I love fountain pens.

I love beautiful inks and beautiful paper and stationary.

I love intricate leather bound journals.

So why not bullet journaling too? It seemed to make perfect sense. I have started a bullet journal every year for the last 7 years, sometimes multiple times per year. I’ve never made it through a year. I’ve never been able to consistently use it as my planner. I’ve hidden from my bujo and gotten stressed out by having to make a spread every week. Well, not every week— some weeks it was so cathartic and enjoyable making my weekly spread all pretty. But some weeks it was a drag.

So this year I’m finally throwing in the towel— bullet journaling is beautiful and I love to see all your ideas, but it’s not for me.

I’ll use my nearly-unused bujo in 2025 to inconsistently diary when I feel like it.

Hi All. I'm loving seeing all the set up posts! PSA: for those of us who have only just felt ok to unwrap or buy their BuJo. It's ok if it's not all set up for Jan 1. Just remember these are tools to help us and they are a work on progress.

You can’t be mad when a child trying to showcase their creativity 😅

NB: Do not leave your bujo unattended at all time

I sometimes like to get fancy with my monthly layouts but I've never been one to overcomplicate my weeklies. I've used this layout for years, it takes 2 minutes to set up, and I love the flexibility it gives me.

I used to keep a budget/spending tracker on the right column, but recently felt like it wasn't very useful for me to track on paper so now it is just a column for general to-do's or goals for the week, important reminders and such.

The left side has a small corner for my habit tracker, and the rest of the page is intentionally left blank. I often have very vivid dreams and I like to write them down when I can. It's fun going back and reading all the random dreams I have throughout the year. So I like to keep that space open for my dream diary, as well as for when I have notes or random thoughts/projects that I am working on that week. (for example, I will probably be using a portion of that space to plan out thanksgiving dinner next week)

It was hard in the beginning to find a layout that works for me, but now I always find myself going back to some variation of this one. Just wanted to share! 🙂

I have tried in the past to keep track of habits on a daily basis, and then compare month to month. I have always been overwhelmed and intimidated by having such a long-term project, but using this method has really helped me track everything that I’d like to and following the same format I can compare different months. A single dot means I did it, blank means I didn’t. I made pain on a scale of 0 to 5.

When I set the mood tracker, I wanted to see how my mood was affected by my stress and sleep levels. My goal is to keep my stress bar as low as I can and my mood bar as high as I can. Sleep was a sort of afterthought and bonus stat. The days that I keep an eye out for our ones where my stress and my mood meet and try and identify what made that day challenging.

I probably won’t keep all of the categories, the same as some of them I never bothered with, but with this layout, I can cover a lot of different categories without having to stress.