From a very early age, I have loved diaries and organisation. I remember spending hours writing in my FunFax (remember those?) and inputting information into my pink electronic ‘Secret Diary’. That love of organisation followed me through to my teens and then to my adulthood.
My most recent planner has been the beautiful mint Kikki-K planner which I adore (find similar here), but recently I have been finding a need for something a little more streamlined when it comes to organising my thoughts. I seriously have an over active mind and I sometimes find it so hard to organise my thoughts. I jump from one thing to another without actually finishing any of the tasks I’ve started. Having my own business which includes running an online store, creating YouTube videos and writing blog posts means that I have my fingers in many pies and it’s simply not effective for me to be jumping from one thing to another so rapidly. I would find myself being so busy but actually being quite unproductive.
I have toyed with the idea of starting a bullet journal for a while. Now I know they seem to be the ‘in thing’ at the moment, but I want to assure you that I’m not simply jumping on the bandwagon with this. In fact, if people are doing things because they deem it as popular- I tend to run the other way! BUT I digress…When thinking about starting a bullet journal, I knew I didn’t want to completely let go of my everyday planner. I wanted a solution to use my bullet journal as a way to get my thoughts onto paper and organised in a way that I found easy and effective.
I set about doing a little research on how people laid out their journals and ideas that I felt could work for me. I wrote down some ideas and finally settles on a few simple pages to help me keep track of tasks I needed to complete. So here are the sections I decided upon:
Year on two pages including birthdays
Key
To Do list
YouTube
Blog
Sponsorships
I liked the thought of having some sort of diary page in the bullet journal even though I wasn’t actually using the journal as a planner. Having a year to view can come in handy and having a place to put Birthdays and see them all in one go is great.
The Key was the fun part for me. This is where I decided what my symbols would be to represent if I had completed a task or was on my way to complete it. I also added the Key for my YouTube, Blog and Sponsorships page so that I could remind myself of what each letter on the page represented
I left 5 pages free for my To Do list as I knew it would get full pretty quickly. This page is just super simple and will be a line for each task and I use my Key to indicate if I have started or completed the task. I haven’t added a great deal to it yet, but I have found it extremely helpful already. I am adding ALL task to this list so that they are all in one place. No matter how big or small, if I think of something I need to do, it will be going on the list. So very much using it as my brain dump!
The YouTube, Blog and Sponsorship pages all have columns at the side of a task so I can mark off subtasks. For example, when writing a blog post, I can mark off when I have done the copy, the photography, added the links, pushed the post live and them promoted the post on social media. I know it might sound silly to some to have these smaller subtasks- but trust me, when you have so much on your mind it’s easy to miss something.
So there you have it, my shiny new bullet journal. I am loving using it and have found it so helpful even in the short time I have been using it. I chose to use the Leuchtturm1917 with dotted pages as I felt it would be a little more versatile. When it comes to bullet journals, you really can use any notebook that you like and you can set it up however you like. If you have a Bullet Journal, leave a comment below and let me know what your favourite section is!
The post My Bullet Journal appeared first on Bella Coco by Sarah-Jayne.