Bullet Journal- a cry for help

I am an incredibly creative person always looking for a new outlet for my creative energy.  I love music, art (though I am not the best at drawing), photography, design (I was the 10 yr old watching HGTV), and writing (obviously).

I am also a very organized person!  If you have looked around my website at all you know that I love planning and making lists.  An international friend of mine is visiting Disney for a week in Aug with someone who’s never been to Florida–so stay tuned for my “recommendations” which are really more of an itinerary that is not mandatory to follow.  You also know that my website is a mess and needs HELP–that being said when I can’t make decisions and when I get overwhelmed I just don’t do anything–which directly relates to why I have not put more effort into this blog.

ALL this said, I thought bullet journalling was going to be a GREAT new outlet for both my creative side and my neurotic side.   Unfortunately my indecisive side has reared its obnoxious little head and left me unable to utilize my journal with only 2 weeks left in January.  I started watching videos on youtube weeks ago that got me pumped and ready to use the journal the moment the Amazon box dropped outside my door.  But I do NOT know where to start :(.

The other night I decided to just break it out and DO IT.  I had seen in a video a recommendation to do a grid spacing cheat sheet, which I immediately messed up.  I did the math for the dots to not have spaces between so then when I had gaps between things they ran out of room.  I also miss spelled sheet… yup I wrote “Grid Spacing Cheat SHEAT”.  I was already skeptical of my spelling ability, but this was a real wow moment.

The second page: I did was a year at a glance, but as mentioned before I had done the spacing incorrectly and ran out of room for it to look perfect.  I decided to just complete it anyway.  When deciding how I wanted to label things I decided I would try a snake like pattern for the months (so Jan started in the top left and Feb was one below it Mar below that Apr below and then Jun to the right continuing that way) but SOMEHOW I messed that up too.  I was speaking the months allowed and writing them and somehow managed to skip a couple months. I realized about halfway through because Dec was going to come way too soon.  I colored over the months and decided to write them in with a gel pen which did “work” but it isn’t the prettiest.

The third page: I have seen many mood trackers that were monthly and I thought I would rather see a yearly one so I took to Pinterest and found one I felt would do nicely.  I changed out some of the colors and only included 4 “moods” rather than the 8 or so listed in the model.  I made my key and arranged them so that “happy” was at the top and “angry” at the bottom (the model one had angry at the top and it was just far too negative for me). I counted down my 31 spaces so that I could have enough room for all the months and I probably wouldn’t have hated this page if I had stopped here.  But the model had given dark borders to all the boxes allowing the colors to be their own square.  Again, I should have left it alone!  I decided to draw the boxes, I didn’t get out my ruler because I was confident I could connect the dots that are in my journal.  I think you can see where this is going, but I drew the vertical lines first and they worked out very well. But then drawing horizontally I could not really see the dots anymore and half way down the chart I realized that some of the boxes were way larger than others (and the problem was only going to get worse as I went).  But I went… and I went all the way to the bottom of that chart making my wonky lines and now I just want to scrap the entire book.

Most journalling layouts don’t get referred to frequently after you have done them but these pages were meant to be ones I could quickly see how to space a new month, I could easily see the months (now thinking about it I don’t know why I did my year at a glance like this all crammed in one page… If I need to see what day of the week June 3rd is I am going to pull my phone out not the journal.  Again I just really need to scrap the whole thing haha.  I need to go back and make it so that I can see big events, travel dates, appointments at a glance).

But I guess if someone learns from my mistakes here I will stop being so bummed about it.  I have now started researching simple designs for beginners, so if anyone has any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.

sincerely,

a heart broken (creative) wordy over thinker