Normal people have junk drawers in their kitchens…I have a Bullet Journal drawer.

Hi. My name is Lindsey and I’m a planner. (Hi, Lindsey)

Truly I love planning and organizing. Everything from events (can’t wait for Layna’s birthday…it’s the beginning of March, but I’ve already got it blocked out. How have we never done a My Little Pony party???) to meal planning (not surprising considering food is my favorite). In fact, I realized that six of the seven posts I’ve written since the beginning of the year have really been about food. Today is a short break to talk about another love in my life.

Bullet Journals as a system (like Franklin Covey planners have a system) were established by Ryder Carroll. Then the rest of the world took it and ran in a million different directions. As most things do, it spawned entire subcultures dedicated to the idea of Bullet Journal in all its iterations. We have die hard devotees of Mr. Carroll’s actual system, we have free spirits who have unabashedly made it their own and all they kept was the name. I’m somewhere in the middle…and oh what a vast middle it is.

I started with a college lined notebook with 3 subject dividers…and it’s been awesome. As much as I swoon over perfect layouts filled with bona fide Art, I simply have not had the time to have my bullet journal be anything more than a free form planner. In the last few months my time game has changed significantly. For example, right this moment two of my munchkins are playing outside, one is on the couch with a book, and the other is singing and drawing in the school room. That means no one needs me. At. All.

Time, people. I have TIME!

February, therefore, is a chance for me to re-purpose an old sketch book and baby-step my way into a big girl bullet journal. Complete with Art.

Google knows everything and the internet is a vast store of all things brilliant bullet journalists. While browsing an instagram feed for a British girl’s journal, I saw how she did a round monthly view. I fell in love and will be experimenting with this for the next little while. Up until now I’ve drawn a standard calendar to get an overview of what we had going on in a given month.

January is the month of resolutions and new habits. Something that is huge in Bullet Journals is the idea of a “habit tracker.” It’s exactly what it sounds like…a visual way to track anything you might be working on and wanting to improve. I’m still enamored of round so mine for this month is a circle. The goal is to have no white squares by the end of the month.

I live in my weekly layout. I don’t have enough motivation to micromanage down to the daily level on a regular basis so I stay on a week view. Usually I’ve had my days vertically, but since I’m striking out with new and different, the first week will be horizontal.

And back to my happy (vertical) place.

Here’s that art I was talking about. I’ve wanted to get better at ink drawing, but ink drawing flowers especially. Orchids are my favorite flower (don’t make me name a variety…narrowing down to Orchid was hard enough) so I started here. These types of pages will be for random notes, more sketches, or even thoughts and quotes.

It’s not fleshed out all the way, which is good because I have a week before I can make the shift to this Bujo (we even have geeky slang) but I have a whole list of pages I’ll be trying out, including “this year in pixels”. It’s a grid with a square for every day of the whole year and you fill it in with your mood or how sucessful you felt that day or whatever and at the end of the year you have a visually stunning representation of how you did overall. Above is a preview and I’ll post an update later in the year. I’m so excited to see how many of these experiments stick and what ends up working for me long term.