Down the Rabbit Hole of Bullet Journals: From Book to PDF
In October 2017, I started my first bullet journal. 74 pages later, I had gotten through half of the book in the course of one semester of school. This journal offered the perfect tool for procrastination: organizing. On the surface, I appeared to be ultra-organized and artsy, and I had discovered an online bullet journal (bujo) community.
On the one hand, I did feel organized. I would sit down before the first of each month and draw lines in this journal to make my own customized agenda. Each tabbed section you see in the picture above took about two hours each to complete. It became a wonderful way to relieve stress. Or, so I told myself.
I had fallen in love with precisely making each page perfect, and in doing so I fell down a deep, dark hole of time consumption. The more stressed I was, the more pages I drew.
Now with a clear vacation-brain removed from school stress, I have evaluated my life choices and my time spent on my bullet journal. I was in the middle of making my spread for the month of January, and I no longer found joy in doing it. This is unbelievably tedious, how did I make 74 whole pages of this? No wonder people looked at my journal in disbelief when I showed it to them.
On January 1st, I devised a plan for myself. Seeing as I will be spending most of my time lesson planning and preparing for hard work in the classroom, I will not have time to draw lines for hours and hours. With this in mind, what computer programs did I have for making my own digital PDF journal?
You might ask at this point: why make a digital replica of what you were making before? Don't they have Google or Outlook calendar for schedules? Yes, they do. These tools are not the most effective for everyone (or so I have chosen to believe). This is what I knew before making my new masterpiece:
1. I needed to be able to print it out (and put it in a binder)
2. It needed to be like my other journal layout
3. I did not have design programs like Photoshop or InDesign
In a nutshell, I ended up using Canva and Microsoft Word to put the whole thing together. In a matter of one hour, I produced a template for all of the months of the year, and I could easily change up the template to fit each month. All of this work was a grand total of 108 pages from January to April alone. I had done 34 more pages of work on my laptop in less than five hours than I had done by hand in 3 months.
It might seem like an obvious idea that computers and machines complete work a lot faster than humans can do by hand, but I just hadn't looked into making my own journal before now. The ease of purchasing things on Amazon in the past made me think less about DIY projects like this.
All of this is not to say that bullet journals are a lost cause. I've seen hundreds of posts about bullet journals online, and there is individual craftsmanship in every one of them. With all of this beauty, is it truly functional for everyday use? You have to have a system.
This popular form of expression quickly became more about looks than function to me. I was too busy following a trend to understand what I truly needed. I could still make it look pretty with minimal effort and feel productive with my computer.
With the goals I have in mind and the work I have to do in the classroom, I want to make more room to spend time on things like professional development and reading. It's way too easy to hide between the hand-drawn pages of a journal, and I needed to do that last semester.
I don't have any New Year's resolutions for you, but I will be doing things with more purpose in 2018.
Below is a March 2018 peek at what my PDF packs look like: