Art Journal Every Day: BuJo Update

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, the concept is simple: It's a commitment to take ten minutes each day to do something in your art journal.  No need to finish anything or even like it.  It's about making the time to nourish your creativity every day!  If you have the time to flip through your phone, you have the time to Art Journal Every Day.  If you'd like to share what you make, use the hashtag #artjournaleveryday so that we can all take a peek.  You can find new Art Journal Every Day posts here on the blog most Fridays.  The archives go back to the first Art Journal Every Day post in 2010.

Last month I asked folks on instagram what kind of content they'd like to see from me.  Someone mentioned that she'd love an update on my Bullet Journal (BuJo).  You may recall that I became obsessed with Bullet Journaling in 2017.   I still use my BuJo every day, but how I use it has morphed and changed over time.

A brief recap: A Bullet Journal is a flexible paper and pen system for organizing your life and keeping track of things.  Some people are very artistic about it...

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I love looking at these kinds of Bullet Journals, but it is NOT what mine looks like.  My Bullet Journal is a notebook filled with writing.  But it's better than a regular notebook because I use several Bullet Journal elements that really help me with organization.  Here are the five things that are crucial to keeping my life organized:

1. Bullets
2. Color
3. Time Ladder
4. Index
5. Continued On

Let's discuss. 

This is a bullet:

These are the simple bullet symbols that I use:

It makes it very easy to see at a glance what needs to get done.

This is my color coding system:

Again, it makes it very easy to see at a glance what my day looks like.

I mentioned the evolution of my BuJo and one of the things that has evolved is my calendar.  You can see that Steve gets his own color.  This allows me to keep track of his schedule but not confuse it with my own.  I assume when the baby reaches an age where he has events that I need to be aware of, he'll get his own color too.

The second calendar evolution is that I have *gasp* moved my calendar from my BuJo into a paper planner.  Crazy, I know.  I still keep a BuJo style calendar, but now I have pre-printed squares to deal with and it makes calendaring faster and less onerous.

As you can see from the photo above, I still use a time ladder system, which is critical to organizing my day.  Unclear on what a time ladder is?  It's a vertical arrangement of your day that allows you to see where you have open areas of time to get tasks done.

I love the time ladder and I don't think that I could ever go back to another system.  It has really helped me figure out how to best use my time.

The last two things on my Bullet Journal list are: index & continued on.  What are those?

The index is the key to making the Bullet Journal more than a notebook.  Think of it as the "table of contents."  This is what allows me to find any random note I scribbled in my book in under 30 seconds.

So this brings us to "continued on."  This is simple but brilliant.  You start your notes and when you run out of room, you simply flip to a new clean page -- even if it's 20 pages later in your Bullet Journal -- and continue your thoughts or listmaking or whatever.  The index keeps it all organized. 

People often ask me how I manage to get so much done, especially now that my time is limited by the baby.  There are three answers to that question: (1) I have a partner who watches the baby and gives me time to work, (2) I have no life outside of work and family, and (3) Bullet Journal.  It really keeps me organized and on track every single day.

Thanks for stopping by!

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P.S. There's ONE seat left in tonight's Friday Night Art Journaling: Lace Pages live online class.  I hope you'll join me!