Beginning a New Year: Why I Bujo in July
Welcome back to my library! I’ve been on a hiatus for any number of reasons, but July marks the beginning of my bullet journaling year and as I was setting up my bullet journal I thought, what better way to re-open the Maison Library than through a step by step of how I set up my bullet journal. There are many people who are more experienced with bullet journaling, and I draw my own inspiration from many different bullet journaling accounts on Instagram, and what I plan to offer you today is how and why I set up my journal the way I do from the perspective of an independent scholar who has used the bullet journaling system for a few years.
As you can see from the image above, I use the Leuchtturm 1917 for my bullet journal. This is the notebook brand I began with and I’ve continued to use it (I’m starting my third year now) because it worked for me, I love the rainbow of available colors and the feel of the paper which I personally find to be very tactile. I also like to use the dot grid because it provides some writing and layout guidance without being intrusive. There are some drawbacks which have been well documented by journaling accounts: here is a review of bullet journal options. the Leuchtturm is not immune to “ghosting” and its relative “bleed through,” and this can especially be the case when using fountain pens or markers. It isn’t possible, in my experience, to use a flex pen because the ink completely bleeds through the page so that’s a limitation.
The other limitation to the Leuchtturm that I run into as a fountain pen user is that some of the inks can change significantly on the page. This change can be quite beautiful in the case of multi-colored ink like Sailor Manyo Haha, but, alternatively, all of my burgundies turn brown and that saddens me particularly because burgundy would be a great color to pair with this red cover this year. Rhodia also makes a notebook that is bullet journal compatible and their paper is one of the gold standards for fountain pens alongside Tomoe River and Claire Fontaine.
Setting up my Future Log. Usually I do this in black ink, but because my journal is red I decided to use J. Herbin’s Rouge Caroubier to open with the same pop of red that my notebook has on the outside.
One thing that I have noticed is a bit different about my bullet journaling practice from many others is when I begin my year. While a lot of planners and bullet journal practitioners set up their planners at the beginning of the calendar year in January, I begin mine in July, which is just a little later than halfway through the year. This happened subconsciously, but I’ll explain why it makes sense that it did. Even though I am an independent scholar, my year still revolves around the academic year in very specific ways whether that is participating in the academic job market, applying to conferences, submitting articles for publication, working on a book proposal, or just participating in writing workshops with my peers who may also be teaching. As a consequence, July is when I reset the clock and start thinking about upcoming deadlines, particularly because many deadlines start appearing in August, which means I need to be actively charting and tracking them by July.
Actually, when I was at Stony Brook University (and I imagine this is true of many institutions) the academic fiscal year reset on July 1st, which goes a long way toward explaining why so much of the academic year begins again around August, and not just teaching. Between July and August institutions like University supported journals, conferences, conference funding, all of these programs and venues have their budget for the upcoming year. So, as a participant in that world I find much of my year defined by these external deadlines that are determined by the academic year. When I was considering shifting my bullet journaling practice to line up with the calendar year I realized this and decided to stick with July because, for work, it made the most sense to reset my bullet journal and plans with the fiscal year, and I think this applies to anyone who is setting up a work focused bullet journal. Look at when the fiscal year begins in your industry and align your bullet journaling practice with that yearly benchmark. You might even begin a month early if you notice that things intensify exactly at the start of the fiscal year. For me, July works, because nothing ever seems to be due in July, and generally the deadlines start to show up around the end of August, so there’s a nice buffer between getting set up and the deadlines that allows me to chart, in my bullet journal, how the year is shaping up.
On my horizon this year, and reminding me that it is in fact a good idea for me to begin my bullet journal again, is a special issue deadline, a book chapter proposal deadline, and the deadline for abstract submissions to NeMLA (which I want to keep an eye on as a co-chair for a panel this year). So, let me show you how I get set up and why.
I think I was setting this page up right after finishing a French lesson and I accidentally wrote the months in French. I mean, it’s an easy mistake; it’s just a two letter switch. Décembre is missing an accent though. Look to the right and you can spot another mistake, I wrote 29 where I should have written 19. Embrace mistakes.
