Bullet journal

Refining my bullet

This post is a little overdue as I meant to  write it after my first full month of bullet journaling. Now I have nearly gone through two full months of using the bullet journal (that’s just over two months total as I actually started mid-January) and I have already culled nearly half of the elements that I started out with.

At the moment my journal is fairly simple – close to how the original is structured, actually (which puts me in mind of the good ole KISS acronym, ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’). When I first laid out my journal I definitely did not KISS and, as a result, I found it a chore to fill out every day. While I still like the idea of some of the items I cut, they are just not practical or purposeful. Here are all of these obsolete elements:

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Daily cleaning tracker

The first useless spread to disappear was the Daily Cleaning Tracker. Thinking this would help stay on top of my domestic duties, I made a list of all of my various chores and split them into categories to assist with organisation and ease of tracking. These categories were General; Laundry; Kitchen; and Bathroom. I quickly realised that nearly all of these tasks didn’t need to be done each day, making a daily tracker  completely unnecessary.

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Gratitude tracker

The second unnecessary spread to vanish was the Daily Gratitude Tracker, which I titled ‘Grateful for…’. This is something that I still really like the concept of. My rules were that I had to come up with two points each day, and I couldn’t list the same point more than thrice in one month. I thought it would be uplifting to document all the things I find myself grateful for, but often found myself listing frivolous items just to populate the page.

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Spiraldex – 24hr task tracker

The final thing to vanish, and the one that lasted the longest because I really wanted it to work, was the 24 hour task tracker. Before becoming interested in bullet journals, I had never heard of spiraldexes before. I really like the look of them and most people seemed to be using them to keep track of their hours. My colour-coded ‘tasks’ were Exercise; Commute; Work; Social; Personal; and Household. In the end, these were ditched because they were too time-consuming to complete each day. I was also finding that most of my days looked exactly the same. If I ever bring back a time tracker, I would only track the ways in which I spend my personal time (which would likely include exercise, social and household). However, it will not be in spiraldex format.

What’s left is the following (plus, of course, the key and yearly calendar at the very front of the journal):

Much cleaner and a hell of a lot easier to manage. And I still have a spiraldex in there, yay!

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