How do I mark up the mini-cals in my future log, you ask? I only put Jewish holidays on the mini calendar itself, and use half-boxes to remind myself which sunset actually starts each holiday. And I put an X through each fast day so I don’t get excited thinking it’s a fun holiday and then check below and realize I can’t eat

[hawtchocolate]

This is the next evolution of my birthdays tracker! I had to expand it into a two page spread because I was tracking too many birthdays (and anniversaries) to fit on one page anymore! That meant taking the “gift ideas” spread I usually had on the opposite page and squishing it underneath, with four columns to write down ideas. I like it overall, what do you think?

[hawtchocolate]

planning to visit family next week and seeing everyone takes so much planning and scheduling! I used my clear sticky notes to make appointments that I could move around.

[hawtchocolate]

My back pocket

*I forget where I saw this idea, but it’s definitely not my original idea!*

I try not to buy a lot of new supplies, but I still have enough that re-swatching everything whenever I switch notebooks quickly stops being fun. When I reordered the same notebook for my third volume that I had already been using in my second, I used the last few empty pages of my second volume to swatch each collection of pens and markers I have, cut them out, and store them in the back pocket of Volume Three.

It’s been so convenient! I don’t have to re-swatch, plus I can pull out whichever cutout(s) I need at any given moment and hold them right up to the page I’m working on. I can even align them to each other to see how colors from different sets might look together, or whether they match.

Side note:

I also keep some sticky notes on the pocket (black, which I write on with white gel pen, and clear, which look super cool laid over some other bit of text or color), and on the occasions when I cut a part of a page off (say, for a dutch door spread), I stick it in the back pocket in case I need to use a piece to cover up a fairly large and annoying mistake later.

[hawtchocolate]

Bit behind on the pages and highlights but this is my bujo key and the way I index my dailies, which I leave out of my regular index on the opposite page of this spread. I find it’s helpful for a quick lookup of which page a particular daily is on, and it looks pretty dope. The color corresponds to my highlight color for each month.

[hawtchocolate]

Since I’ve gone back up to three monthly trackers this month, I brought back an old trick: on each daily, I put the page numbers for each tracker I need to fill out that day, and X through them as if they’re tasks as I fill out each tracker. It’s a good way to stay on top of monthly tracking, and I try to use it whenever I have more than one or maybe two trackers for the month.

[hawtchocolate]

Thursday was a doozy! I made a mistake with an experiment at work and got so upset with myself, but my boss and coworkers were really reassuring. It’s easy to say mistakes happen when you’re not the one making them.

The daily log itself ended up being so crazy long because I embedded notes from this “How To Apply to Grad School” seminar, in the purple box. I like embedding little meeting and seminar notes in my daily because they usually don’t take up enough space for their own spread, and they are still easy to find just by flipping to the day of the event.

[hawtchocolate]

Pretty Letters! (Future Log Design)

I used a light gray mildliner and my regular 0.38 mm black Muji pen to create the lettering for the months in my future log:

The simple layout works well for me and I definitely need the half-page width per month, and up to the whole column per month. The pink boxed dates on the mini calendars are actually Jewish holidays, and I wrote the dates and holidays in that same pink pen (Staedler triplus fineliner in the light pink, #1 in the 36-pack I own, though they don’t come with official numbers or color names).

I find I use my future log most at two times: when something’s happening in the distant future, like months ahead, or when I have a task or project I don’t want to think about for several months; and right near the end of each month. I don’t set up my monthly until the very last minute, I don’t like counting out blank pages to cover the remainder of the month I’m in or anything like that, so when I’m nearing the end of the month I often find myself thinking of things that are happening that weekend or next week and have nowhere to write them down. At that point I just start rapid logging all that stuff under the appropriate month in my future log, and transfer it all into the monthly log when I set it up. I don’t mind having all that minutia in my future log at that point, since the month is coming up and I won’t be needing that white space in my future log anyway, and it takes away the stress of keeping a lot of upcoming stuff in my head until I make my next monthly log.

