as someone with adhd who bullet journals and has actually been keeping up with it, here’s my tips for keeping with it if you want em:
-use a shitty pen. one that doesn’t suck to write with, but not a fancy one. I literally just have like ten identical pilot bottle 2 pens in black ink, plus some extras that are a surprise tool that will help us later.
-stickers. I bought a sticker set that looks kinda nice, but its entire purpose is that it has 12 lines of numbers 1-31 and 12 sets of the days of the week by their first letter (like M T W TH F S S M W…), plus names of the months. when I’m starting a new month, I slap the month sticker at the top center, cut the date numbers accordingly down to 28, 29, or 30 if needed, look at a calendar and cut down the days of the week stickers, and slap those in to make my monthly log. you only need enough focus to look at the calendar and figure out that the month starts on, say, a wednesday, and ends on a friday, so you cut off the days before the first wednesday and after the last friday to make it fit. bam, 2 minute monthly log. fill in with events.
-get a notebook that you like by all means, but you absolutely don’t need the big brands (moleskin used to be it, then leuchtturm, then they moved on and now I think archer and olive is big?). they have an official bullet journal that I like using bc it was designed for it with some grid guides if you’re worried about shit like splitting a page up unevenly, but I’d recommend against using any of the big brands the first time. I bought a pack of three cute recycled notebooks from barnes and noble and I feel a lot better about fucking up in them because I got 3 for like $15 rather than 1 for $40.
-aesthetic hack: if you do care slightly about how shit looks/seeing mistakes bothers you, get white out first off. second off, there’s absolutely no harm working in pencil. third off, and this is the big hack: you can make shit look nice with some black construction paper or cardstock. rip off some of the paper, buy 1 or 2 fancy metallic pens meant to show up on black paper if you want to write on them, and tape over the mistake. it looks like you’re doing a cool aesthetic thing but it’s super good for hiding mistakes. I accidentally numbered a page totally wrong and I just cut out some circles from the black paper, numbered them correctly, and taped them over the mistake because mistakes DO bother me, but whiteout works super well for the smaller ones. (if you’re using the official bullet journal it also doesn’t stand out like on some more creamy papers)
-I like to prep weekly spreads months in advance bc I know my motivation is super unstable and won’t hold enough throughout the year to make a new spread every week, but here’s the thing. you don’t have to do a spread. I do it bc I like being able to put in my tasks way ahead of time/as soon as I know about them, bc I don’t trust myself to remember to put them in later. you can just literally write “monday december 21st”, draw a line underneath, and write your tasks for the day, though.
-speaking of spreads, those big fancy spreads everyone gets so caught up in? fuck em. do you ACTUALLY care about tracking every book you read in a notebook if you’re a big reader, or would you do just fine entering them in goodreads or writing a note on your phone? how about those aesthetic water trackers? is that really gonna do shit for you, or will you just feel guilty when you inevitably forget you’re supposed to drink water and now there’s a few days with a big hole in them in the tracker? use the spreads you actually think you’re gonna use, and then… minimalize them. my “goals for 2022″ “spread” is two pages with “goals for 2022″ in the middle and a box drawn around the two pages. when I decide on the goals I’m literally gonna randomly scatter them around the page.
-you don’t have to set it up all at once. I literally keep my bullet journal for 2022 in progress open on my desk with a pen and every now and then I’ll put down “wednesday 22nd”, underline it, and go back to what I was doing. later I’ll glance at it and put down thursday 23rd in the right place. you can make slow, steady progress and then you look down and oh shit you’ve set up all the way to july without ever dedicating specific time to bullet journaling.
-hardest part is building a habit of using it. in theory you wanna look at it every day. I have my watch set up to buzz me every now and then and tell me to look in my journal at set times–usually, when I get home from work and I actually have to think about my tasks for the day. but once you’ve built the habit, it keeps things MASSIVELY on track.
