Do you love your planner? ... Or do you have a love/hate relationship with it? Are you struggling to find reasons to make it an integral part of your life? Check out these 7 reasons why using a Planner or Bullet Journal can simplify your life.
1. You can think and plan more long-term.
This is my ‘bento box’, it’s not obviously a real fancy genuine Bento Box.. and some hard-boiled eggs that I'm cooling down to add for my lunch tomorrow. My bullet journal helps me keep thoughts and plans and projects in one place, and organise my commitments, this gives me mental space in my head to plan and think about things like meal prep for my lunch at work; planning more long-term in my life.
2. Memory keeping, your Bullet Journal becomes a unique record of your life to cherish.
Your Planner or Journal becomes a beautiful place to keep and cherish the everyday memories of life, things you might otherwise lose or throw away. Everyday ephemera, things that aren’t fancy enough to frame on a wall, but represent who you are! Your planner or journal is a special place to put it and honour it.
I made this little embellishment in the corner, using skills from my scrapbooking teaching days and I've added these really nice little Bible scriptures I received from a church event a couple of years ago and found them in another journal and I wanted to keep them here so I can remember them and look at them in makes this book feel extra special and like a real record of my memories.
Make your own vintage style bullet journal or planner layouts with my ready-to-make planner kits here.
3. One place to capture everything!
Your journal can be the catch-all for everything in my head, and daily life, and to-dos, and projects… it is endless. Notes from a meeting, your shopping receipts, your random thoughts you want to remember for later, your appointments… take your journal everywhere to get the most out of the system.
4. Handwritten notes at meetings helps you be more concise.
Someone said to me recently “Wouldn’t you rather type the notes during a meeting?” I would not. Why? Because I write less than I would type, and you may be the same. The volume of text is fast smaller handwriting notes than typing on my laptop. I also find that I'm more concise. Handwritten notes, because I am more concise, gives me an actual list of things I can go back through afterwards and make some goals and actual points that I need to take action on, rather than lots of chit chat-chat from a meeting.
5. Using your Planner can help you save money.
My Bullet Journal helps me save money on groceries because I can make a list of everything in the pantry freezer and fridge before I do my grocery shopping, like a stocktake. After a few months of not having done this I found 4 Vegemites in the pantry! … I think I have gone a bit overboard on the Vegemite the past few months of shopping.
This is a great way to maybe save yourself or get yourself a $100 because this is going to take me, I'm not going to lie, maybe 2 hours but honestly, I feel like I'm going to save probably about $100 so that's well worth it for a couple of hours of my time = groceries is just maths and so is saving money.
6. Using a Future Log - planning big things in advance.
My future log is an integral part of the bullet journal system. If you're familiar with it by Ryder Carroll he is actually the inventor of the bullet journal method which I love and have loved ever since he invented it. The Future Log is where you'll put things that are coming that don't need to be on your immediate spread for that day or week.
This layout is where projects, events, appointments can be logged so you remember them and have them safely recorded somewhere, but you don’t need to worry about them today. Now you have a trigger of when it's a time to remember these things or start working on them or actioning them. As that period of time comes closer you can pull specific tasks out to my weekly or daily spread when it’s time to. I like to do a large 6 monthly version of this, for example, Jan-June, then I also do a new mini-version every couple of months with maybe 3 weeks or 4 in advance, usually with projects on this mini Future Log that I need to be aware of for work.
7. Habit Tracking but in a casual, easy to manage way.
I love using casual habit trackers. I made some tea stain envelopes in video a while ago on my Instagram and Tiktok. Then I’ve cut up those envelopes into little pieces, using some stickers from my pencil case to secure one next to each of my dailies.
Here I am recording in My Bullet Journal things I've eaten during the day, not a diet or anything, something casual that helps me be more mindful. Plus, doing this sort of casual habit tracking in your Planner or Bullet Journal, even with something simple like small post-it notes, takes literally seconds to set up each day.
Make your own vintage style habit trackers with my curated vintage planner stickers here.
Thanks for reading Part 1 - I hope it was helpful and gave you some easy-to-implement tips to get more out of your journaling. Stay tuned, in fact, sign up to the newsletter at the bottom of the page, to be emailed Part 2 when it is released. See you later!