Bullet Journal: Whimsically

1. Trailer: Hey guys, my name is Ramona Mclean. I'm a freelance illustrator and art teacher. Bullet journaling has been a huge help for me in clearing my head, organizing my life, and staying creative. In this class, I'll be showing you how I use my bullet journal based on the method created by writer Carol. I'll show you my supplies, how I set up my pages, and how I stay productive with my morning routine. We will answer a series of questions to pinpoint what journal is best for you and how you want to use your own bullet journal. Once we've figured that out, we will move on to practical set up advice where you can pause the video and set up your very own pages. Keep watching. I can't wait to get started. 2. Why Bujo: Why should we bullet journal? Why do I bullet journal? I got into bullet journaling while I was a mess in terms of things I needed to do for my wedding. This book just totally organized my thoughts of things I had to do. I was jumping around with like using a planner, not using a planner. I was already using field notes for my daily to do and daily logs, but I didn't have the planner side of that in my book. A few other reasons. It's a great way to organize your life, Great way to reflect on your life and make sure that the things that you write in here, the things that are your to dos, are what you actually want to be moving towards, are in line with your values. Are they beneficial to your life, not just anybody's life? I know with being an our entrepreneur and looking at people online and their videos, you assume that you have to do what they do. And you don't have to make a podcast, you don't have to make Youtube videos. But you do have to do something that will support your life. Choose what's most important to you, reflect on it daily. Reflect on your to do, and then see how far you go. It's a great way to be mindful. It keeps us present when you focus on your book. If you're doing doodles or you're writing to dos, or your thoughts, that will take your brain from this like jumbled mess into a physical copy of what you're thinking. There's some days where I get really bogged down with my thoughts. I just start to write it out. Here is one I believe I started to write all the things I was thankful for to combat my stress tracking habits is super helpful. When I look back at my habits, I can see the patterns that start to emerge. If I look at this one, I can see that certain things have gaps. Why do they have gaps? Is it because that's something that I need to change my system on or I've just let it slide and I don't have a specific time to do them. It's just very helpful to actually see what you're doing in a day and what you're not doing in a day. The last thing I'm going to talk about is just that this just empties your brain. Your brain will focus on certain thoughts continuously If you don't sort through them and figure them out when you put them on the paper. It actually alleviates that pressure that's been going on loop in your brain over and over and over again when you write it down. It just creates space and you can see it clearly, you can work through it. It's just such a helpful space for decluttering your brain and is helping you be a happier person. 3. Questions: Hey guys. Now that you've seen my system and hopefully been inspired, let's get specific about how you want to use your bullet journal. We're going to be going through a series of questions. Just grab a piece of paper and something to write with. Pause this video after each question, answer it, and then move on to the next. The first question we have is, what do you want to use your bullet journal for this question? You can go broad to help organize your life, to give you some mindfulness time to get creative. And you can also go specific. Do you want to use it for art to do notes, book notes, projects, tracking your habits, organizing your mind, that thing. Pause the video and answer that question. The next question we have is, what tools and supplies do you want to use in it? For me, I like to use fountain pens, gel pens, watercolor colored pencil, and sometimes stickers for you. Do you like to use pencil? Do you like roller ball pens? This is going to greatly influence what notebook that you should get. The next question we have is, what style of notebook do you prefer? Do you like spiral staple, hard cover, soft cover? Do you like notebooks that are decorative and pretty on the outside or do you like a minimal style? For me, I typically do not like spiral notebooks. They really bother me. They just don't feel pretty. I don't go for those. I tend to go for soft cover over hard cover and then put them in some case. The last question we have is, what size book do you enjoy for this? You want to go as large as makes you comfortable to write in, but as small as comfortable to carry For me my bullet journal is it's on the small side, but it's a little bit bigger than say, a field notes. I typically don't carry that around very often. I have a separate field notes book that I bring around just for my everyday random thoughts and keep my bullet journal at home. But if I go out and I'm working on a project, then I will bring my bullet journal. Just think about how big you write, about how large a book you like to carry around. A good way to practice this is to go to your bookshelf and grab a few different size books and hold it, pretend you're writing in it, and see what feels good for you. Those questions will help you come up with what journal will work for you. Obviously, with the tools you have to find paper that will support those tools. I use medi book because it is big enough for me. The paper is like really smooth and it takes water color. It takes fountain pens, rollerball pens, pencils colored pencil, everything which is amazing. Join me in the next video and we will get into some practical application of your bou jo. 4. Tools: Hi guys. Oh, sorry about that. I just wanted to talk to you about the different tools I use with my Bull journal. So I'll just flip to my recent pages and just show you. I use a range of different pens and supplies. I use this pen the most. This is a traveler's notebook fountain pen. I love it for writing in capital letters and drawing because the ink doesn't come out very fast. It's