Bullet Journal // Part One: Some Info

I am not a planner. Well let me rephrase that – I am a reformed planner, in the sense that I don’t want to be a planner. I don’t want every detail of my life to be structured and spelled out on paper. It’s not how I live. I try to live fluidly, staying in the moment and do what feels good. Sometimes a day dedicated to chores ends up being a day of Netflix and baking. Sometimes I think I am going to get out to do a bunch of errands yet at 5pm I am still in my pajamas hovering over my studio workspace.

I am not a planner, but I am a memory keeper. And that’s where the need for something, some sort of way to record things more readily comes into play.

I stopped keeping a paper planner about 5 years ago. My style of planner back in the day was always a blank notebook where I would add in the days of the week and my to-do lists. Sometimes I would tab back pages to keep things like gift lists or house projects. It worked.

In recent years I’ve relied on Evernote and Google Docs to keep lists: house projects, vacation plans, scrapbook layouts to make. I also used my one sheet weekly planner to keep life things in order (bills, meals, appointments).

Then the planner craze hit the scrapbooking world. I have resisted for the most part. I do buy some of the stamps and embellishments to use in my regular scrapbooking, but I don’t have a dedicated calendar type planner.

I’ve checked out the different systems and admire the way scrapbookers are using their planners. But still. It didn’t feel like something I wanted to do.

I found the traveler’s notebooks and love them more for mini scrapbooking albums. I thought about going with a Midori system (Jetpens.com has a comprehensive guide). This started to lean more towards my needs with a planner. I started to evaluate my needs more and thought I should try to emulate what I think the system I would like to use would be, with what supplies I have.

I remember last summer first reading about the Bullet Journal and thinking it seemed like a good system. I decided to revisit that idea. Then as I was reading through the main site and other resources I saw the word log. Logging. Yes! I need a log. Not a planner. A log. Somewhere I can write things so that I don’t forget.

I googled it and found some pins on Pinterest. I took a few notes of what I think I would need to keep in a log. I decided to use a notebook I have on hand. It was a set of 3 that I purchased from Zulily, they are Japanese notebooks from Ca.Crea.