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Why You Should Start A Bullet Journal

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Waterloo chapter.

Photo Taken by Kayley Luftig  

If you have been seeing posts on Instagram, Pinterest, or blogs of these beautiful notebooks with unique ways to organize your life, they are officially called “Bullet Journals”. Bullet journaling is a new fad: it allows you to be organised and creative all at the same time! For a person who loves to make lists, use their agenda, journals, sets goals and doodles this is the perfect purchase. You can basically create any kind of list in the most creative way possible. Keeping your life on check in the most detailed and colourful way possible. It allows you to use it as a way to keep your life on track, while letting yourself have fun and be creative. I find that it is a way to let it all out of your system, basically I consider it therapeutic. Highly recommend for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the crazy amount of sticky notes they leave for themselves, or has a million note pages open their desktop (like me…).

 

Some examples of my favourite pages are:

  • colouring in map pages to show where you have traveled

  • draw books on a bookshelf and write in the book titles of books you want to read

  • Keep track of your workouts and when they will be during your busy schedule

  • Pages of your favourite quotes

  • Lists of your favourite movies

  • Setting goals for yourself, like 20 before 20 or things I want to learn in 2017

  • Habit trackers

  • THERE’S TOO MANY TO NAME

 

Photo Taken by Kayley Luftig  

To start you need to make a key to set symbols for your to-do’s, what you have completed, schedule, notes and events. It allows you to see each type of text clearly and formatted. Besides knowing how to bullet journal, you need the right materials to start one! Having a good dotted grid journal will help with keeping the journal clean and clear for organizing. It helps when creating boxes, creating symbols, making charts, and writing interesting fonts. You can get the original bullet journal from Leuchtturm 1917, sold at Chapters. Or you can purchase a Moleskin dotted journal (if you want to spend less money), at Amazon. Bullet journals can be a bit pricey…

 

In order to make your bullet journal beautiful it is important to use bright colours! I would suggest the best tools to start with are a ruler, Papermate flair pens, Pigma micron pens and Tombow markers. These are easy to use and I personally love them for illustrating or for calligraphy.

Photo taken by Pearl Kraft

 

If you have free time this weekend and want to get your life in order, bullet journaling is the perfect way to do so. You can control your schedule by creating unique layouts to tell when you need to study, take breaks, hangout with friends, go to the gym and when you have class. This time of year can be very stressful for many of us and having a place where you can be creative while keeping track of your life can help.

 

If you are planning a summer trip, travel pages are always helpful. Packing checklists help a lot with keeping your travel stresses under control. Once you are at your destination it is always nice to create a page specifically for your favourite spots, restaurants and stores that you have visited. You can create map pages to colour in as you visit each city. Creating a list of places, you want to go in the future will help with making your future goals. Keeping track of goals is another category for which people use Bullet Journals. It helps you accomplish the goals that you have always wanted to complete with goal trackers and lists.

 

Someone who is looking for a blog to constantly learn and see unique ideas for pages to create within your Bullet Journal, I would highly recommend the Boho Berry blog: http://www.bohoberry.com/category/bullet-journal/

 

I am a total movie/TV show fanatic, lover of all things handmade (I paint watercolour cards in my spare time) and have an obsession with sweets. Studying Global Business and Digital Arts
University of Waterloo Honours French and Business 2019, Her Campus Waterloo Campus Correspondent, Social Media Guru, Tech enthusiast.  Fluent in emoji, HTML and CSS. Avid reader of Refinery 29, Buzzfeed, Mashable & Tech Crunch. Follow on twitter @jena_tweets