what i learned from 5 years of bullet journaling (and why i'm quitting)

january 2020 is my fifth year anniversary of starting my first ever bullet journal yes this thing is from my second semester of eighth grade and now i'm a freshman in college you know it's really been a long five years i've gone through eight different bullet journals and i even wrote a book about bullet journaling and note-taking methods for students and along the way i've learned a lot about bullet journaling and what works and what doesn't so in today's video i'm going to be sharing all of the best lessons that i learned from my experience and i'm going to be talking about how after five years of sticking with this planning method i'm now deciding to at least temporarily move on from it [Music] my first takeaway is kind of phrased weirdly in my notes but i said to take the stairs don't cannonball and this analogy refers to the various ways you can get into a pool and adjust to how cold it is one method is to take the stairs which allows you to gradually submerse yourself in takes a lot longer but each individual step feels less shocking and freezing the alternative method which i usually do for getting into a pool is to just jump straight in it's a huge shock and kind of a painful adjustment at first but it gets it over with really quick and while i would recommend doing a big splashy cannonball for a swimming pool i would not recommend doing that for bullet journaling when you first start bullet journaling you can see so many potential bullet journal layouts and artistic choices out there on social media and having all of these options in front of you it's easy for your eyes to get kind of bigger than your stomach you want to not only take it all in but try all of it for yourself and while i commend you for being ambitious it's good to dream big and to search out all these various sources of inspiration you might be setting yourself up to fail by doing too much all at once i definitely experienced this myself when i first started bullet journaling you can see i left a lot of blank setups because i set them up feeling all motivated at the beginning of the year or month and just never got around to actually using them one of the main reasons is that while bullet journaling kind of just seems like a one-off artistic planning type deal there are a lot of different habits associated with bullet journaling that you need to slowly incorporate into your routine when you're just starting out you have to remember to look at your task list and rewrite all of the tasks you didn't finish for the next day's to-do list or reflect on your mood and actually remember to flip to your mood tracker page you have to remember to set up a new monthly spread at the end of each month or to fill out a weekly log at the end of every week and the way habit formation works isn't really conducive to shoving 4 000 different habits in on one day and just being able to flawlessly execute them every single day afterwards generally i would say it's better to start with one habit and really solidify it so that you don't even have to think about it once you start working on your next one and while you don't have to do it one at a time like it's a little bit too unrealistic too long of a freaking tiny staircase what i would recommend is starting with just a few of your favorite ideas or just the bare bones planning setups that you need that way you can first work on building that planning bullet journaling habit and then start to add in the more advanced trackers i don't know what to call them like nothing's inherently more advanced versus beginner but like the ones that come after the ones you decide are the most essential [Music] my next lesson the one i wish i learned before my wallet had been so grievously injured is that you do not need that much stationery you don't no matter how much you love brush pens colorful markers nice gel pens i'm you don't need that much please stop buying it okay perhaps that may be a very much generalized statement but i definitely went overboard when i first started and because of what you see on social media it kind of feels like to have this perfectly aesthetic organized bullet journal you have to have a full rainbow spectrum of brush pens and markers and gel pens and white pens and black paper and glitter markers and i'll stop listing out everything that's on my jet pens wish list but you don't need all of those just one set of nice brush pens or markers will suffice like you probably see now on my most recent plan looking videos that i just use my mild liners or a couple of brush pens stationary and nice pens are not collectibles and we should stop viewing them as such they're just tools you need to make the colorful blobs that you want to make and once you have enough to make every possible colorful blob you need you're set a few things however that i do believe are surprising essentials that i didn't realize i needed include page flags because even though a lot of notebooks come with those ribbon bookmarks there's a lot of different spreads that i need to flip to every single day and i just want to be able to easily keep track of them without having to go all the way to my index and then flip through and look for the page number it's just so much effort but like actually reducing the amount of effort it takes you to fill out your trackers and planner logs is a great way to make you more likely to actually do those things because it requires just marginally less motivation the other thing you definitely need is white out because everybody makes mistakes and if you feel like treating yourself to some artistic decorative stationery i would not splurge on like a 439 color marker set instead i would stick with the markers you already own or even just one black marker and use a white pen because white pen accents just add so much spice [Music] my next tip is mostly geared for those getting started but can apply to more experienced bullet journalers as you start to you know get more ideas and want to try new things and that is to do and then declutter this is also definitely related to my first tip about trying a few things at a time instead of dumping everything in all at once the essence of this little catch phrase is to start by trying out the cool thing that you've seen online or came up with after a couple of rounds of use so maybe a week or a month or a couple of months i don't know time frame is up to you you can decide whether this really worked for you like did you use it did you enjoy using it do you feel like the insight it offered was you know insightful and if you feel like it's a great spread that you want to keep in your life then you keep it and if you feel like it wasn't that useful or didn't spark any joy you can just declutter it no guilt attached i feel like there is a certain level of standards within the online bullet journal community that can be toxic where you're just supposed to do these common spreads that everyone does for example i felt for the longest time that i had to have one of those year long things you know where you draw out a year-long calendar on one page and just have it there like i never used that i never looked at it but i felt like i just had to have one because every bullet journaler had one you don't have to have anything if you don't like something you never use it it just feels like a waste of time you declutter it and don't let anyone tell you what to do and i guess me telling you to do that is me telling you what to do so you don't have to listen to me wait that's a paradox you know what you just