Bullet Journalling: April

I'm still using my Bullet Journal and I've also successfully sold a friend on getting started using a Bullet Journal (that's not counting the couple of online friends who have adopted it as a method for staying organised as well).

So how's my BuJo shaped up this month?

This month took me a couple of days to get started because it didn't have the sense to start at the weekend. I ended up pencilling in the standard month stuff and then spent about a week inking over the top of it. Thankfully April ends on a weekend, so I'll be able to devote my time to getting everything drawn and inked in one go.

As usual, I began April with a review of March:

I've been exchanging washi tape with some of my pen pals and one of the tapes matched the pastel colours I've been using for my March theme, so I thought it would be a nice way to pretty up review page. This notebook doesn't really need much in the way of jazzing up since the pages are coloured and have little pictures on the corners, but I'm almost at the end of the gridded section (and I'm thinking of moving on to the beautiful anthracite Leuchtturm book I picked up in Wales rather than using the unlined pink section that's next in this notebook).

I tried something slightly different for my month overview this month:

I was struggling with having enough space for everything on a single line; sometimes it would look a little jumbled where I would write something in for the end of the day, then I'd get an appointment or something would come up for earlier in the day which made it confusing.

I'd seen something similar to this layout on Boho Berry, except I organised mine into morning, afternoon and work. It's fairly self-explanatory; work is where I make notes about my start/finish times and holiday hours. I left space down the side for notes which I've not really used. I'm not sure if I'll leave the notes section here or swap it out for something else.

This month I've switched out some of the stuff from from April Habit Tracker to create two different trackers:

I still have my standard habit tracker where I'm tracking the 'need to do' things, but I now also have a self-care tracker as well, which is for the 'want to do' things.

These are for the things that don't need to be done, but which are fun to do. It's sort of for those moments where I've checked off the laundry, or gotten back from walking Tara, or just had a busy day at work and want to reward myself with something I enjoy. The problem with those things is that they don't always count towards any of my monthly goals or targets so it feels a little like you're wasting time, when you're not; doing things just for you which you enjoy is important too. So I've made a little tracker to stay on top of that too.

This month I decided not to bother with a whole food tracker, instead I've done a snack tracker:

I still want to do something a little bit different with this, because I like tracking my food and meals, but I don't like this list format. I'm actually playing around with the idea of doing some sort of weekly overview in the future, with a page per week and including that information on the weekly view (so I can see it week by week, rather than on a monthly basis). But it's something I'll carry on playing around with in the future. As I keep saying, that's the beauty of the Bullet Journal system. I'll just keep messaging with it until I get a system I like.

I'm still just doing dailies where I track my fluid intake, list my to-dos and write a little review at the end of the day. I don't have much in the way of Collections this month. I'm still using my TV Series tracker to stay on top of which episode of House we're up to. I've also got a special list of things to do before my Mum and stepdad visit next month, and my latest 'collection' spread is a tracker for our FET.

I based this on the Calendex idea for keeping track of details, such as appointments and events. I originally tried laying it out in the style of a habit tracker but I needed it to run over more than one month, so in the end I modified the Calendex format. Each day has six boxes for me to record medication, appointments and other information. The facing page has a little key to make sense of the colours and letters, as well as additional details (like times of appointments).

My one other change this month was to move all of my pen pal details out of my Bullet Journal and into a whole new folder, I'll go into that on another post.

Do you Bullet Journal? What's working for you this month?