My Bullet Journal presentation from the 2017 Moonlight & Magnolias -- part 4

Welcome back to my Bullet Journal Presentation! Today we're going to get into the Basics of the BuJo.

The only real requirements to start a Bullet Journal are: a notebook and a pen.

A six-inch ruler is nice to have but not necessary.

Notebooks:  I used a Composition book for my first journal.

• Pros: they're cheap, which is good if you're not sure you'll continue with the system and don't want to spend a lot of money on something you'll give up on after a week. (However, the system is so customizable, I can't imagine anyone giving up after a week. If it's not working, just change it!)
• Cons: really too big to carry around easily, and ink can bleed through the paper. 
• Use if: you carry a backpack instead of a small purse, and if you're going to write with a ballpoint pen instead of a felt-tip or any kind of fancy ink pen.

The ideal/recommended notebook for Bullet Journaling is the actual Bullet Journal notebook. A lot of people also use a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook. Both of these notebooks are about 5"x8", use a dot grid instead of lines (ruled), and have nice thick paper that ink won't bleed through.

They're also both pretty expensive, which is why I didn't start out with one of them. Since I haven't used them, I can only guess at the Pros and Cons, but I'll take a shot.

• possible Pros: small enough to carry in a purse, dot-grid which is said to be more flexible for writing, drawing, charts, graphs, etc. than ruled (lined) paper, thick paper that ink won't bleed through, pocket in the back.
• possible Cons: bloody expensive for a damn notebook, no matter how fabulous it is. 
• possibly good to use if: you carry a purse instead of a backpack, will use a variety of pens.

Yoobi (sold at Target) makes a 5"x8" notebook for about $6, but I think it's ruled, not dot-grid. That would have been my next step if I hadn't found some nice little dot-grid notebooks on sale for $11. I haven't used them yet, because I have another Dreamspinner Authors Workshop journal and a moleskine journal to use up first. The rules of First In, First Out are rigid and unyielding. :)

For pens, I got a set of colored pens with really sharp points that make my writing thin and sometimes hard to read in the scans. I use those mostly to color in my Habit Tracker (more on that in a later post). The pen I'm using now is a Pentel R.S.V.P. ballpoint pen, black, medium point (1.0 mm). It makes nice thick lines that my elderly eyes can see better. I got a five-pack at Target or possibly a grocery store.

Feel free to use the comments section to suggest notebooks and/or pens that you like.

But let's get back to the Basics of the BuJo. They are your Index, Future Log, Monthly Log, Daily Log, and Collections. The Monthly Log pages will include a list of Must Do-s. The Daily Log will have tasks, notes, events, and narrative. Of course you can have all kinds of other stuff -- remember, highly customizable -- but those are the basics. You don't ever need to do more than those, and you can always do less because, say it with me: highly customizable. :D

The first thing to write, maybe on the inside cover, is  your email or phone number so the notebook can be returned to you if you lose it. Hopefully that will never happen, but that's why some people (myself included) back up their journals by scanning them.

The next thing to do is set up your Index, which is where you will record the page number of everything you write in the BuJo. So simple, and yet so helpful to be able to find everything quickly.

you don't have to index your index like I did here

Generally, two pages are enough for the index.

Go ahead and number the first ten pages or so, including the index pages. Just start from 1, in the bottom corner of the page, and go up to ten, number both sides of the page (so the first five pages will get you to 10). Try to make the page numbers as legible as possible to help with indexing and finding information later.

example of page numbers

The next thing is to set up your Future Log. The official BuJo site has you set up six months' worth of space, but I've found setting up entire year is more useful for me.

To set up a Future Log, you divide each of the next few pages into thirds, and write the upcoming month names on each section. Start with the following month, not the current month, since the current month will go on your Monthly Log page. So for six months, you'd use two pages. For a year, you'd use four pages. You can also make each Future Log month more than one third of a page -- February is the shortest month and yet somehow my Future Log February is completely jammed.

See Feb. in bottom right corner of pic, completely jammed

Into these Future Log months you will put upcoming things you know about now, and you'll add new ones as they come up. For example: deadlines, trips, birthdays, theater tickets, weddings. Go ahead and put in everything you can think of right now. AND make sure you list "Future Log" in your index, along with the pages your future log is on. They will probably be something like pp. 3-4 or 3-6.

Helpful tip learned from painful experience: keep your Future Log in the front of your journal. Or in the very back if you like, but somewhere that you can quickly flip to it. I tried to have a "rolling" Future Log once, dropping off the finished month and adding a new one six months in advance. What a mistake. Even though I knew what page it was on, I still had to flip pages to find is vs. leaving it at the front of the journal.

Since this post will go up on January 31, let's go ahead and start our Monthly Log with February. On the next blank left-hand page, write February at the top, then list the days down the page. Since my current journal is ruled, and there aren't 30/31 lines on one page let alone 28, I let my Monthly Log run onto the facing page. Go ahead and also put a letter for the day of the week on the left side of the number of the day. For example, Feb. 1 is a Thursday, so to the left of 1, you'll write Th, to the left of 2, you'll write F, and so on.

Here's my Monthly Log for January.

monthly log for January -- see Must Do-s crammed onto right page

Like your Future Log, go ahead and fill in all the things you know about now. As each new month rolls around, you'll flip to your Future Log, find the corresponding month, then copy all that month's events from the Future Log into the current Monthly Log. For example, in my Future Log on the right side, you can kind of see that I have Jan. 18: pay Visa bill. Then, on the January Monthly Log, I have Pay Visa bill on Jan. 17 (I decided to move it up a day since I tend to ignore my reminders for a day or two).

