0:00 if you want to organize your life be more mindful or productive and really connect what you're doing to why you're doing it then this video was me for you so I've been bullet journaling for around 8 years at this point and over the last8 years the way that I bullet Journal has changed and evolved massively as I figured out what really works for me what doesn't and how to really distill Down The Core Essence of bullet journaling as a productivity and life system a journaling practice is one of the most powerful tools for personal transformation if you're new here my name is Izzy I'm a Cambridge graduate and a doctor in the8 years I've been bullet journaling I've tried so many different formats so many different structures even different like sizes of journals and so today I'm going to be sharing all of the experience and the
0:45 top tips that I wish that I had known at the very start when setting up all of this bullet Journal stuff if you're interested in going deeper with journaling I've created a completely free notion template with my all-time favorite journaling prompts on them so you can check that out in the link below if you're not familiar with the bullet Journal method it was developed by one of my friends Ryder Carol and is essentially a productivity system where you integrate what you're doing with why you're doing it and it's a highly customizable journaling method which you can basically do anything you want with and so if you've ever thought about bullet journaling before you might have seen online all these beautiful gorgeous artsy spreads that people come up with and for me personally this has been about developing mindfulness productivity efficiency and Clarity of thought through tracking the past and then figuring out what we should be
1:31 doing in the present and also then planning for our future and so today I'll be walking you through the minimalist method that I use for my bullet Journal because I don't want to be spending hours on my bullet journal and making it look cute because I'm also not that artistically gifted unfortunately so for me this is much more about keeping it simple and easy to keep up with I'll also show you how to integrate all of the other journaling techniques you might use within the bullet journaling system I absolutely love having all of my journaling stuff in one place because prior to using the bullet Journal method I used to have a bunch of notes scattered everywhere I would have to-do lists in all kinds of places I would use a random sheet of paper for some kind of to-do list each day or random Post-it notes that would be everywhere I would leave notes in Apple notes or like Google notes or
2:18 other note taking apps and it was all a big mess what I found is the Simplicity and beauty of having everything in one journal and also having a clear system for finding all the things that you were writing about and want to keep track of is amazing it's transformational so without further Ado let's get into the video so this is a selection of some of the bullet journals I've used I've recently moved to Hong Kong so I didn't bring quite all of them but this is a selection of them and as you can see they're different sizes because I actually used to use an A6 bullet journal and then I've upgraded to A5 so I've really feel like I've experimented with lots of different formats lots of different kinds of paper lots of different brands of Journal over the years so after 8 years of trying different journals my personal favorite and my recommendation would be the lerm
3:04 1917 journals these are the notebooks which have the dot matrix inside them so essentially this dotted grid which basically gives you a little bit more of a modular structure to work within but still doesn't have so much of the input of having like an actual grid on it some people like a grid I personally like the dot matrix so this is the bullet Journal I'm going to be using for the coming year I've chosen in this nice purple color I think it's important that you choose use a bullet Journal that Sparks joy for you because this journal is going to be with you following you around for the next year hopefully and so for it to spark Joy means that every time that you use it which is hopefully multiple times a day you'll have that extra little Sparkle of Joy A variation on the loer 1917 which I really like is Ryder has designed this bullet Journal
3:52 version of the Lo ter 1917 and he actually gave me a personalized version of it which is absolutely gorgeous and essentially this has has a key and also a couple of like bullet Journal specific Pages at the start such as this index page here along with having these markers here for the third lines and a couple of other bullet journaling supporting structures within it the paper's also a little bit thicker and I just really enjoy this format of the journal I'll link below everything that I'm recommending so you can check it out if you want the next thing other than the journal itself that you'll want is something to write with so for me my absolute favorite are the Muji pens so these are the Muji gel pens I like a 0.5 mm black gel ink pen I also love that they do these in a whole range of colors and so this is the pen that I always
4:38 carry in a pen Loop right next to my journal the next piece of equipment is a ruler so a short little ruler like this is ideal because it's easy to maneuver around on the page and what you'll be using this for is for drawing out any grid lines any lines that you need basically to keep it nice and straight honestly this is kind of optional because especially with a dot matrix notebook you can actually kind of hand draw it and it still looks cute but I like to keep one of these around anyway another thing that I find very helpful is to have some kind of Correction tape so this is just standard white correction tape which basically allows you to erase any mistakes that you might have made because one of the big barriers to getting going with bullet journaling or any kind of physical Journal is a feeling of perfectionism where I would get this so much as well I'm like I'm scared to taint the page because if I make a mistake then I can't
