Okay, so you want to start a bullet journal? But you don’t have the right notebook or the right pens or the right washi tape or the right ruler or the right vibe?
Don’t let a fear of your bullet journal not being able to compete with the bullet journals you see on Instagram keep you from jumping in. The trick to being successful by using your bullet journal is to just get started!
So I’m going to walk you through how I set up my bullet journal in about 45 minutes. There are plenty of ways to get a brand new bullet journal set up in anywhere from 10 minutes (trust me, it can be done to an extent) to upwards of a handful of hours.
It all just depends on how much work you want to do up front and how much of a project you want your bullet journal to be each week and each month when it’s time for a new spread.
I, for one, used to fall into the category of people who spend way too damn long on setting up a bullet journal. When I first got started, I used about 12 different pen colors, I used to paint the covers of a new journal, and I used to try to do all these random things to decorate the pages (if you don’t believe me, just watch this pen pile grow).
This time, I wanted to take a different approach. I’ve been using either a Passion Planner or an Erin Condren Life Planner for close to two years now, but neither has every feature I need. Also, long story short, I wasn’t using my planner effectively anymore. Grad school is a little less...intense I guess? My to-do lists are shorter and my days aren’t as packed, but things carry more weight. Does that make sense? So my planner has a lot of wasted space at this point in my life, and last semester I didn’t use a planner at all because all I had was my team design project. I fought with myself for almost this entire semester about what to do to be a better student, keep myself more organized, and keep myself on top of my assignments and deadlines.
The answer? Get back into bullet journaling.
I set my bullet journal up in about 45 minutes this morning before I sat down to study for my upcoming statistics exam, so let’s walk through how I did that.
First, I got together my existing Erin Condren Life Planner (which, let’s be honest, I will always love), an empty notebook I had lying around (I am the type of person that people gift notebooks to and I’m definitely not complaining), some highlighters (I only ended up using the gray one), and some black pens. I happen to have Faber Castell pens laying around because I like to sketch and they don’t bleed when I go over them with watercolors, but seriously, any black pen is totally fine. I promise.
Fortunately, the Leuchtturm1917 notebook I have comes with an index in the front already. However, if your notebook does not have one, you’ll want to go ahead and add that at the very beginning of your notebook.
I’m going to be honest, I don’t love that it’s called an index in the bullet journal community because to me it’s a table of contents if it’s a the front, but whatever.
Skipping the index and one blank page, I dove right in. I will say, I had a bit of a plan going in. I knew I wanted to have 6 columns, one for each month, so I spaced those out using a mechanical pencil. Using a brush pen I had laying around (you can also use a crayola marker or a plain pen/marker if you’re not feeling script fonts), I wrote out the first 6 months and gave my page a title.
I then did the exact same thing for the next 6 months.
Next up, I went over those pencil lines with a black pen. Pencil can be skipped, or going over with a black pen can be skipped - it depends on how confident you are in your spacing and what you want your bullet journal to look like (in the end, that’s what your bullet journal is all about, right?). Once I had my six columns, I went in and put mini calendars in for the first 6 months. I’ll go back and do May - October later.
Once I had my columns, I went in and started added some dates to my future log. If you’re on a time crunch and just want your bullet journal started so you can add in your first list, then by all means, power on through and skip this part!
4. Make your Monthly Spread
Okay, so this is 100% where my pencil and my eraser saw the most action. I had no idea what I wanted my spread to look like, just that I wanted a teeny calendar and a place for goals.
I started by sketching out some boxes, writing in what I wanted those boxes to be, debating whether I actually wanted any of those boxes, etc.
Eventually, I decided it’s what I wanted and I went over everything with some black pens.
I included a section for monthly goals, some important dates, and an overview of budget benchmarks.
100% optional, but I decided that on the page facing my monthly spread would be the perfect place to track some of the habits I want to get better about staying on top of. Since it’s a tracker for the month, it made sense to keep it with the whole month.
This is without a doubt the part that took the longest when I was setting up my bullet journal this morning. Not only did I have to figure out what exactly I wanted to track, but I also had to go through and ink in all the lines because once I started, I was committed.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it turned out great and I’m really excited to use it, but I wish I had left it until a few days from now, just because it did take almost 20 minutes for this one page (ridiculous, right?).
6. Make Your Weekly Spread
I decided to keep my weekly spread relatively simple, especially compared to what my bullet journal used to look like, and stuck to just black pen and gray highlighter.
I kept things as simple as possible. I’m hoping that with a simpler layout, I can maybe get a new weekly spread going in under 5 minutes as my weeks progress.
Along the lefthand side, I have my work and class schedule. Then the rest of the two page spread is dedicated to to-do lists. Can you spot the mistake I made on Monday? Who cares?? Make mistakes in your bullet journal!! This is JUST FOR YOU!
I may switch to more of a horizontal situation in the upcoming weeks, but for right now I’m on board with this one and we’ll see how it goes!
7. Finally, Make Sure You Have a Key
I forgot until the very end to set up my key, and honestly, it wasn’t the end of the world. I stuck it up on the page just before my index starts and called it a day.
I did my best to keep it simple. My keys in the past have had a habit of taking up an entire page.
All in all, I’m really happy with the more minimalist direction this bullet journal is heading. I’m excited to only need to carry like two or three writing utensils to be able to use it, I’m excited to not stress about messing up, and I’m excited to be excited about school again.
I plan on adding a few more pages, like a cleaning schedule and a workout tracker or something similar, but that’ll come after I finished getting ready for my Stat exam!
What do your bullet journals look like? How long does it take you to set yours up?