really compact, super small. I just love it. It's so cute. I didn't have a great reason to use it before because when you write with it, it's a dryer pen. Writing in cursive or writing really quickly doesn't come out well. I'll show you as I try to write quickly, it skips a little bit the smoothest writing experience. If I go slower like this and I'm using capital letters, then it comes out a lot nicer. And I can do my drawings, and it has not a chisel at the end, but it's like a slight flatness I guess, which helps with drawing for me. Here's freckles, maybe she's like, oh, I'm so cute, that's that pen. Only problem with this pen is that I do need a blotter. When I draw with this pen, it stays wet for a decent amount of time. I stick my blotter page in there and then push it down and then work in. I also use this fountain pen, which I'll use for all my planning. This pen is super nice to write with. It's very smooth like this in cursive. It's great. And I love this for getting loose with my mind maps. It's very smooth, but I don't love it for writing my tattoos and drawing with it because it is a little heavier flow for ink. Then I have colored pencils, which I use every so often just to add a little bit of color. Every so often I'll bring out my full color range. But I find just having like these three, or maybe a yellow as well, is really nice for mixing the colors together. Then I have this barren fig pen. I don't always use this in my book. I actually use this more so in my daily field notes book. So I'll just stick that in here like that. Every so often it's kind of a gel pen and it is really smooth. So if I don't feel like using a fountain pen, writing with cursive or just joting down, it's a little bit less wet. It's in between this one and this one. I love it for notes, especially my Field notes, Very heavy pen, but really cool. I want to show you, I have this mini printer. It is so helpful to me because I stick in a bunch of photos of my day. So I'm going to go into this more so when I get into my daily pages, But it's so handy for adding memories. My book, last but not least, I have this pen loop that I added. It's just a sticker, but I just stuck it in there and it's fabric here and it's great holds my pens. This book came with a pen holder, but it broke off. It wasn't the most durable. Then the last thing is my journal. I'm a Dori book that we went over in the last video. Thanks so much for watching and stay with me and we will get into more fun stuff. 5. My set up 1: All right, so let's go through how I set up my bullet journal every month. I have a few things that I use just constantly every month. I don't like to put too much in, I want to keep it not complicated but also helpful to track certain things. On the first page here, I have intentions that's straight out of rider Carol's book and set up, so I have five things here, scale, share, I want to grow that morning routine I've been doing a morning routine and I want to keep consistent with it, build my business, stay grateful, and get closer to God. These are my main focuses. I wouldn't put too much on this page, because the more you put, the harder it is to stay focused on all of these. But it's a really good reminder of just what you want to be working on. Next, I have my index. I'll just put just like writer Carol says, you just add the page numbers to the pages and then stick them here. Every time you add a new page. You don't want to add them before you actually put that page in. Here's my future log. I've written nothing on it. I recently just added the months. I'm sure I will use it, but I just have not used it yet. Anyways, I print off with my small printer about four months and then have the little calendar. If I need to look at the calendar and see what days are what for that month, I can look back at this day. I'm going to skip actually to my newest monthly log because this one, but half of it is in my previous book. Let's go to here to January. I write down all the things I know are happening in the month at first, and then every day in my morning routine, I will look at this page and if I know anything new I'll add it, then I put tasks on the other side. That way I can constantly see the things that I need to work on. If it's done, I can check it off. Here's my habits. Page pages don't have enough space to both write it and then go all of the month. I add it to two different pages. I write down all the main habits that I want to do. Then at the end, I'll add little notes. I'll show you in the previous month notes on how that went. This was really good. I play? Yes. Yes. Then Jim, on weekends, I want to work on that, like getting better actually. Going on the weekends, missed a couple when ran out of protein powder. Good. Do more, write down number. Just little notes to keep in mind. For the next month, I have this thing called connection and mood tracker. I wanted to see how my mood changed based on how connected I felt to my husband that day. The X is my mood and the Dot is my connection I felt to my husband. And I just feel connected by having deeper conversations or having a connecting moment when he comes home from work. I just add the line afterwards so I can see how close together for the most part, they follow each other. But every so often there's like a extenuating circumstance that has nothing to do with him. I add in a little line here for my period because I know that during that time, it's probably going to be a little crazy. I'm actually surprised my mood was up here for day 2.3 It's pretty good. It just gives me a little more context. And then here I add specific things he's done that make me feel connected so that we can talk about it. And I can say, hey, I really loved when you did this. I believe that is it for my set up. Then I get into my daily log, which I will talk about next. Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next one. 6. Daily log 1: I wanted to get into my daily logs. I'll just show you a few examples of what I do every day. Start out actually messed up this date, but I can show you the day before I start off with the date. And then I put the weather, if it's cloudy or rainy or sunny, snow today, which is pretty exciting. And then I put the high and low for the weather. As I go back through this, I can go on this day it was minus eight. No, it wasn't minus eight. It was 8.1 It's just nice to know. And then if I look through it like years later, I can see what the weather was. I put out my daily to do list. I always have a morning routine. I originally had this as all the separate individual things I did. But because I started doing it every day and the habit became easier, I just consolidated it to morning routine. Today. My to is to start filming classes for this, that's awesome. I like to add little notes in there. Cool things that happened. Snow is coming today is the first day that it is snowing for a while. There was one other day of snow this year, which is exciting. Put that in, cause that's something I would like to remember. Then I have these little doodles of my character. This is freckles. I like to draw little poses of her that have to do with what I'm writing and what my emotions are for each thing. This was Sam surprised me by coming home at 09:00 A.M. and telling me he took the next three days off work. Yeah, excited. This is a thoughtful thing. I guess. I'm looking up at the words and the mug that I got, sad because I wanted to get the mug that morning, but I couldn't. I don't like how tall twins tables are, cuts off my arm circulation. It's funny. Here's my little character. I try to push the poses. I can get in a bad habit of just drawing them out simply in the same way every time I have to remind myself, okay, let's draw these poses a crazier, a little bit more to show what the emotion is that I'm feeling here. I did some doodles and just wrote that I was having fun drawing portraits again, drew a little pencil me in my little cook holiday outfit. I like to draw like little anxiety lines under my character. Yeah, not wanting to do work excited because I found out some stuff about skillshare and some money I'm making, which is awesome whenever I have my period, I tend to draw like a little red dot there, but I also draw the poses kind of crazy reading wise, man's fear tonight which is a book. It's so good freaking out because there's one week till Christmas and there's so much to do. Mind blown. I like to draw these little clouds, puff balls. You get the idea? I just like to draw a little poses of what I'm doing. If you are interested in creating a character like this and learning how to do poses and that sort of thing, I have another class about creating your own comic character. So check that out. 7. Daily Log 2: Some of the things I like to do in my daily pages is add book notes. I have a morning routine where I read from a nonfiction book. I'll read sometimes a chapter, sometimes less, just depending how big it is. But I'll always take notes with it just to ingrain in my brain, and I like to add a lot of little notes going off the notes that I'm recording, just because that way it connects it with my life. Instead of just recording exactly what the book is saying, I find that's been super cool. I've mixed regular notes with mind mapping, all the stuff just goes off on its little tangents. And it looks cool and it feels really helpful. Sometimes I will stick little stickers in there, like this was safflower seeds as treats for my bird. I stuck that in. I also have a yeti sticker. I just recently purchased a mug and it came with a sticker. So I'm like, great, stick that in my book. Why not? I also use my book for planning. Planning is super helpful. I've been watching a lot of videos by Sh, he does a lot of mind map stuff. When I was planning this video, actually, I just put all the different sections of what I want to talk about and then just went off in little tangents so that I could understand how I wanted to make this video super helpful. Then you can go back and I just put in the order of how I wanted these videos to appear Super helpful sometimes if I'm having an emotional day and I don't really don't know why I can put in the middle feeling emotional and then put potential reasons. It's so helpful just getting it on the paper and out of your brain. Here's my printer that I talked about in my supply video. It's called a foam memo. This is the second one. The first one was not great. Second one is awesome. I print out little photos from my phone. They're all black and white, but it just like helps me remember. And then I actually get to do something with those photos. The reason why I like this printer is because the printer paper for it is so much cheaper than if I got the one photo sleeve. I don't know. The colored ones are just a lot more expensive and then I feel a little bit more precious about how I'm using them. Here's some photos for after Christmas. This was a pen I got from my phone like a Stylus pen at Christmas, right before New Year's, we did like Facetime, and I took a screenshot of it because it looks so funny. Every so often I will do these really full photo pages. Big events like Christmas or my birthday, or a big day out. Just something where I have a lot of photos for. I'll just fill up a page. I did this for my wedding as well. It's super fun. I love looking back, just adding little notes about everything here. If you can see that Sam, my husband, and I, we got matching pajama outfits for Christmas. We wore those to my parents house Christmas morning, and it was super funny. I love doing that. You can also use this as a way to stay grateful. Some people will do like a challenge where you take a photo of something you're grateful for every day. Having a little printer like that is super easy just to print it out, stick it in and say, I'm grateful for this today. I sometimes use my book for art. I've been getting into portrait drawing a little bit more lately. Also draw different things from my day. I made a little clay tree for my friend, for Christmas. I just included a little drawing in there. Even if you can't draw, adding just small doodles and then writing a note beside it is super helpful just to remember what happened here. That's a book, It's super simple. Here's like Jasmine Tea I had that day recording the different food. This makes it a little bit more fun to look at, more visual. And that's it. That's the main thing I use my Daily Pages for. See you in the next one. 8. Morning Routine: Hi, guys. