My 2019 Bullet Journal

How do you keep track of all your events and daily tasks? Google calendar? A planner? I use a combination of Google calendar and a bullet journal. My Google calendar is more for events and long trips, and for things I’m doing with other people since you can easily share calendars. But for my daily tasks, habits, and other things I use my bullet journal (bujo)!

If you haven’t heard of bujos before, they’re basically a kind planner that you design yourself. I find them better than pre-made planners, since in those there are often pages that aren’t super useful for me. This way I can put in exactly what I need to help me stay organized!

I thought I’d show you some of my pages from my new 2019 bujo that I just finished setting up.

My different bujo pages!

Year at a glance

The very first page I have is a year at a glance page. I like being able to see the whole year and quickly check which dates fall on which days, so this is helpful for that.

Books read in 2019

I also use Goodreads and this spreadsheet (made by @xcrini) to track my books since they give better stats, but I saw this design in someone else’s journal and loved it so I had to have it. I just write in the title whenever I finish a book. It looks so cute when all the shelves are filled in with books!

Future log

This page is so you can write down important dates for the whole year, to quickly see upcoming trips/events/etc. I mostly use it for keeping track of birthdays of my family and close friends, and for my dates of travel.

2019 goals + fun page

This year I set 19 goals that I want to accomplish in 2019. They range from bookish goals (review 60% of the books I read, finish all the books I own, etc) to research/academic goals (publish another paper, document my code better, etc) to climbing goals (toprope in the 5.10-5.11 range by the end of the year, etc) to general life/health goals (work on getting better sleep, using all my produce and not buying meals when I have groceries at home, etc). I actually completed one already – get approved for at least 1 book on NetGalley!

The other page is just a reminder page for this Latin phrase that I really love – “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,” which means “I will either find a way, or make one.”

January title page

Just a simple title page to start the pages for January!

Monthly spread

On the left page I have a page for meetings, events, etc so I can see what’s happening in the month. On the right I have a few things: in the upper corner, just the dates again since sometimes that layout is easier for me visually; in the octagons the books I need to/really want to read this month; and on the bottom my tasks I need to do this month. I used to not set TBRs for the month and just read what I want, but now I’m getting a few review copies so I want to stay on top of things!

Good things/gratitude

On this page I write down one or more good things that happened each day. I like trying to focus on positive rather than negative things to help my overall mood, and this really helps with that.

Habit tracker

In the habit tracker I keep track of various things that I’d like to daily such as: hydrate, climb or go to the gym, work on the blog, work on my research, wake up by 9am, get 8 hours of sleep, etc. As you can see the beginning of this month has been not so great for my sleep/research haha. In my defense, I’ve been on vacation!

Weekly spreads

On these two pages I have boxes for each day of the week where I keep track of how much water I drink that day and the daily tasks I want to accomplish. This is different that the habit tracker since these tasks are ones that would vary day to day, such as meetings with my advisor, different research tasks I need to get done, errands I need to run, etc. Since my job as a PhD student now is ~work on my thesis~ I really like having daily tasks (and weekly, and monthly) to break up that very very large scale task haha.

The end!

As you can see, I like to keep a pretty minimal style throughout my journal. This works best for me because I’m not agonizing over colors, designs, etc and it helps me get pages done quickly so I can really focus on the other work I have to do!

Also, I realized that since I’m pretty efficient with space/page usage I will have a large number of pages left over in my journal. I kind of want to do some more fun pages, tracking different things. Maybe track the movies I watch during the year? What do you like to keep track of? Give me some suggestions of what I should do with my extra pages 🙂