Beginning Bullet Journals
Bringing structure to your life is a difficult thing to do in the midst of deadlines, projects, keeping personal and professional goals in sight, and balancing this with a personal life and maintaining hobbies. And often when you come across those blogs with beautiful notes (and lots of them), you want that, but you don't know how. Well, I'm there too. As the summer begins, I told myself that this year would not be one of those years where I sit around the house and do nothing all day. I want to ready myself for the oncoming year of more deadlines, more chaos, and more stress. However, we never want the stress. But to prepare myself for next year, I told myself that I would maintain and set goals for this summer.
June calendar of my bullet journal, hand made.
Here's where we start, and where you come in. Deer Notes is my goal to keep to myself in order for me to feel like I have a productive summer break, as well as a gateway of tips for people who also want to decrease that feeling of dread a week before school starts.
Taking Action
My first task is to create a bullet journal. Now, as I am a frequent Tumblr user, "studyspiration" blogs are becoming more abundant, in their perfect, menacing way. So, naturally, I wanted to have that too! No, but really. If you're like me, then you get the feeling of satisfaction as you gaze upon perfect handwriting, color coding, and a full page of beautiful notes. And then you look at your own notes for school, and you become disappointed in yourself. This is where you belong, dear reader! You have found your niche. I congratulate you. So, step one: create a bullet journal. And at first, I too, was unbelievably confused (and still curious) on what they even are. All I knew is that some people track how much water they drink or how many hours of sleep they get per day... right? So I found some of those perfect blogs and put all of their posts about bullet journals together, to make my very own personalized one. Original, right?
Materials
I'd like to think that the whole thing is rather creative. Because everyone who knows me must know that I'm a fan of stationary, overtime, I have accumulated a large amount of journals. I chose one that my friend Hope gave me to use as a travel journal, which made me depressed because I don't travel to crazy places like she does at my young age. It's 5" by 7" inches (about 13 by 18 centimeters) with off-white, lightly lined pages. Not ideal, but a manageable size for my first bullet journal.
The First Steps Now, for the summer, I started off with making a June calendar (see the picture) with a ruler and black Pilot G-2 .07 pen. From there, on the next pages, for the whole month, I use a page per day. I begin with the date and day of the week, leave about half of the page open for things I need to remember, doodles, assignments, and more; and the other half to track how many glasses of water I drink (something I need to increase greatly) and how many hours of sleep I got. Below that, I leave a space for comments and notes. To be honest, I don't really know if that's how it's supposed to be. It takes way less time than I thought it would to make, which is great! -Anna
Sorry for my camera quality, I promise I'll use my actual camera to photograph my pages next time.
Please, comment to give me feedback on my posts, ask questions, or give me suggestions for topics.
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