Going to college makes everyone want to be productive, and almost everyone uses some sort of a calendar or planner. The majority of the college population probably went to Target, Staples or Amazon to look for the best type.
But not many people consider the option of creating a bullet journal! This may be because you either don’t know about bullet journaling or think it takes too much effort to create one. I am here to tell you otherwise. I could go on about the benefits of bullet journaling (and I might do that in another article) or you could easily research it before or after reading this, but I’ll summarize it for you.
Bullet journaling is cheaper than buying an already-made planner, and you can be creative and change up how your bullet journal looks or completely change the layout and format. It doesn’t have to just be a planner, and it helps you de-stress and makes you feel less overwhelmed. It brings together your deadlines, to do lists, events, and anything you want to just put on paper. Here’s a general list for you oof what you need, and how to start your bullet journal.
JOURNAL: First things first, you’re going to need something to journal on. Whether it be just a regular notebook for school or an empty journal with dots, grids, lines, etc. Your bullet journal foundation can be anything you want, just preferably empty so you can start your planner from scratch.
SUPPLIES: You are also going to need some supplies to write in your journal/planner. You could be simple and just use a pencil and be all set or you could use your abundance of colorful pens and pencils to decorate your journal. The beauty of the bullet journal is that you can have either and your bullet journal will be unique to your personal preference.
INDEX: When it comes to actually starting your bullet journal, many people start it with an index, which is used to reference whenever you need to find something in your magical planner. You just put the page number and what the page consisted of in your index so later on if you were to be interested in finding your October month page, then you look on the first page of your index and can easily find it.
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FUTURE LOG: Bullet-journalers use some new language you might not be accustomed to yet, but the future log is essentially the yearly overview. People just write out all the months of the year while leaving space to put in events for the months. This is really helpful because you might be in October, but if you have to put down an event you’re attending in December, you can add it to your future log.
MONTHLY LOG: Now we are getting more specific with the monthly logs. This is one of the places where you can go crazy and do whatever kind of layout or spread you seem to like or enjoy the most. Some people draw out the monthly calendar into their journals and some people do a vertical layout where they just write the numbers of the days vertically down the page. You then fill in each day with whatever you have coming up, and you can bring in some events from the future log into the monthly log. Some people write out a monthly task list along with the monthly log/calendar. If you, as a college student or worker, need to have a monthly to-do list, then you can put it on there. The perks of the bullet journal are that you can choose to put it on or take it off!
WEEKLY/DAILY LOG: Depending on your schedule and how busy you are, you might want to do a weekly log or a daily log. As a student, I personally like to sit down every Sunday and write out the template for my weekly log and then fill it in throughout the days as I see fit. Some people like to do it every day, by writing them to do list daily when they wake up in the morning or the night prior. This is the part, I personally think, where you can get the most creative and different. If you Google search, Interest search, Tumblr search, or Instagram bullet journals, you will have the ability to find maybe thousands of different weekly and daily layouts. The great thing is that if you don’t like how one layout works, you could change it the next week or next day until you find a system that you are happy with. Or if you get tired of a specific layout, then you can just change it.
Start simple, and don’t worry too much about making your journal Instagram or Pinterest worthy because what is important is sticking to the bullet journal and if you jump into it, it would be hard to stick with it. Also, remember to let people know about your bullet journal because everyone will think it’s cool!