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Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Bullet Journals

On Sunday, as I was messing around on Pinterest, I saw someone had pinned a picture of a Bullet Journal layout. What's this? asked I, immediately intrigued. My weakness is planners and organization and paper and pens and this had all of that.

Later in the evening, I did some online searches and immediately became enamored of the process. It's a combination planner, diary, and To Do list and it can be as simple or as elaborate as the user likes. I'd love to be elaborate, but knowing me and how pressed for time I am, I'll probably try the simple version and see what happens.

But I get ahead of myself. After learning about Bullet Journaling and deciding I wanted to try it (perfect timing since my current planner ends June 30), I went in search of a notebook.

My first strike happened when the official Bullet Journal was sold out and appears to have been sold out for quite some time. I still recommend visiting the website, though, because it gives a nice overview of the process. The explanation that I really liked and I found useful came from Buzzfeed and is titled WTF is a Bullet Journal.

With my first book option gone, I went in search of another and immediately fell in love with hardcover notebooks from a German company. If I lived in Germany, I could buy a full line of their products in any color they had (and they have many options). However, I live in the US and my options were extremely limited. I wanted the version with the dotted pages because that's what the sold out Bullet Journal had, however, unless I wanted to pay more than double what they cost or I wanted basic black, I was out of luck.

After far too many hours of searching, I bought a blank journal and decided that would be good enough. Then I searched for more information on Bullet Journals and discovered a lot of people are using squared notebooks. Back to online shopping because I had seen the squared version in the color I wanted.

I didn't cancel my first, blank notebook. I figure that I'll try to decide which one I like better after they arrive. The one I don't use for journaling, I can use for something else.

Now I'm eager and excited to try this method of organization, but I need to wait for my notebooks to arrive. I'll be sure to post updates here as I attempt to use this method. I'm hoping for the best, but I've crashed and burned before on these types of projects, so I guess we'll see.