5:25 take this back especially if it's in pen rather than pencil and so this just removes some of that perfectionism remove some of that fear because it's like you know what if I do mess up a little bit all good I'll just put a little bit of correction tape on it and I think in general for the bullet Journal letting go of perfectionism is a big part of it because if you actually want to use the system and get the most out of it you can't feel the sense of hesitation on towards tainting the page and this is another reason why I personally enjoy having a bullet Journal focused on minimalism and Effectiveness rather than on Art because for me as a not particularly artsy person having a beautiful Journal that I could then mess up felt like it prevented me from even using it or being consistent with it let alone the hours of time it takes to actually make it look beautiful the biggest trap that people who want to
6:10 start bullet journaling run into is perfectionism and I think seeing all these beautiful artsy spreads can set the bar very high and we almost give ourselves too much stuff to do because actually we want to do the opposite when we're building up a new habit or a new productivity system like a bullet journal or any kind of journaling practice we want to start with the absolute bare minim what is the minimum viable stuff that we can do to actually build the habit and get into the process of figuring out how it fits into our lives and what we want to bolt on on top of that afterwards rather than setting ourselves up to fail from the start because we have set ourselves too much to do the next thing that you might want which is completely optional is some accent pens this is just to add a little pop of color to your bullet journal and is totally optional so for example for
6:55 me I sometimes use a purple Muji pen or sometimes a green one and then sometimes a blue one so for me these are the three other pen colors I use and I also use this Tombo brush pen style thing as a little bit of a highlight so sometimes like highlight behind some lettering and then I can just write something like let's say October and adds a little bit of a break a little bit of a pop of color into the bullet journal the first thing that you want to understand with bullet journaling is to have a key set up which is essentially that a DOT means that there's a task a DOT that has a cross through it means it's a completed task a dash is some kind of note or something that you want to remember a DOT that has an arrow through it means that it the task has been migrated to another time equally for a DOT with an arrow backwards that
7:41 means a task has been scheduled and then a little circle like this is an event so maybe an appointment that you have or a birthday dinner and then if there's anything that either a note or an event or a task that you add a star to that means it's important and anything that you add an exclamation .2 means that it is urgent for me at the start of every bullet Journal I also like to make sure that I've written out and measured how many squares are vertical and horizontal on the page so that I don't have to go back and count them out every single time helpfully for the L term 1917 notebooks each gap between the dots is exactly half a CM which makes calculations a lot easier so when I'm numbering it here I'm numbering it from 0 to 36 which means that there are 36 squares vertically and 24 squares hor
8:29 horizontally another thing I like to do early on is to test out my pens because some pens bleed through paper depending on which notebook you've got how thick the paper is what kind of quality the paper is they might bleed through so sometimes it's worth just testing out how do my pens look are they looking cute are they staying on the right side of the page and it's then just flipping over and having a look on the other side to see if it's bleeding through for this journal here this is the official bullet Journal uh LT 1917 version and Ryder made sure to make the paper thicker so so things really don't bleed through I find that with the standard Lo ter the paper is very slightly thinner which means the notebooks are lighter but there is a little bit more show through depending on which pens you use so this might be worth testing out early on as well now we're pretty much set up to get
9:14 going the first thing that you want to set up in your bullet Journal once you've got your key is your index page your index page is essentially the table of contents for your bullet journal and the reason why this is very important is because if you're including almost anything in your bullet journal and stacking lots of different kinds of journals within it different kinds of collections uh then you want to be able to easily and quickly find where all these things are helpfully the L term notebooks are also numbered and so you don't need to handum the pages in a notebook which is not numbered numbering the pages is helpful and so what you want to do is at the top of the page write down index I usually like to keep the style very simple here some people enjoy practicing a little bit of hand lettering this is something I've moved away from over time because it just adds a little bit of complexity to the whole