Hope this was helpful! How do you use your future logs? How many months do you make them in each journal? (Mine’s 8 months, two full spreads.)

[hawtchocolate]

When I started bullet journaling, I bought a four-pack of Staedtler pigment liners that came in this super handy plastic case that I found myself using a lot. They started crapping out eventually and I had seen a lot by then about Sakura Pigma Microns and wanted to try them out, but they didn’t come with a case! Fortunately, I discovered that they fit just fine in the Staedtler case. My 0.5 and 0.3 mm pens died first, and I recently replaced my 0.1 Staedtler with the Pigma Micron, but my last Staedtler lives on!

Do you have a preference between Staedtler or Pigma Micron fineliners? Or is there another brand you prefer?

[hawtchocolate]

IThese are my indexes for the two volumes I have so far! The bottom picture is the index from Vol I: very true to the original method, black and white, with page numbers listed after the title of the page. I tried checking off each daily as I finished with it (meaning I migrated everything out of it and never had to reference back to it again), which was helpful in terms of not leaving open tasks on too many pages, but I found it ugly and messy.

When I was moving into Volume II, I decided to make some changes from the original method, and from my implementation in Vol I. First, I got rid of the word “Collection” in front of every collection, since that wasn’t doing much for me. I saw how others were organizing their indexes by month in addition to organizing by page type, and decided to follow that idea by bundling the pages that go at the beginning of each month. I also stopped putting dailies in my index because I would rarely use my index to find dailies, especially since there was no way to tell which dates were recorded on any given page. 

Instead in Volume II, I created a Calendex-looking structure within my index to track dailies. The first picture is a close-up of that modified Index. The numbers in the chart are page numbers and they are written in the box of the first date covered on that daily page. So for example, on page 29 of my bullet journal, there are dailies starting with January 18th and going through the 22nd, indicated by the page number 31 on January 23rd. I added the highlighter bars in later because the middle of the chart was looking bleak and boring. The black hatched-out sections are times when I didn’t use my bullet journal for dailies.

My Volume II index is also a lot more colorful than Volume I. By the time I was done with Volume I, I had already adopted the practice of choosing a color for each month, and that carried over into Vol II. As you’ll see in later posts, the highlights and page tabs for each month match the colors in the daily calendex.

I saw one bujo (I forget which, maybe more than one) use a bulleting system for their index to help with migration into new volumes, and I saw a lot of different takes on color coding indexes, so I decided to combine the concepts. In my Volume II index, each line in the index has a colored dot next to it. These correspond either to monthly colors if the page is part of a monthly bundle, or to one of five categories I laid out in my key. I’ll do a post on these categories and page tabbing in my bujos later on. The idea was that while I was in this volume, I could more quickly find things in my index by scanning for their color, and when I was moving out, the dots would serve as bullets to mark whether a particular page was migrated (arrow pointing right), irrelevant (bullet is crossed out), or finished (an X through the bullet, something I’d use for monthly logs, for example). I will talk about the benefits and drawbacks of my color coding system in that later post, and I have yet to migrate to Vol III so I will keep you posted on whether the migration bulleting system is effective!

The last thing I’ll point out is that by the time I started my second volume, I had noticed that I don’t tend to write many things that take up more than half a page of width in my bujo, and I had already known that I strongly prefer vertically oriented lists to horizontal ones. I decided to split my index into two columns and give myself two pages rather than three like I did in my first volume (I never touched the third page of my index in my first volume, which was another reason). I used a white gel pen to draw a line down the middle of the left-hand page so that I could easily find the center part but the line could be “invisible”. The right hand page didn’t need a center part because the dailies calendex took exactly half a page of width, and I figured that without having to list all my dailies in my classic index, I would use fewer lines throughout Volume II and I was safe leaving myself only three columns (I was right).

That is all I have to say for now about my index! I hope these ideas and visuals have been helpful :)