During the last few years, I have kept a bullet journal to optimize activities and advance my goals. Still, only until today, I can say that I have designed a bullet journal according to my needs, and it has fulfilled all my expectations. Therefore, I want to share this design with you, inspired by others with a personal touch.
When I was looking for ideas to make a bullet journal, they always focused more on the font and decoration than its distribution. For this reason, I would like to leave aside the design issue and focus on the content and layout.
First Steps
The first thing to do is buy or recycle a notebook. Let’s allocate one or two consecutive sheets for the cover, which should carry the name of the year; you can complement it with a motivational phrase, words, or drawings that inspire you or leave it with the year.
As we are starting the year, it is essential that on the next page, you write your goals for 2022; you can divide it into financial, work, professional, family, personal, or lifestyle; or simply a list with all of it.
Tip: try to define goals according to your possibilities. For example, if one of your dreams is to buy a house, but your current salary is not enough, set an achievable goal. For example: save X amount of money for the down payment of my house, which you could complement with: find a job that generates better income or creating an extra source of income.
Writing down our goals for the year is an excellent exercise of projection and visualization. Do not worry if you do not reach all your goals this year; most importantly, you advance gradually to get them, and later we will see how you can evaluate that progress.
Monthly Planning
Once you define your annual goals, it is vital to start working on them. Therefore, you will limit what you can do in the first month to help you achieve this objective; in this way, break down and define the main goal and the month’s sub-goals and activities. For example, one of your goals for the year is to train more. For starting, one of your sub-goals could be to join the gym and train three times a week. These small monthly goals are fundamental to defining your weekly schedule.
Calendar
Having a monthly calendar is very useful to remember important dates and meetings; you can incorporate it into your bullet journal, manage it on your cell phone or have it on your desk. The important thing is to have it visible to schedule those dates not to forget.
Habit Tracker
For me, this is one of the most critical sections of the bullet journal, as it allows you to create habits and track them. Habits can be physical, intellectual, mental, social, emotional, or health-related. For example, if you want to generate or strengthen the habit of studying a specific subject by doing it daily or five days a week, you record the days you do it on your Habit Tracker. It could be designed either with mini-calendars or in a grid. Remember that it is not a planner about when you want to perform the activity; it is to record when you do it.
Weekly Scheduling
When making your weekly schedule, it is essential to review the goals and activities to be carried out during the month, which you can adjust over time. In this way, you define the goals for the week and the activities you must perform to achieve those goals. I recommend you write them down on Sunday night or Monday morning, evaluating what was left pending from the previous week and prioritizing them.
Daily Planning
I think planning daily activities is where the success of the bullet journal lies. In my previous attempts, I always prepared the whole month or the whole week, and it didn’t work, and every time I didn’t do many of the things I had scheduled, I felt frustrated. That is why it is key to plan your day, visualizing what weekly activities you could finish in the day.
Evaluation of Activities
Evaluating your activities is crucial because it will allow you to know how much you are doing during the week and the month. In this way, as you advance in your planning, you can redefine your goals, making them more realistic according to your possibilities. Every Sunday, you should highlight those goals and activities you proposed and finished satisfactorily, see those still pending, prioritize them for the following week, and do the same when you finish the month.
Tip: If you have goals or activities postponed for more than two months and you do not see any progress, it is time to stop and rethink that goal to a more achievable one or define what you need to start working on.
That’s how I built my bullet journal: annual, monthly, and weekly goals, daily planning of activities, and a habit tracker to keep track of my habits, it looks a little long, but it is effortless to put into practice. I hope you liked it because it has been very satisfying to see everything I’ve been able to do with it and I hope it gives you the same satisfaction.
Thank you for coming this far; if you have any additional questions or want to share your experience, leave me a comment.
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You’ve done a great job! Nicely done and super simple, easy to navigate and use and no fluff ❤️
Thank you so much!!
I love all these photos! It looks useful and so pretty!
I’m glad you enjoy it, thanks for visiting my blog.
This is fantastic! This journal really hits all the highlights of goal setting and being intentional about completing those goals. I love that you include a habit tracker. I have an excel spreadsheet with my yearly goals that I go back to periodically throughout the year and I have various habit trackers that I use for some of my goals, but it would be nice to have everything all in one place.
Yes, It’s helpful to have everything in one place; it’s helping a lot reach my goals. I really recommend you. Thank you for visiting my blog!.