Hello, friend.
This should have gone out last week, but I wasn’t sure what it would have been on the 15th. Lots of stuff going on around here with high school and college applications for my girls, a 17th birthday, and holiday prep. We are staying in New York again for this Thanksgiving, and I’m happy about that.
For all that stuff I turn to my trusty Bullet Journal (known by the cool kids as BuJo) to get me organized. For a long time I did a small moleskine calendar book - the one with a seven-day week on one page and a notes page facing that. It was good but not great, often not giving me enough room to keep track of various things or write all that needed to be written. At some point I got wind of the BuJo concept and decided to give it a shot. I still use a Moleskine, just a big softcover one now with gridded pages (my personal fave because you can start making a chart for cables/lace/colorwork anywhere).
There are lots of different ways to “do” BuJo. Just google the term or search it up on your favorite social media, and you will see lots of options. Some people turn it into an art form with lots of washi tape and colored pens and stuff. More power to them, but I stick to the basics, like the box of Sharpie fine pens I just got (nothing makes me feel more on top of things than a dozen of the same pen in the cup on my desk; I know lots of people are into one fancy pen, but this is what works for me).
Ugh. I don’t know why substack does not have image rotation controls, so my apologies for the sideways photos. They’re really just to give you a little idea of how I do this, but I hope you don’t get a crick in your neck.
If you google BuJo, you’ll end up at some point checking out Ryder Carroll’s site where it all started. You can definitely fall down a rabbit hole with all this, especially now that Ryder (rightfully) has stuff to sell, so let me tell you what kind of pages I always have (to stave off overwhelm for a little while):
Table of contents - I usually split the page in half vertically on the off chance that I end up with lots of different categories of pages.
Quarterly calendar pages - three months on a page with a little date calendar on the left, then lists of events (birthdays, meetings scheduled in advance, etc.) for that month in two columns on the right, so four pages for that.
Month pages - a column of dates down the right side with day of the week letters next to that and a little line under each Sunday to break up the weeks. All the info from the quarterly calendar gets transferred here every month, then I add in standing appointments, practices, and such that are on my google calendar (yes, I’ve got both paper and digital going, since the kids’ schools all publish google calendars).
Week pages - these are the meat of this whole shebang: seven days (with more lines for weekdays than weekends) on the left with menus, to do’s, and sometimes recurring task checkbox grids on the right. It all gets noted here, so I can stay on top of everything. Big all day things come first each day (birthdays, days off), then times events, then sometimes check box items for things I need to do on a particular day.
Monthly menu pages - this is a new one I’m trying where I transfer the what-we-ate info from each week to a monthly overview presented like the monthly pages, so I can see that we’ve already eaten some dinner twice but it’s been too long since we’ve had another favorite. I’ve got a roster of dinners we like as a family, but I don’t want to eat the same thing all. the. time.
Once we’ve gotten through all the pages that make it a working calendar for me, we’ve got the fun stuff, like notes and sketches (and charts) for new designs or lists of designs that need to be published. I also keep notes for this whole school application extravaganza we’re going through. I find it helpful to have as much as possible on paper. There’s just too much going on to rely on memory alone. When I’m reading a book, I might take notes on a new page. When I spilled coffee all over a small idea notebook that had been hanging around for a while, I transferred the ideas I was still interested in to a new page.
This is where the table of contents up front comes in handy. You just add the new pages to the list with their page numbers, then you can find stuff pretty easily later on (provided you label them clearly enough for yourself), so for November I noted the month page, as well as the week pages for all weeks in November. It should be said that the table of contents is page one and all pages are numbered sequentially at the bottom of each page as I go.
What I really love about the system is that when you have a new thing you want to do, you just start it on the next page, number the page, and make a new entry (or add an additional page number to an existing category) on your table of contents. No muss, no fuss, just another page. I suppose if a page were a real disaster, you could rip it out, but I don’t. There’s nothing wrong with just moving on. If you really want, you could X out the page or doodle all over it or something, but really you can just move along.
At some point early on, I looked at some web pages for decorating your BuJo and learned to make little ribbon headers for each page (basically start with a rectangle surrounding your title, then add two sets of short parallel lines at each side, one above that extends over the rectangle a smidge and the other about halfway down the side that touches the rectangle, do the little carat to connect the two parallel lines on the outside, then a small line down from the top line to the rectangle and a little line at a 45-degree angle connecting the top line to the corner of the rectangle). I also put the weekly day/dates into little flags. That’s pretty much the extent of my drawn decorations. Some people make beautiful pages with decorations and different layouts but this is what works for me. And that’s the real power of the bujo for me - totally flexible and up to me.
Last year I added little washi tape “flags” for each monthly page (you can see one on the monthly page above) and stepped them down by one grid square along the side of the page. This is very satisfying and makes navigating the BuJo easier. Some people decorate pages with washi tape, but that hasn’t caught on for me (yet).
I’m nearing the end of my second navy blue, soft cover bujo and am getting excited for volume three. Last year’s innovation was to make labels with my little label maker for the start and end date of each journal (before that I’d used kraft paper covered moleskines, so I could write on them directly - the soft cover books are shiny and not for writing on).
Right now there’s that chartreuse sticky hanging out the top from the page with notes on my current project (the colorwork sweater dress that I put aside this past summer), but normally I don’t use stickies in my bujo. I do usually leave a pen in the notebook at the current week’s page.
Well, that’s my bullet journal story. I’ve contemplated a few other kinds of pages to keep track of things like skincare. I do have a 2021 reading list going - thanks to the Libby app and the NYPL I’ve read a lot of books this year. I might do a stash page since I’m using Ravelry less, and every once in a while I do a new wishlist page. The possibilities are endless!
I’ll be back on December 1st with a pattern release and a coupon, so until then Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate and Happy Rest of November to those who don’t. xxoo, Kathleen