One of the key concepts behind bullet journaling is that it is a flexible system that you adapt to your own needs. Basically, you take an empty notebook (any empty notebook) and turn it into a planner/everything notebook. I’ve never done well with structured planners (a monthly was my best bet, but a weekly? Forget it), but I did have a few problems that led me to bullet journaling.
deadlines in academia are often far out and can be difficult to track without a clear system
I would write everything down, but without a clear notebook to put it in I would often loose the loose-leaf or post-it notes I wrote things down on
I also needed a notebook where I could put miscellaneous information beyond my schedule
Bullet journaling addressed all of these issues, plus, it was analogue and I like analogue. Another feasible alternative for me would be to track deadlines in my cell phone or keep a spread sheet in google sheets, and I do this too. I think it’s important to have many different systems for keeping track of non-negotiable deadlines since it’s unlikely I’ll carry both my bullet journal and my laptop in the same day, and sometimes I may be out with just my phone; I’m not a pack mule.
What prompted me to begin bullet journaling was a need to have a place for everything because I was becoming really overwhelmed in my last year of my Ph.D. as I juggled completing my dissertation with many other activities. I set up my bullet journal using the standard method prescribed in this starter video by the creator of bullet journaling Ryder Carroll which includes:
The Index
The Future Log
A paired down and simple monthly spread
The same for breaking down your week into daily tasks
There are some things I don’t do. I don’t actively migrate or use his symbol system; I’m off and on with indexing and tend to use washi tape more frequently as a visual method for quickly identifying where important elements of my bullet journal are. What I never deviate from: I always include a future log and a monthly spread because these two things help me to track when I have an upcoming deadline and give me a place to keep deadlines that may be many months out.
This is another angle on my monthly layout. The pen I used is a Sailor Pro Gear Slim with a medium fine nib. Also front and center are my mistakes, no shame here.
The Future log is probably my favorite feature in the bullet journal. I like that, up front, the system provides a place for tracking deadlines up to a year in advance (at this point in my career I don’t have deadlines that are further out than a year). In the past when I would see a conference deadline, for example, that was three or four months down the road, I would just tell myself “oh I’ll come back to this post later” or I might write it down on a post-it note that would inevitably disappear, and as time passed the pressure would mount as I realized I I couldn’t recall the deadlines and I would have to do the work of hunting them down again. Obviously a monthly planner could solve this, but something I appreciate about the future log is also how condensed the year is. While I made the monthly sections larger by reducing the original page spread to two months per page, I still like that I can quickly flip through the future log section and get a sense of how the entire year looks.
I also like that I determine how much space is devoted to each month, rather than having to hunt through various planners to find a format that works for me, but that may not work for me in a year or two. This is a part of the flexibility of the bujo system, that it is infinitely variable and can evolve with you from month to month, week to week, or even day to day depending on your needs. If I needed to, I could remake my future log in the middle of the year to better suit my schedule.
My monthly spread in progress. I use the basic spread from the starter video to this day. That layout suits me.
The spread is created by listing the dates vertically and then writing down the corresponding days of the week next to them. An adaptation I could make would be to skip a line between dates. Every once in a while two things are due on the same day and they don’t always fit on one line.
Here is the completed spread. The fountain pen here is a Sailor Pro Gear Slim Shikiori Princess Kaguya with a medium fine nib, this is the pen I used to create the layout.
There are a lot of different ways of laying out monthly spreads. The most popular seems to be the standard box method that many planners use, where every date gets a box creating a grid of dates for the month. People often lay that spread out across two pages, I don’t know where they put their task list, or if they keep one. For me, I like the basic spread because it is quick and it gets the job done. I find a gridded monthly spread visually overwhelming if I have to hunt down tasks, so the vertical list style visually simplifies things for me. The task list is helpful because it allows me to set goals in more detail and perhaps straighten out any scheduling confusion created by the more structured layout on the right side of the journal. I recommend giving this method a try for one month, see how it works for you, especially if, like me, you don’t feel confident in your ability to sketch or create symmetry with more complex layouts. I think there’s a lot of visual beauty in the simplicity of this basic monthly format.