On the facing page, write down all your Must Do-s for the month, then see where you can fit them into the month, which you have spread before you, ready to be filled up. I didn't do that for January, which is why it's January 31 and a lot of my Must Do-s are not done. That is user error, not a BuJo failure. :P

I find my Must Do-s list is most effective if I write only the truly Must Do-s, and not my Should Do-s or Want To Do-s. It keeps the list from getting diluted and makes me focus more on getting done the things I really need to get done. I can always make separate lists of SDs and WTDs and add them to the calendar once the MDs are on there.

So you've got your Future Log and your Monthly Log. I'll do one more Log, and then save the rest of the basics for the next post, since this one is getting reeeeeaaaalllly long.

The last log is your Daily Log, and this is where you get stuff done. That is, it's where you list your To-do items, called Tasks. It's also where you keep track of events that occur on that day, or ideas you get, or Deep Thoughts you may have about anything that crosses your  mind.

Tasks are listed with a dot to the left of them. Events have a small circle to their left, and Notes have a dash. When a Task is completed, you put an X over the dot. If it's a really important task, you can mark it with a star. I mark mine with five dots (one in the middle and four in the corners) so I can still cross it off with an X when I'm done.

If you don't get the task done the day you scheduled it for (copied from your Monthly Log, the same way you copied Monthly tasks from your Future Log, or something that came up recently), you put a right-arrow over the dot and move it to the next day. This is called Migration, and I'll talk more about it in a future post.

Next post will be on February 3, and I'll finish the Basics of the Bujo, including Rapid Logging, Migration, Narratives, Collections, Signifiers, and my own BuJo hacks for writing. Now I have to wrap up -- the foster cat really wants to walk on the keyboard, so I need to go cuddle her.

Let me know how the BuJo process goes for you!

My Bullet Journal presentation from the 2017 Moonlight & Magnolias -- part 3

Wow, I've been gone a long time. I guess November and December (and most of January) were pretty busy. Let's catch up a little.

Previously on B. Snow's Blog:
     In part 1 of these posts, you learned what a Bujo is, and in part 2, you learned why I started one.

Now, on to part 3 of my BuJo presentation from last year's Moonlight & Magnolias! Which I have time to write since the car is getting maintenanced, if that's a word. Blogger doesn't think it is.

As I said at the beginning of the presentation/these posts, a Bullet Journal is a highly customizable organization system. One size does not fit all. You can get some great inspiration from others, but in the end, YOUR bullet journal only has to work for YOU.

This Popular Science article describes the bullet journal system thusly: "It's exactly as ambitious or exhaustive as you need at the exact time you're using it."

It's a very accurate description. I'd like to add that the converse is also true: it's exactly as simple and plain as you need, too. You can go either way, at any time, and you can change your system at any time. That's the great thing about it vs. a preprinted planner -- you can make changes as you go, to fit your needs at any particular moment.

So how do you get a Bullet Journal to work for you?

Let's start with what you want to keep track of in your life. The Bullet journal is about more than just tasks to be done, but let's start there, since that's what keeps most people awake at night.

There are things we need to do daily, weekly, monthly, possibly quarterly, and yearly. These are all Must Do-s (like scoop litterboxes and taxes) or Should Do-s (like exercise and cleaning -- you can probably guess what my body and my house look like..... :D).

This about the daily tasks you must do, should do, or would like to do. What are habits you'd like to cultivate? Examples that came up during the presentation are: exercise, vitamins, eating healthier, writing, social media, drinking more water.

Some weekly tasks you'd like to get done: things like laundry, clearning, cooking, date night, blog posts.
Monthly: bills, glass to recycling center.
Quarterly: royalty statements, dividends, taxes if you pay those quarterly.
yearly: taxes, car registration, birthdays.

Some specific writing things you may want to keep track of are: plot bunnies, revision ideas, books you read, word count on stories, deadlines, checking publishers' websites for Calls for Submission. You can see how these items might fall into the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly categories. Others are more random and not linked to a timeline or a calendar.

Some other things you might want to track besides Must Do-s and Should Do-s are Want To Do-s, or what I call my Wish List. This can be as immediate as "get gardening books from library" or as far off as "take my dream trip to Paris". The Bullet Journal is a good place to keep a Bucket List, because you can add to it as you discover more and more cool things that exist in the world, like the Ausangate Mountain of the Peruvian Andes, which I'd never heard of until yesterday.

You can list your goals and the steps you'll take to achieve them, as well as the rewards you'll get when you complete them.

I'm sure you can come up with your own lists. Regardless of the type of thing you want to record or track, there's a place for all of these in the BuJo, AND a way to find them after you've written them down.

Now that we have some idea of things we want to track/accomplish and/or habits we'd like to cultivate, it's time to start your actual Bullet Journal!

Hopefully you went ahead and started one after my first post because it was so awesomely inspiring that you rushed straight to the official Bullet Journal site and absorbed all the great information there. But if you didn't, grab a notebook and a pen and meet me back at this blog for my next post.

The rest of this month is getting busy, too, but I'll be a grownup AND a Bullet Journaler and say that the next post will be up next week, Wednesday, January 31.

In the meantime, what are some of the things you'd like to track/record in your BuJo?

If you already have a BuJo, what are some things it's been especially good for? For me, it's been the daily tasks. Somehow less intimidating than a huge, rolling To-Do list.

See you next week! For sure!!!