One book July 2019 – week one in review – Random Pastimes of a Restless Mind

So I’ve stuck to it for a whole week. First of all, I must say that so far, this attempt at BJ is much more successful than the last time. I think it is because 1. I’m not trying to make it pretty and 2. I didn’t draw out a weekly layout. I’m thinking that when I have a weekly layout, I tend not to do daily pages (just like in my ringed planners). Everyday I’m kinda forced to look at my monthly layout and my notes that I’ve taken. I’m still not very good at writing every thing that comes to mind. For example, I left my sunglasses somewhere and I had wanted to go and pick it up the next day. I didn’t write it down and so of course I forgot to do it. Now I have to wait until next week Thursday when their open again :/. Lesson: WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN!!!

I didn’t use my stencils at all, but I would like to start using them more. Especially to draw out more indicators. So far I’ve used boxes, bullet points, circles and exclamation marks. But I would like to further differentiate all the notes that I’m taking down. This way it’s easier to identify what it an idea, or a random note, or something that needs to be transferred to a journal when I’m doing my review.

I found that working from the monthly task list to be annoying (always flipping back and forth) and overwhelming (because it’s a long list and I have to sieve through the list to see what it is I want to do). So for the coming week I am making a “this week” list on a sticky note which I can move from day to day. On it will have my tasks that I would like to accomplish that week. I will also make some project planning pages so that I can break down the projects into workable tasks which can be transferred into this sticky note.

I didn’t update my habit tracker daily. Luckily because I wrote most things down, it was not a problem to update it at the end of the week. However, I would like the habits that I want to work daily to be more visible on the daily spreads (again, I don’t tend to flip back and forth through the pages so it just gets forgotten). We’ll see what solution I come up with. Preferably one that allows me to use my sticker supplies.

My conclusion after the first week is that I like the bullet journal method. Do I see myself using it exclusively? No. But I can see myself using it in conjunction to a ring planner and perhaps also a common place book. It’s a great way to gather your thoughts and organise it to a certain extent, but I feel like I would like another way of organising everything even further for easier referencing. I just don’t think that the collection pages would be enough for me, especially if I had accumulated more than one BJ notebook. In that way, rings are a great way to collect and file similar notes over a longer period of time. I’m also thinking that the idea of index pages would be handy for a commonplace book.

So I will leave you with a few pics from my BJ. I’ve done my weekly review and used my highlighter to mark off the notes and tasks that I’ve reviewed and moved to wherever they need to go. The notes that are not highlighted still need to be processed (most of them are things that I will transfer into my journal).