I’ve been bullet journalling for well over two years now and I’m constantly finding new ways to improve my process and make things work better for me. Because of this, there are a quite a few new things I tried this year and I thought it might be quite nice to share them with you, and talk through what worked and what didn’t.
Adding monthly title pages
I’ve always had a monthly overview spread to start off each month, but this year I created a ‘proper’ title page to begin the month. This worked really well as it allowed me to be a bit more creative when I wanted to be and made things much easier to find when I was flicking back and forth throughout the journal. I also kept a colour theme running through each month so things were easier to find at a glance.
Some of my 2018 monthly title pages: April / May / June
Creating habit trackers
Habit trackers aren’t a new thing, to me or in general, but I’d stopped using them in 2017 and thought it might be worth making them more specific. After some browsing on Pinterest, I found this kinda style and figured I could make it work.
I tried this one out in May, but at the end of the month I didn’t really feel like I’d learned anything (except that I was eating out a hell of a lot). Also my ‘vegan meals’ were mostly breakfasts, so again didn’t really tell the whole picture. I almost feel like a ‘log’ would work better than just colouring in squares? I dunno.
I’m struggling a bit with habit tracking as it’s something I find useful, but I can’t seem to find a way to do it that works. I’m just too forgetful to be filling it in everyday! If you’ve got ideas for better habit tracking please leave them below!
Mood tracking
This is another one of those things that a lot of people do each month but I’ve never really done. I thought it would be interesting to see if my period affected my mood as much as I felt like it did, and whilst my two bad mood days in a row were my heaviest period days, three mood options didn’t really give me much variation or real insight the rest of the time. I only bothered with this for May and didn’t feel like I got enough out of it to continue drawing mood spreads out (even this basic bitch one took me about half an hour to do) so I stopped.
Tracking my period
I have an app for tracking my period and I think I’ll stick to that for 2019. I felt like I was duplicating information a lot of the time, as I was looking at the app to back-fill the spread. I had big plans for this spread as it was supposed to help me sort out my symptoms too, but I got bored of that after month two as the spread wasn’t fit for purpose (hence the need for the mood tracker above). I may still make note of when my period comes in my 2019 bullet journal, but I’m thinking this might be better placed on my monthly spreads than dedicating a whole two pages to it.
Weekly meal planning
May was a busy month for new bullet journal spreads, and one I hoped would take off was my meal planning spread. In reality, it was more of a documentation spread than one for planning, and it just didn’t really work. One of the main things I wanted to look at was how many times a week I was eating meat-free, and this spread didn’t really give me that.
Tracking my blog pageviews and sessions
This has probably been the most useful of all the spreads as it’s so much more visual and actually gives useful information. I’ve tried using graphs in my journal before but not for this purpose, and I think it works really well. Unfortunately it does show a gradual decline in my blog views throughout the year, but I’m making peace with that. This is a definite winner to take forward into 2019 and one that probably doesn’t need much adapting ahead of the new year.
Read more: How I track my blog stats in my bullet journal
You’ll notice a trend that a lot of the spreads I didn’t like basically just weren’t fit for purpose, which is something I need to work on for 2019.
I think trying new things is important when you’ve stuck with something for a while – for me it helps to keep things interesting and I think there’s always ways to do things more effectively.
Have you tried anything new in 2018 which has been a game changer?
