Welcome to Journal on it, the podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon. And each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time.
Let’s dig deep, write freely and reflect boldly.
What is a Bullet Journal?
Episode three Bullet journal, sometimes referred to as a bujo. What is a bullet journal, to be honest, and the definitions vary depending on where you look. The one I’ve chosen to go off of for this episode. Is from the creator of the bullet journal’s actual website, and the creator is writer Carol, and he calls it a mindfulness practice designed as a productivity system.
Bullet journal, if you’ve ever looked it up, is kind of a mix of a bunch of things. It’s your day-to-day planner, it’s your to-do list, a habit tracker, a goal tracker, and your personal journal. All wrapped in one place, usually in a beautiful like aesthetic kind of layout. I’m gonna take a few seconds here to kind of break our normal flow.
A quick note.
And I did wanna annotate, this is probably one of the newest styles of journaling as it was created in 2013. Um, and this is one of the youngest ones I’ve. Personally come across, which is very interesting ’cause it kind of took the entire world by storm. And the resources for ideas and plans are almost infinite on the internet.
Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, people actually make their money by showing off their bullet journals. But I did also wanna make you aware, if you go to the creator’s actual website. He hosts classes on how to do all of this and has his own actual like bullet journal set up for you. So if you wanted to start but you didn’t wanna dive off the deep end and you really didn’t know where to go, I would actually suggest going to his site.
If you type in bullet journal.com in your search bar, it should pull it right up for you. He has infinite amount of resources there. He does have some paid classes. But he does also have a bunch of free materials on his page.
Pros
As with all types of journaling, there are some pros and cons. Some of the pros include increased productivity, better organization, having a good creative outlet, saving money by making your own planner instead of buying a super specialized one.
Uh, less paper waste flexibility. It’s gonna help you remember things, events, birthdays, those kinds of things. Everything is in one place. It’s a great self-development tool, and it’s good for, uh, goal reflection.
Cons
Now for some of the cons, the creative parts of this can sometimes actually take over productivity.
There can be a lot of pressure to make these super aesthetic spreads. It can be very time consuming. It’s honestly overwhelming to start. It can make you really harsh on yourself for failing or not being as good at some of these other parts as others are. Uh, it can be pricey to start if you’re somebody who’s going to make one yourself.
And losing it can be a major issue because you literally don’t have a backup for it to all of your appointments, all of your goals, everything being in one place can have a downside.
The personal experience
For me, while I do enjoy some of the benefits of a bullet journal, I don’t do a full blown bullet journal. I have chosen the parts that work really, really well for me and included them into my personal journal.
Um, we did talk about that a little bit in an earlier episode. I do a monthly spread at the beginning of every single month, and this is the closest I get to fully incorporating a. Bullet journal part. I pick like two to maybe three pages. And what I’ll do is on page one, I have the goals I’m trying to track or the habits I’m trying to track.
Um, the next page is my mood tracker. This is a big thing for me as somebody with anxiety. I try to monitor my moods and see if there’s anything I can see. If I do the third page, it is always my to-do list. Um, sometimes I include this on the first page. If I’m not working really hard on building a new habit or if I don’t have a lot of like long-term goals, I should be focusing on that month.
It’s in the details
Um, this is little things for me. It’s usually like, make sure I follow up with the podcast, make sure I keep up with the Instagram schedule that I have set for myself. Three times a week sounds really easy until you have to wake up at 8:00 AM after working into the evening. If I have doctor’s appointments coming up that would go on my to-do list, I always like put them as like a line item there, so I make sure that they get accomplished and I’m there when I need to be.
Just kind of a handy reminder, any holiday or birthday shopping that needs to get accomplished would also go on this page. I don’t keep it in my journal anymore. I keep it in a locked app, but I actually keep a list somewhere of all the things that I plan on getting people that did used to be in my journal.
But I don’t always keep my journal on hand when I go out just because it is so personal. So I do leave that at the house a lot and having like an app that I use for that works really great for me. I know we’ve talked about it before, but I do. I do the monthly spread and I wanted to share where I get a little bit of my inspiration for these from and where if you want to do a full bullet journal, you may also find some inspiration for different pages and the calendar park.
Where to look for inspo
For me, I spend a lot of time on Pinterest looking up these, I have a bunch of different mood trackers. I have a bunch of different things you may wanna track. Like one of the ones that I’m looking at currently is like the songs of the year. And they have a bunch of different shapes and they kind of like a cd, an old school iPad, uh, a cassette.
Some people dunno what cassettes are, I gotta remember that. But they have a bunch of different little musical icons and as they find a song for like their month, they feel that it should maybe their most listened to song or the song that resonated with them the most. But bullet journaling allows you to track so much more stuff than people realize, and I find a lot of inspiration on the line for these types of things.
More inspo
Another place that I get a lot of inspiration from is actually Instagram. There are people who make it their whole Instagram like page to do, prompts to do like full-blown spreads. There’s people who do bullet journaling there. Uh, junk journaling. Any type of journaling you can think of, you can find on Instagram.
Somebody out there is making an amazing kind of page, or this artistic doodle, like the one I opened Instagram just now, the one I’m looking at, this lovely person made, uh, like little Polaroid frame. And they used it to do like a little back to school page where they like outlined some scissors and then they outlined some other little things and they did ABCs and the little frame just to kind of like emphasize to them how important back to school season was.
As always, I will. Link to all of the resources I have found, be they for the pros and cons or where I’m finding my inspiration. I’ll put down a bunch of information in the show notes, and of course you’ll be able to find the transcript on the blog site. If you have any ideas or requests for the next episode, feel free to leave me a comment, and I will do my best to get that recorded and out for you, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Outro
Thanks for joining me on journal on It where we slow down. Tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens when Honest page at a time.
Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.
https://www.verywellmind.com/bullet-journaling-4520842
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/toyhouy/episodes/Eps–3-Bullet-Journal-e37ba7f