Bullet Journalling for Busy Creatives: Creating a Weekly Layout in 15 Minutes or Less
I have always had a bit of a love hate relationship with Bullet Journals. I've always loved the concept, but hated that the community online perpetuates the idea that you must spend hours on big layouts with trackers for everything and perfect decoration to back it up.
The idea of having a system that was super flexible and adaptable, but also fully customisable was really appealing to me as someone who loves writing down to do lists but hates the structure of planners. But going through Pinterest and Youtube and seeing all these people spending hours upon hours decorating and mapping out these pages every week both intimidated me and made me feel like a bullet journal was an unrealistic thing to include in my organisational scheme. I'm busy, I don't have the time to waste productive hours on a single piece of my organisational system.
The more I thought about it though, the more I desperately wanted something like this. I spent years trying traditional planners and would always stop using them because they were so one use and impractical. So I set out to try and come up with a bullet journal system that would be quick enough to sketch up, flexible for day to day use, and still look clean and tidy. I scoured Pinterest for minimal bullet journal layouts, and after a year of trial and error and many customised tweaks for my lifestyle, I have finally come up with something that works.
As a creative where things are changing all the time, the ability to have a notebook like this so you don’t lose everything is really useful. I jot things down, I doodle ideas and mockups out, and everything is in one place so I don't lose it. All in one notebook together, all with a logical structure, but simple enough to be productive and reasonable week to week.
I’m a fan now, because I have created something that works for me. That is hard to do, and you wont be able to do it for yourself overnight. My main advice if you take nothing else away from this post is to be realistic, start out basic, add/subtract things as you go, and don't feel like you have to decorate every page! It’s a useful tool, but only if you don’t waste productive time setting it up each week. I use maybe 15 minutes of my life either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning setting it up for the week, and I just do it while I watch youtube. Realistically I could probably do it faster if I didn’t have a distraction but Youtube is fun.
What follows is an outline of what I do and how I got to that point over the past year. If you’re like me and want to try this but don’t want to complicate the hell out of it, hopefully you can get some ideas and inspiration from my mistakes and learnings!
The General Concept:
Bullet Journals are notebooks typically in an A5 dot grid or blank page book (for ultimate flexibility) in which you sketch out layouts and pages to act like a traditional planner without the rigid structure of one. The intention behind them being that you can use it as a to do list book, a doodle book, a brainstorming book, anything and everything.
Gone are the days of buying a traditional planner that has a bunch of unnecessary things, and weeks where you don’t use it gone to waste. Use it when you need it, change it to suit your life week to week, and let it work for you.
The typical bullet journal user has yearly, monthly and weekly and daily pages, but this can be overwhelming if you’re a busy bawse killing your creative life.
The beauty of a bullet journal is you don’t HAVE to do anything you don’t want to! The only yearly and weekly pages I have are a place to jot down major events throughout the year and monthly goal charts (as I will outline later). I used to use many more of them but have slowly phased them out over the past few months. Pinterest got to me for a long time, and I’m finally snapping out of it.
Bullet Journal Decoration for the busy Millennial:
I’m human though, I love things looking pretty. Like any good millennial, I know aesthetics are everything. Whilst I don’t have time for full on bullet journal decorating, I do have time do use classy highlighters for headings.
I have gone out and bought myself a handful of Tombow Dual Brush Pens and swear by them. I have maybe 8-10 in nice complimentary colours that are light enough to use as highlighters and add some clean looking pops of colour throughout. It helps to distinguish headings from content, and make it a bit more interesting to look at. Each week I change up the colour combo, and I use only 2 colours per week personally, but live your best creative life and do what you wanna do!
I also have a slightly thicker (0.5pt) pen I use for the lines and headings to make it more obvious what is what.
Using your Bullet Journal:
The Monthly Pages:
I have started going off monthly pages a bit in recent months just because I never used them. I started out with heaps, thinking that I had to in order to have a “bullet journal” but all the online hype around them is bullshit. Do you, boo.
The only thing I do now is a quick title page to separate months from each other, a page spread for my monthly goals so I have something physically written down to refer back to, and a page for some major monthly to do’s (things that need to happen sometime that month that aren’t necessarily suited to hopping through the weekly lists). If monthly trackers are helpful to your success and accomplishing things because you have it physically in front of you, that’s awesome, but I never really have a use for them.
As an example of some nice and easy ones you could include if you wanted to try something are things to do with your health. I know as a creative, mental and physical health quite often end up on the backburner. Having trackers, be they monthly or weekly, might help to just remind you that you need to do something and make it obvious when you have neglected it.
I used to have a workout tracker and a meal tracker that I did weekly, but now just use my phone for those things as I personally would forget to use them. I need digital reminders for things like that.
The Weekly Pages:
I have recently whittled this right down also. The layout I was doing up until a few weeks ago took slightly too long for my liking and I found I wasn’t properly utilising parts of it. As mentioned above, I used to include a workout and meal tracker weekly that I found I just wasn’t using enough.
I currently do a 4 section weekly to do list where I jot down major things that need to be done that week in the 4 major areas of my life: personal, work, my parent’s businesses, and the blog/youtube. This just ensures that I can clearly see what things are for what and not forget to do anything becuase it’s all jumbled. I then, at the beginning of each day, go through and pull things from the lists that I will have time to do that day, and transfer any I don’t do to the following weeks list.
I also have a blank brain dump page for brainstorming ideas etc. If I need more than a single page, I will take a double spread following the daily layouts and start my next week after those. I didn’t do this until a few months ago but it has totally changed how useful my journal is. I wasn’t using the concept to its full potential just sketching up really rigid pages to use day to day. The beauty of an empty notebook is being able to jot down notes as well to keep them all in one place. Some weeks I use it, some I don’t, but it’s great to have.
The Daily/Weekly Spread:
I have whittled this down from two double spreads to just one as of late. Up until late August, each day would have a time tracker and a to do list where I would mark how many hours I spend working on different things as a visual representation of how I was spending my day. I found that I wasn’t using it, and it added a lot of time to sketching up my layout each week. It got modified to bring the whole thing down to 1 week on a double spread.
The left column has major client jobs to do, major weekly to do’s for me (to remind me they really need to be done), as well as a little ‘next week’ list of things that must get carried over to next week's layout. I don’t always use this but it’s helpful to have for when I do need it.
The rest are just small vertical spaces the perfect size for a daily to do list for me. If this ends up not working for me over time then I will change it again, but currently this is working perfectly.
So that’s how I use my bullet journal as a busy creative! Don’t feel intimidated by all these gorgeously decorated pictures on instagram and pinterest, you can make a clean and simple layout that really takes advantage of the flexibility of the bullet journal without overdoing it. It has really helped me keep my life on track and not worry about random post its full of ideas getting lost everywhere. Give it a go and see how it works for you, but know that it might take a while to get it how you like it!
Let me know below what your thoughts on bullet journals are - have you tried it? Did you love or hate it? And let me know if you have anything you swear by that I’m not doing. Always down for some inspiration!
P.S. Whilst shooting the images for this post, I had a gremlin coming through and mucking up all my props so I include a few of those pictures for the 'awwwww' factor. Enjoy!
