Hey guys. Have a short week so just set up my next two work weeks together. Have a couple of brain storm sessions so included a notes page for the two weeks. Excited!

I've got several simple projects that are stalling. I was thinking of the following:

1 spread grid for all projects, projects down side, dates across the top, showing project vs date, single word update on progress. (Decide width after a few days. Room at the bottom in case need tiny bit more space, but goal is quick update and habit tracker.)

1 spread for project. Top of left page is list of tasks. Bottom is notes and more detailed diary if necessary. Right page will vary depending on what's needed. I'm not sure if it's better to do it this way (hard to flip through) or start writing on the right and continue to the left (awkward), or start writing on the right and turn the page to continue (again hard to flip through).

Which book? Not meeting/purse book. I like to throw out my task and "map through the week" book. It forces migration and review, and throwing one out is a physical sign of progress that makes me happy. These new spreads will need migrating at different times. Tasks I scratch out don't belong in my journal (unless I think of them while journaling).

I'm thinking of yet another book, this one in a duotang.

I really wish I'd kept Mom's old plastic spine binder!

Thoughts?

New to BuJo. Question for experienced BuJo users:
Based on your experience, which do you find more useful on the index format - Page numbers first followed by Title description, or Title first followed by page numbers?

half way through january 🥳 my bujo is the one below, so far using a running tasks list and then writing an entry for every day or so.

top i just like to decorate or note down how i feel things that are happening (and important) :D

I use bujo to get information out of my head before I forget it. I’m really bad at remembering things that need to get done and especially due dates for assignments, plans that have been made, events, things at work.

Also just enjoy writing down ideas or thoughts that come to mind throughout the day. It helps a lot with keeping my head clear.

My issue is what to do when I have things I want to write down but I don’t have the ability to stop and write it down in the journal.

What do you do to manage that?

Should I keep a smaller journal for when I’m out. Or should I just use the notes app in my phone?

I already have a second brain I use in apple notes but the way i have gotten accustomed to collecting information for my second brain I would be making a separate note for each thought or task that I want to save. I try to use my second brain to save larger pieces of information, important files, and taking notes. Basically anything that wouldn’t be rapid logged.

Am I just overthinking?

Basically, I jumped into this without having read all of the Bullet Journal book. I skimmed some basics and watched a few videos, because I heard this could be a good method for ADHD folks.

BUT: I am looking at the book in more detail. I work a 9-5. And my struggles are often with maintaining household tasks, errands, appointments. I don't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. I am not a Steve Jobs type or a Ryder Carroll type. I am more similar to the"Stacy" mentioned early on it the book.

Anyone else in a similar situation? I'd love examples of how the bullet journal works for you. I'm especially struggling with what belongs in my daily log and then how I clear out or migrate it.

Thank you!

TL;DR: had a good 5 months of journaling in 2024, December was a mess in life and now I want to start again. Please share inspiration, life hacks or what your experience is. I’m also curious about your setups.

My main question is: where did you get inspiration for your (minimalist) bullet journal? I seem to find mainly examples of beautifully illustrated pages but that’s not for me, since I like clean layouts. So I’m mainly searching for ways to optimise my mind and life and so on, not so much for decorations.

I’ve had a lot of fun and benefits of using a bujo to track my life and to-do’s last year. December was difficult due to personal reasons so I slipped up, and only uses about 5 pages in December in total. Of course that felt like failure, but I’ve recuperated. Did the obvious thing of buying a new booklet for a fresh start (which will fix all of my problems I’m sure). It’s the official bullet journal v2, which I love all together. But now I’m looking for ways and inspiration to use this thing to the max, no page left empty and so on.

For some background info: I’m a 32 year old guy in the Netherlands, not super skilled at drawing. I’m mostly a creative mind and work as a photographer / filmmaker with ADD as a challenge. Therefore I like clean setups since they help ordening thoughts and actions. Adding natural/muted coloured Marker Felt tips from Stabilo helped last year to keep it clean and nice to look at, but they seem to have lost their magic at the moment. Nice and heavy pens (for instance Parkers) have also tickled my brain in to writing, but I can’t keep buying pens to just write for a month. Feels wasteful and so on. I’ve already watched plenty of videos but if you have some brilliant inspiration video to share: I’m all ears. I have the instruction book from Ryder Carroll on my e-reader but haven’t gotten around to that yet.