Things I put on my task list: conference abstract writing, breaking down journal article goals into more manageable tasks, goals that I hope to accomplish like keeping my workspace cleaner. Anything I would like to get done that month regardless of if there’s a hard deadline or not.
Things I put on my monthly spread page: I only use this for hard deadlines and dates and times for meetings.
This month I’m trying a weekly layout as well because I have a more structured schedule than in the past.
I really like this symmetrical and simple weekly layout. We’ll see if there’s enough room on each day. I’m more using it to keep track of meetings.
I’ve played around very minimally with weekly layouts, but when I was working on my dissertation I rarely had meetings or scheduled events outside of the repetitive tasks of teaching a course, which I didn’t need a planner to remind me about, so I gave up on the daily schedule pretty quickly. Now every day has a different schedule, and lately I’ve had a lot of one-off meetings, or meetings that recur, but not necessarily every week. Now that this is the case I’ll be testing this weekly spread this month. If it works, I’ll do it again next month. If it turns out I don’t need it, I’ll quit, and if it turns out I need more space I’ll start contemplating alternative spreads. To give you examples of how I’ve used this so far. On the 29th I had a one-off invited lecture to give (online, obviously, this is 2020), Tuesday I had a recurring French tutoring session (I’m developing my spoken French using italki), Wednesday I had a new writing group meeting and the first Salon Evocations podcast episode dropping, Thursday I had another French session but with a different teacher and at a different time, and then Friday I needed to trade draft pages with another writing partner, so, as you can see, every day I had something a little different to do. It’s becoming a bit too much to keep straight in my head, plus, why waste my memory on that? Thus, the weekly spread.
My starter page for the month
An aesthetic bonus. It isn’t a required part of the bullet journaling process but a lot of bullet journal practitioners use the beginning of a new month as an opportunity to create a theme that they’ll draw out through the month. Maybe you’ve seen some of their gorgeous sketches or even paintings that they open a new month with? It was actually the beauty of those monthly spreads that originally drew me to bullet journaling, but trying it for two months reminded me that I find no joy in drawing, so I changed it to something I love doing. I started writing down a featured quote at the beginning of each month. This month I’m starting with Jules Huret’s description of the various cities that Buenos Aires reminds him of upon first arriving. En Argentine is a work of travel writing that I’m revisiting as I adapt the presentation I gave at NeMLA into a longer piece, so to celebrate having been invited to contribute a chapter to a book collection based on that presentation, I decided to open with that ongoing research. This is one of my favorite parts about creating monthly spreads, finding a quote that I find meaningful and including it at the beginning of my bullet journal. Last year it was the Baudelaire quote “I have included a certain amount of filth to please the gentlemen of the press. They have proved ungrateful.” from the “Preface” of Les Fleurs du Mal.
Ahh, the romance of the blank page.
Between monthly spreads I create spreads based on my needs. Sometimes I create areas to track peer review edits or progress, at other times I might write down notes from a one-off tango workshop I took, at still other times I might create a section for new projects, or, one year I created a yearly goals spread, which is something I would like to do again this year since I’ve completed many of those old goals and now I need to think more about what I want for the future. One thing I’ve already started working on in this journal is to track reflections on my writing process so that I can create new posts on how my writing process has evolved, what I’ve learned about myself, and what is working for me. Maybe some of those tricks will also work for you.
So, I’ll close out with one last image of my bullet journal. I hope it’s been as fun an experience for you to read and see as it was for me to photograph and write. For the comments, tell me, what did you think of this more visual post? Would you like to see more photographic essays from this blog? Is there anything you would still like me to answer regarding bullet journaling, writing, or anything else? Let me know and thank you for joining me here in the library!
