Weekly templates and Bullet Journals

[vriddy]

Crossposted to bujo and my own journal.

At the moment, I'm really happy with the weekly planner template I use for my bullet journal. Many of the tutorials are monthly and daily, but I tend to plan in terms of weeks and tweaking things a bit has been working well for me.

This is what my view looks like at the start of the week:



I have a large section on top where I park what I want to accomplish during the week but not necessarily on Monday. This makes my daily migrations less painful and is helpful as I often have a bunch of phone calls or other "following up on appointments" things to do, that I tend to forget about until the end of the month if I leave them in the monthly section. Migrating them daily was super painful in the past and I always ended up giving up. This way, I also get a weekly reminder when I do a weekly migration. When I do that, I also go look at my monthly to-dos to see if I want to bring something else in.

At this point, I tend to use the monthly to-dos as a list to track "major" projects, the kind that requires a collection. So I'll have the project name in there and it's a reminder to go look at the related collection and pick a task or two from the more detailed to-do list there.

The little box on top, I wanted to use for choosing a main area of focus for the week but I tend to use it as a pep talk for myself and write a nice quote or little drawing. :)

Below the box is something I was missing for a while to keep track of recurring weekly tasks: when to take the trash out, etc. When I prepare my daily tasks I go back to the first page to check both the weekly to-dos and the recurring tasks. I took inspiration from the habit trackers out there and adapted it.

I found that I really like boxes: it's easy to do them quickly (so I don't procrastinate on preparing the next week) and apparently I find them very visually appealing, haha.

My monthly views used to look like this:



but as time passes I find the calendar less and less useful for monthly appointment reminders. It's nice to have the bird's-eye view but it takes forever to do and I'm constantly referring to my phone, the source of truth and where I actually get my reminders from.

I do find the weekly parking lots helpful though, to track what I want to do in a week or two (again, it's a lot of following on appointments if someone hasn't gotten back to me by then, or just trying to spread tasks around if they're not urgent so I'm not overloaded in the current week.) So, this month I tried just creating a page with 4 boxes, one for each week - we'll see how that goes! It's certainly faster to draw :)

So, that's how I adapted the method to my needs :) Do you use a bullet journal yourself? Have you made any modifications to the planner method you follow?

Comments

[annofowlshire]

I agree that I don’t find the monthly views that useful, I tend to rely on my Google Calendar for that - which also let’s me see my partner’s schedule in realtime (and vice versa) so it’s quite handy. Still, I prefer analogue ;)

I guess I sort of Bujo in that I use my own system that is vaguely based on the original bujo system? I use a Traveler’s Notebook with 64 page inserts, one for work, one for home. So I only use them for a couple of months. I don’t number pages, if I have a “collection” (usually a bigger time frame or project to do list or an ongoing shopping list) that I need to reference regularly I’ll make a washi tape tag as a bookmarker and I have a bull clip keeping me to the current time frame. Otherwise, I just use a page a day, ongoing to-do and other notes list for my home notebook, and for work I do similar but usually have a little “schedule” for the day at the top.

Sorry if that’s a bit of a chaotic organization explanation, but that’s pretty true to my system, too ;)

[vriddy]

I need my monthly views to come with an actual alarm 😂 I know the BuJo creator mentioned that he keeps updating the monthly view through the month so he can see at a glance what was done but that's not something I've really experimented with so far.

Using washi tape for marking collection sounds really smart and really nice!! Apparently, I utterly abhor numbering pages so I'm playing with a date-based index at the moment, but tape and stickers sounds like a nice way to go about it as well.

Thank you for sharing your explanation :D

[lunabee34]

Thank you for sharing. I don't bullet journal but I find everyone's system so fascinating.

[vriddy]

Yes, it's always cool to see and maybe sometimes get some inspiration :D

[lassarina]

I have a goals page at the beginning of each month along with my tracker page, and then each set of two facing pages gets divided into thirds (so six sections per spread); one is my to-do list and the other five are individual days. I really dislike putting Saturday and Sunday as half-sections as those tend to have the most info on them (for legal reasons, I can't put my work info in my personal bujo.)

At the beginning of the month I go through and write any scheduled events down, but I also keep those mostly in my digital calendar because I won't remember to check every day if I have something going on; those schedules are more for my memory later.

[vriddy]

I haven't been good at checking back my monthly goals though I can see how trackers would help with that, since they encourage flipping back to the page. Does only having five spaces mean that your spreads can start on any day, if I understand correctly??

[lassarina]

Yep! It's just a five-day block starting wherever the last one left off. (Sometimes I will split one block into two days if I know I'll be traveling/not updating in order to neatly work the whole month into six sets of facing pages instead of having overflow. It depends.)