Any help would be much appreciated, or if you know the struggle personally: let me know!

I’ve been trying a very minimalist bullet journal for the second time. I was using a Laurel Denise planner for 2022 and 2023 and it worked well overall but those are really big and there wasn’t the room for notes and lists that I wanted. I stumbled on Jashii Corrin’s YouTube channel and she made bullet journaling sound so chill and supportive of well being that I went ahead and got a notebook and started trying to figure it out again a couple of weeks ago. I thought the notebook being small and being able to customize so much would make it worth the time to learn the techniques and set things up in it. I also downloaded an app called Time Align that helps you track your time and time block, since I’m working on time blindness and not getting overwhelmed by huge to do lists that could never fit in a day.

It was going okay for awhile, but I’m pretty much at the crash and burn stage now. Here are my questions/struggles:

1. Since there is an index and a future log, I understand that you just work a month at a time. But as I’ve added in notes pages for various things and trackers for this and that, things are in a random order and it feels very disorganized. I know I can refer to the index but it looks so jumbled and I am not in the habit of looking at the index yet so it just doesn’t feel great. Is this normal? Do others leave intentional blank pages so that they can add things where they make more sense?

2. I’m spending a LOT of time on this. I’m not doing anything remotely artistic. It’s just trying to set up each day, day by day, and each week, and pull tasks from one day to the next when they don’t get done, and adding tasks and things I think of and filling in trackers. But it takes me 2+ hours on the weekend and like an hour a day. It’s all new so I’m having to learn as I go, so that probably accounts for some time….have others found that this takes less time, over time? When planning my week, I have to reference my work calendar, my workout app, my physical inbox with random things to take action on, the prior week and days in my bullet journal, the lists of weekly and monthly recurring tasks I made etc - sooo many sources of info and I’m trying to make my bullet journal the place where it all comes together in a way that doesn’t feel stressful, but that’s not really happening and it’s taking me forever.

3. I am not sure I truly understand the flow of tasks from future log to monthly log to weekly log to daily log. It seems to make sense in theory that I migrate tasks I didn’t do to the next day. But there were tasks I knew I would not have time to do the next day so they got left behind and I ended up having to look carefully at each page of the previous week to make sure I caught all the tasks that needed migrated to this week. It feels so clunky but I know it’s not supposed to….I also ended up with a gigantic list of tasks that didn’t happen last week to this week and I 💯know I will not get most of them done this week. It just feels really defeating. Is this normal? What am I missing here that is supposed to make this helpful?

Thank you in advance for any thoughts!!

The biggest thing that I dislike about the standard bujo method is that it's linear. I don't naturally think like this - the linear method makes it difficult to achieve goals (as in break them out into small manageable chunks, and also see how what I'm planning fits into the big picture), and it makes it impossible to analyze and integrate all of the data into something meaningful down the line. For those who prefer to have theirs setup nonlinear, what's your setup like?

I create a lot of mind maps but because they're updated frequently, I have to keep them in a tablet so that I can easily manipulate them. I do want to start including goal frameworks in the bujo for the year - this will help with goal achievement. The other thing that i was thinking of is using a discbound instead of a regular book so that i can iterate my mind maps and switch them out once I'm happy with them. My mind maps always get very messy.

Actually, is there another kind of planner or method better suited for non linear work?

e: always interesting to get downvoted for asking a question.

Friends, I am a pretty diehard minimalist bullet journalist since 2017, sticking fairly closely to Ryder Carroll’s original method with an index, future log, monthly spreads in list form, daily spreads, and collections for projects.

BuJo has worked terrifically for me with respect to helping me stay on task and keep track of many to-dos, but where it sucks is managing my schedule. I have a work Outlook and a personal iCal and never the twain shall meet. My work calendar cannot be integrated with iCal because of the work firewall (I’m in healthcare, HIPAA, etc.) I love the Hobonichi Cousin’s weekly calendar layout, but it sucks as a bullet journal. I thought about ripping the calendar part out to carry but tearing up any notebook feels like sacrilege. (And I’ve looked at the Weeks and the day-free Cousin but neither seems to meet my needs.)

