Since we’re over halfway into the year, I wanted to go ahead and do some reflection posts on some of my favorite things. So far, I’ve got out a post on some of my midyear reading thoughts which you can read in midyear book freak out tag. Today, I want to share with you how I’ve been using my bullet journal the past six months because I’ve changed things up quite a bit. We’re going to go into two functional spreads that I’ve been using frequently this year and also into the aesthetics of what I’ve been liking.
I’m a journal lover and obsessive planner, through and through, and you can really see it when it comes to how I use my planners/bullet journal. I’m aware that some people consider digital planning to be far more efficient but it’s never enough for me. Writing things out is far more therapeutic for me. It’s kind of the whole “write and forget” phenomenon mixed with the concept of making time in your day to force yourself to sit down and brain dump what ever’s bothering you and bring the things you rather avoid into the light. Those are two completely different reasons as to why I bullet journal but hey, it’s enough for me lol.
In previous years, my bullet journal used to be heavily reliant on Pinterest. I used to make monthly themes and spend a ton of time looking up a ton of pictures around that theme and decking my spreads out with pictures. This year, I still do themes but everything is drastically minimal.
I do a monthly cover page as you can see with my June monthly spread on the left.
Other then that, I use MAYBE a picture a week and it’s so much less stressful and makes things much faster. To be honest, the first three months of the year, I didn’t even use pictures outside my monthly cover page but after I got obsessed with certain shows or books, I started to incorporate a couple more pictures into my monthly spreads.
I think that my favorite weekly spreads were made in June when I was head over heels in love with the Korean Drama “Start Up”. June had some pretty cute spreads with “Start Up” elements incorporated into it, as you can see to the right.
I really love the minimal weekly spreads because they give me room to just write and plan out things rather than trying to plan around pictures. It make things feel less cumbersome having not to use a ton of color in my spreads, whether it be for the headers or anything like that. I just stick with my black Tombow pen and my Pilot G-2 07 gel pen. The clean and fresh look really helps makes things less overwhelming to look at.
Another one of my frequently used functional spreads is the Admin Spread. This spread is one that I set up for every month where I brain dump everything that I want to do that month, including all those small tasks that keep getting “forgotten”. And at the end of the month, I check off everything that’s been done and if something’s not been addressed, I move onto the next month’s Admin Spread and so on and so forth. I don’t know why I called it “Weekly To Do” here but it was definitely a month long running list.
This is such a good way to keep ourselves accountable for things and honestly, the more you rewrite those tasks that you haven’t gotten to yet, the more likely you are to actually get to them and the more accomplished you’ll feel when you look back at the end of the month and see how much you’ve done! Admin Spreads as I like call them, or monthly brain dump spreads, are a great accountability tool because they’re a great way to reassess tasks and readjust your monthly goals. This spread forces you to see what tasks you’re more likely to put off and try to fix your next month’s routine to address those problem areas and make those tasks more appealable to you.
Do you bullet journal and if so, did your bullet journaling ways change this year as well?