How to start a Bullet Journal
It’s sometimes hard to get into a new hobby. You are settled, your bullet journal is in your hands, but how to start now? What is necessary and what is useless?
I’m trying to give you some tips now to get started. There are no rules, and there is no must-have. It’s all optional – and this is what we want with our bullet journal. I would suggest to keep it simple at the beginning, so here comes my simple guide for the first pages.
In my journal there is a page in the front, thats somehow glued to the cover. I came across a lot of journals and even books with this kind of page at the beginning. This page is usually a little bit strange, so this is where I put my cover page. I decided to go with a simple, magical theme that fitted to my journal for 2021.
You could use this first page as well for your name and adress if you wish to have this in your journal. Another use I saw already was creating the key page or the year at a glance page.
For the key page you write down all the symbols you want to use. Down below you can see my key.
My key consists of:
- a bullet for a task
- crossed out bullet for an accomplished task
- bullet with arow for a moved task
- strikethrough bullet for a canceled task
- square box for a meeting or an event
- sqaure box with a simple slash for a meeting or event that happend but that I didn’t attend
- crossed out square box for an accomplished meeting or event
- strikethrough for a canceled meeting or event
- exclamation mark for something important
- simple dash for notes
Of course you can use own symbols or other symbols, less or even more. Usually a task is done with a bullet – did you know that this is where the name comes from? Sometimes people think the bullet refers to the dotted pages. Well, now you can shine with expert knowledge already!
Going on you can see here my year at a glance. It’s a very simple calender spread for the whole year. Some people need this for reference purposes. It’s a lot of work if you write it all down just like I did. An easy way would be to print out a calender and stick it in your journal.
These were my suggestions for the first page. To sum up: a cover page, an address page, a key page or year at a glance page. Of course you could use them all or combine them. Feel free to experiment!
Next comes the index. I usually find it very helpful when I have to look for meeting notes. Many people find it useless, becaus they are using their journal like a calendar where each week is followed by the next week. But I’m writing meeting notes, shopping lists, journal entries and a lot more between diferent days and weeks. Of course it’s somehow chronological, but finding a specific meeting is easier with an index.
After this I usually add my future log. This is very important for bullet journaling and I’m gonna explain you why in a bit.
The future log is a calendar. As you can’t scroll to a specific date in the future in your bullet journal, you need a space where you can write down specific notes, events or even just birthdays. There are many ways to design a future log. I decided to use a vertical set up with a small box for every day, but I also saw horizontal layouts.
So these were the most important things to get started. It doesn’t matter if you want to do a simple, minimalistic bullet journal or an artistic, colorful one, you will need them for sure!
And then you just start! Write down the current date and then all your tasks and meetings. After that comes the next day, and you go on like that.
For the artistic and creative way I’ll write another blog post soon.