How do those of you with lots of appointments deal? I really don’t want to pre-write out 52 whole weekly spreads, but doing a weekly spread on Sunday with my appointments has also been a struggle because I feel like I’m not seeing my appointments enough in advance. Conceptually I like the idea of having everything integrated in my BuJo but maybe I just need to acknowledge that I have to have a separate calendar.

Thoughts?

I’ve been meaning to start journaling but i don’t know if it’s better to use my ipad or a physical journal?

Hey,

I am very much a combo analog and digital therapist (in front of computers all day) and have been curious about the 12 week year and figuring out how to introduce it into my systems. I was wondering if anyone here has tried it. I was wondering if there are any therapist on here as well who are using bullet journal to stay organized.

Any tips/tricks would be greatly appreciated!

I've started collecting favorite recipes from the year in the back of my Bujo. super favorites i know we'll want to keep doing, i will migrate to the next year. I almost never finish a bujo by the end of the year and I like starting a fresh of every year so this has been a great way to use up the end pages. I could see this as well for making keeping track of hikes or restaurants or books read, etc. just thought i'd share :)

Some months ago, I posted a question on how best to use this method.

Some great suggestions were provided by u/katherine197_ (though I didn't go with the different colour pen suggestion) and u/Euphoric_Addendum_49 wanted to see what I came up with. I've added a picture of what I came up with.

As you can see, I grouped things like birthdays together, with some finance tasks, household maintenance and work tasks into their own groups with some separation in lines between the groups as well.

I did also want to include an Alastair table for future years too, which you can see on the right hand page, for the household maintenance tasks.

These are aligned with the monthly tasks on the left hand side of the spread. I'm not sure, but I think that may have been what u/DeSlacheable mentioned in her reply to my original post?

You can see in the extension for the years, that not all tasks are annual - but I wanted to capture when these are due in the forward years with a box for the year in which they fall.

You will see that the termite treatment has a red box for 2029. That's because instead of the annual maintenance spray, I will need to plan for (and save) for a much more expensive full treatment of our house in that year.

I wanted to provide an update to the people mentioned above for their kind input and to show what I landed on. Apologies for my messy handwriting though!

As a final question to this sub, does anyone use something similar or extend their time based Alastair tables for other things? I'd certainly appreciate your perspectives on how I can improve as well as extend the utility I have gotten (so far!) using this approach!!!

My first week back the left page was a whole spread. The weekly page got busy cause I was trying to avoid dailies, and the to do and to buy page were pretty dismal. Soooo this week I am trying the spread condensed down to one page and the opposing page will be dailies.

I’m trying to follow the idea of just starting a new page for things - start a collection on the next page, then back to weekly rapid logging then on to a couple more collections, etc.

So I have this week’s spread, a shopping list, followed by part of my budget, followed by a list of movies and podcasts to watch listen to, and it goes on from there. I’m adding things to my index, but my bullet journal is just messy and confusing and illogical and I can’t do this. It’s too chaotic.

Am I missing something here, or is the basic method not created for people who have breakdowns when things are out of order?

Will I regret it if I start sectioning things off? Like medical, books/reading, planning, financial, etc? I’ll end up with empty pages when sections fill up unequally.

I’ve also considering using my happy planner disks/punch to make pages I can move around. It’s more fiddly than the original, but maybe it’ll get my brain to stop freaking out.

Am I overthinking?

ETA: I’ve gone with discbound in a half letter (A5-ish) size and a set of tabs, and I’m rather over the moon with this setup. I’m constantly playing with it and using it less, but the novelty should wear off soon and then i can use it more comfortably!

ive tried in the past to do the super cute, high energy bullet journels.. and always failed a week or two in.. i saw this daily journel at barnes and nobles and figured i could try again with something simpler in mind. the book itself is pretty small, kind lf pocket sized. i do plan on color coding a few things as that is more practical for me, but this will be my basic outline each day. i found that abbreviations were better for this size of journel. ik this doesn't have the traditional bujo dots, but i think it still counts as a bullet journel with the way that i'm using it.