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about my morning routine. So as you can see on a lot of my daily logs, I just write morning routine. When I first started it, I didn't write morning routine, I wrote all the individual items. I'll just walk you through what those are. I start off the day with my bullet journal. I'll go through, add my habits from the previous day, write my new to do that thing. Then I will read from a nonfiction book for about 10 minutes and take notes. Then I'll do my workout. Then I will take my vitamins and eat my breakfast that my morning to you for the day. This has been a huge help in my life. I have more time in the morning than most people I get. This might be a lot to do and you do not have to do this. However, I read in topic that the first decision of the day you make drastically changes your outlook on the day. If you wake up and you make a good decision for you, like maybe not looking at your phone when you first wake up, then that's going to have an enormous impact on your day. Doesn't mean it can't go sideways, but it's very helpful for me. Doing this morning routine in the morning. Checked off a bunch of stuff I wanted to do that day. I get to work out, I get to learn something, I get to look at the previous day and plan out my day, take my vitamins, have my smoothie, that sort of thing for you. Maybe it would be a good idea for you to come up with your own morning routine. And maybe that routine looks totally different than mine. Maybe it's take a shower in the morning, maybe it's read the news and eat your breakfast, who knows. But what I would do is just write down a list of the things that you want to accomplish and then look at that list and see, can I put that into a morning routine that's going to really help my life? And check off those things that you want to get done right away in the morning. 9. Bujo set up practical: Are you ready to set up your bullet journal? You've hopefully identified what journal you want to use and which supplies you want to use in it. If you don't have a journal yet, I would pause as video, get one and fill it out. Or you can watch the whole thing and then come back to it. Once you have your book, very first thing we're going to do is write down our intentions. I suggest not writing more than five things. You don't want to spread your self too thin for me. I wrote down Scale Share because I wanted to do more videos. Morning routine. I want to continuously do that through the year and keep consistent at it. Building my business. Stay grateful. Write more lists and stay closer to God, those are mine. Pause the video and fill out your intentions on page one of your book. Once your intentions are complete, you can move onto your index page. This page, you only add your index items. I guess when you've made that page, set up your page, only add your intentions and your index. My next page is, I'm not going to add any of those onto my index yet. I'm going to wait until I make them and then I will go back. Take a few minutes, set up your page, add a title. This is also a good time if you don't have page numbers to add them to your book. The next section I have is the future log. As you can see, I do not have very many things in here at the moment, but I like to put the next four months and I'll print them out on my little mini printer underneath. I'll just add any events or tasks I know I want to do in those months. This is obviously optional. You don't have to do a future log if you don't think it will support your lifestyle. But if you do think it will help, Pause the video, take a few minutes. Give yourself a few more months, potentially. Print out some calendars if you like. The next section of my book, this was for January. This isn't filled out because I switched books, but I will show you here. Next section is to set up the pages that you're going to be using in the month. I'll show you what I have and then you can choose whether you want to add that cheers or not. I put the month and then all the days of the month with the days of the week beside it. If I know any of my plans coming up for that month, I will just slot them in here. Then as I fill them out daily, if anything new comes up, I'll add them. That's on the left side. And on the right side, I have a task list for that month. I'll just write anything I have to do that I haven't put in my daily log this way. When I get to my daily log, I can look back at this every day and go, okay, which of these things do I want to do then? I have a habits tracker. Here we go. I have all the habits that I want to complete that day. And then I have one to 15.16, 31, we went over this in my inspirational video. But feel free to add your own habits. If that is something you would like to track, then you can add any collections or other trackers that are specific to you. Take a few minutes, finish those, and then we will move on to our daily log. Let's set up our first day. I like to write the day and the temperature for the day and then start writing all the things that I know I need to do that day. I like to use a box instead of a dot, but it is up to you what you would like to do for that. Just take a couple minutes. Set up your first page. Anything that you have to do today or any thoughts that pop up? See, I like to write doodles and comics of my character. Brain is all over the place, period. Should be coming soon. Then I started writing some book notes. Take a couple minutes and finish that. You have set up your bullet journal. The best part about bullet journaling is using it every day. Writer Carol suggests doing like 5 minutes or 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes at night. I tend to do 10 minutes in the morning. I don't usually do a nightly reflection, But every so often during the day, I'll look back and check things off, figure out what works for you. Try things out and see how the bullet journal can change your life. 10. Bujo closing: Hey guys, thanks so much for taking this class. Please take some photos of what you've done of your bullet journal or the answers to your questions and post it below. I would love to see what you came up with. If you'd like to see more videos or artwork, you can check out my links below. I will give you a link to my Instagram, my Youtube, my everything. Thanks so much for taking this class and can't wait to see you in the next one. I