do whatever you want but what i recommend the method that's worked really well for me is to do this trial and error do and declutter type of cycle which really helps me keep my routine simple because it allows me to get rid of things i don't really use or don't really like because i find it really helpful to keep my routine short and simple and decluttered while also giving me some room to try new things [Music] my next piece of advice is to place function over fashion the thing i want to emphasize with this tip is that the bullet journaling at its core is a functional planning tool while it is very much aesthetic and i personally find it really relaxing to do calligraphy or doodle in my journal its primary purpose is to keep you organized and to keep you intentional with your lifestyle for a while i got stuck in a trap of setting up my habit trackers or video planner to look as nice as possible but for example i couldn't understand what my habits were because i didn't write out enough instructions for myself or i didn't have enough room to write out my video titles because i tried so hard to make my video plan really cute little boxes and over the past few years i spent quite a long time making doodles and quotes in the line art and all this stuff because i felt like i was supposed to not because i actually really wanted to i know it's kind of hard like i see a lot of comments that are about how oh i wish i could start bullet journaling but i can't draw i can't use straight lines i have horrible handwriting and i just want to shake these people by the shoulders and just say it doesn't freaking matter okay oh my god why do i sound so aggressive i'm not upset at you i'm upset that social media including myself has perpetuated this idea that a bullet journal has to be perfectly aesthetic the whole way through like some parts of my bullet journal are just an absolute mess because i have a really busy day i don't have time to make it look nice i just need to slap something together so that i can be organized and have my journal do its function of organizing [Music] and the last tip i will leave you with is to surround yourself with inspiration this can be through following people on social media there's a lot of bullet journal content on instagram and pinterest in particular or you can talk with friends who like to bullet journal in some ways bullet journaling and planning is kind of like an art it's imprecise it allows you to express yourself and everyone gets ideas from people around them it's not really copying you know what like you like if you see a spread you really like you could just directly copy you like i've seen a lot of people do that with my spreads on social media just you know directly copying the layout with a few small tweaks or even if you aren't intending to copy a spread directly you get ideas from the things you see around you like maybe you came across a cool looking title and it's just living in the back your brain or you come across a cool topic of something to keep track of and it just lives back there kind of underneath your consciousness until you start to brainstorm your own ideas and and i don't think there's anything wrong with that like that's kind of how art works ideas come from all around you your inspiration doesn't even have to be directly bullet journal journaling related i follow a lot of calligraphers and graphic designers to get visual inspiration in general sometimes i even get just inspired by a cool tree i see outside i'm sorry this tip is so vague it's kind of something you have to figure out with time as you develop as an artiste but i promise it's what keeps me motivated to keep improving in my planning and my art and my calligraphy and life in general [Music] um anyways now that i spent a little bit too long waxing poetic about how life inspires me in a bullet journal i'm going to talk about the reasons that i'm quitting bullet journaling at least for now so one of the main ones is that bullet journaling has felt like a performance it's felt very performative for a long time now maybe over a year up to two years i don't know perhaps this is just incredibly unrelatable because the vast majority of you are not bullet journal instagramers but as a comparison to like normal everyday life things it's like how you act a little bit differently if you know you're being photographed or if you know that someone important is listening to every word you're saying at the moment you just kind of be yourself but like a little bit of a more i'm acting it out version of yourself and i think a lot of that has to do with the aesthetic standards of bullet journal communities on social media lately i've just been feeling more and more like i'm just doing it because i'm supposed to for social media and not because it actually genuinely excites me i hope that makes sense it's not like bullet journaling has actively brought me misery it's just i don't find as much joy in it as i used to so as marie kondo would advise me to do i am letting go of what doesn't spark joy and another reason i want to consciously make this committed effort to switch it up in my planning system is it's felt like you know because i've been performing the bullet journal influencer role for so long i'm limited in my options of what i can try out for planning and organizing my life like i've been actively stopping myself from trying out some new planning and organization tools that interest me because i've been thinking oh but bullet journaling is my thing i have to keep bullet journaling it's what the people expect from me it's what i have to do as my duty to my bullet journal fans but that's kind of stupid because it's not my job to pretend i am a perfect bullet journalist who loves every single thing i do it's my job to just be myself and share things that work for me with you and if bullet journaling is no longer really working for me why should i make myself do it because it's not really going to be that helpful maybe this is all just because having something feel like your job social media is not my job but it kind of feels like it is sometimes it said that having something you love be your job makes you start to hate it and maybe that's what i'm starting to feel about bullet journaling or maybe i'm just having some sort of adolescent life crisis and i'll be back to bullet journaling by 2022. i don't know but we'll see where we go from here i'll keep you all updated on my channel i'm thinking that i'll still use a sort of hybrid bullet journal setup where i have a notebook with various random ideas written down in it in a semi-organized fashion i'll try out a couple of different digital planning tools like everyone keeps talking about notion and i've wanted to try it for so long so now's my chance to finally do it gonna try new things and see where it goes from here so thank you everyone who's followed me along and supported my videos during my whole five years of bullet journaling whether you were there in eighth grade when i started my bullet journal in january 2016. or this is the first video of mine you're watching just thanks for sticking around and that's all for today's video i hope you found it interesting i post new videos every week on this channel and you can also check out my instagram my second channel and my brand new tick tock account for more student life and non-studying related content see you next time

Channel: studyquill

Views: 741,000

Keywords: studying, college, school, organizing, organising, organisation, organization

Id: n5H_rPMM1oE

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021