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One thing I desperately need in my life is organization. I’m a forgetful person—if I don’t have it in writing or have a reminder on my phone, I won’t remember even the most basic things. While it’s frustrating to deal with, one thing has been a life saver all these years: planners. Yet not just any planners… bullet journals.
Not many people know what these heavenly inventions are, which is a tragedy. Bullet journals are basically a mix of regular journals and planners. So you combine the stuff you’d find in journals (day to day writing, doodles, pictures, etc.) with things you’d find in a planner (due dates, to-do lists, calendars, etc.).
If you do a quick search on Pinterest, Tumblr, or Google, you’ll find bullet journals ranging from the extremely detailed and neat to the simple yet scattered layouts. Everyone finds a system and layout that works best for their organization, skill, and time level, but bullet journals usually have at least these things in common: an index, a key, a spread/log, and personalization.
An index for a bullet journal is the same thing as in a regular book: a table of contents for reference and easy access to what you need. When writing in your tasks, a symbol next to it determines if the task was completed or not. An example of my key is on my weekly spread, which you’ll see later on. A spread or log is a page or two dedicated to a theme (spending, lists, pictures) or a time period (daily, weekly, monthly). Personalization is the fun part of the bullet journals, just customizing them to your tastes with doodles, pictures, colors, or whatever else you feel would enhance your journal.
While I have tried in previous semesters to keep up with mine, I admit I have been slacking. Mine has turned into a quote and picture journal, but I plan on picking it back up over the summer. One tip I’ve seen from Tumblr has been to plan out spreads or logs in advance so you can just fill them in and you won’t have to spend time recreating them each week/day.
So when I was handed the Erin Condren planner to review, the first thought I had was that I could use it to have pre-made spreads for my bullet journal. While this has worked to some degree, it was not intended to be used as a bullet journal, which I was well aware of beforehand.
This planner has many pros to it, the main ones to me being how customizable they are, the amount of writing space available, the varying colors and quotes inside, and the large squares of the monthly layouts. The cons to me, however, were the lack of a weekly layout, the paper thickness, the number of pages per month, and the layout itself was not suitable for a traditional bullet journal. While these cons could be fixed based on how you customize your planner on the Erin Condren website, I’m basing this off the one I received.
Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this planner and how I was able to tweak it to my liking. I did have trouble setting it up the way I wanted, so I probably won’t continue using it for bullet journaling purposes, only planner purposes.
Below is a series of photos from how I decorated my March monthly spread and how I used my one weekly spread page to plan for the school week of March 20 until March 24. I was also given stickers to use, some of which I incorporated along with my own personal supplies.