10:00 bullet journaling experience but you can also do this kind of thing so if the Ry thing is your jam you can also do that I personally think there's something very beautiful about just a very minimalist style so I always go for this kind of thing and then what you want to go ahead and do is to create a margin on one side and then what you'll be putting in the margin is the page number and then in the body section is the contents so for example maybe on page five you have your 2020 five goals and on that page you've written out all the goals that you have or for example on page 23 you have your March monthly log I usually reserve a double spread for the index just to have plenty of breathing room and not worry about running out of space some people
10:46 when they do bullet journaling they like to include something called a future log which is almost an overview of the year but when I've done this in the past I found that I very rarely use my future log because most of the daily stuff that I actually use is in either the monthly or the daily logs so in the spirit of keeping this as minimal as possible we will move directly on to the monthly logs which is where I recommend starting if you want a really simple setup that will be easy to maintain the first thing to do when you're setting up your monthly log is to write down the name of the month at the top and then to write down all the dates in the month I usually do this down at the left hand side I usually start from the bottom just to make sure that I have enough space or you can count the squares as well or use your ruler to to measure how many squares you need to leave then next write out the letters of the days of the
11:31 week I also like to write out the weekend letters in a different color so this is where I'll use one of my accent colors and on this side of the spread what I use this for is any key dates that I want to remember so let's say any holidays we're going on so for example mid January I'm going on a little baby moon with my husband Ali so we can just draw this out here and I'll just write on the side of it baby moon or for example if it is my dad's birthday and so I'll note down any key things that are going on in the month month I want to be aware of and then when it comes to the day I use this as a highlight space somewhere to remember one storyworthy moment from my day this is a concept from the book storyworthy by Matthew dicks where he talks about how learning to identify and piece together the stories in our lives is a really
12:17 powerful way of becoming better storytellers and also understanding ourselves more deeply at the top of the page I'll often write down some kind of intention for the month so for example in in January maybe my intention would be connect then what I also often do is I'll sometimes write out a little like calendar view here in the top right just to get an overview of the month and then I'll fill in my highlights as I go through the month then on the opposite side of the spread I usually do a habit tracker and a gratitude Journal this will all come together I promise and it will make sense why I'm doing things in this way because this is all very intentional and so then what I'll do is because I've already got the dates and the days on the left hand column here I will just copy across this highlight that I did alternatively you can also rewrite down the days of the week or the dates in this column here depending on
13:02 whether or not you want to use a highlighter type thing and then I will also Mark off the top of the month and also the bottom then I'll decide how many habits I want to work on each month usually I aim for about three or four so that I can really focus in on them and focus on building each habit and so for me this month what I want to really focus in on is sleeping by 11:00 p.m. because I find that if I sleep early it's not even that early but if I sleep before 11:00 then my quality of sleep is just much better I also want to meditate every day and I also want to track when I am creating content so what I'm defining this as is if I have filmed a YouTube video if I have created an Instagram post or like scheduled one or if I have written a newsletter issue and so if I've done any of those I will actually write down in the column Here
13:48 YouTube or Instagram or newsletter and so for these ones on the right hand side sleeping by 11 and meditating if I've done that in a given day so let's say if on the 1st of January I have filled in my highlight of lovely New Year's Day so let's say when I'm doing my daily check-in on my monthly spread I fill in what I've done as the highlight of the 1st of January then I fill in any habits I've done so for example if I've slept by 11: then I will do it put across if I meditate I put across then in the rest of the space I want to have a gratitude Journal gratitude journaling is one of the most evidence-based forms of journaling for improving your mood and helping you to focus on the positive beautiful things in life which in learn actually makes your experience of the world and therefore your actual inner World a more joyful and grateful place
14:36 so here because I've already got all the dates here I don't need to fill them in again because I kind of roughly know where all the dates slot in and so then I will just write at the top here gratitude and each day maybe I'll say I'm grateful for the love of my family and friends and the reason why I put everything all on this one spread with both the story worthy highlights the Gratitude and also the habit is because then just on one spread I can just go to this one spread every single day fill in a couple of quick things which just take a minute or two and then at the end of the month I can see a full month of highlights and gratitudes and also have that mindful awareness of how all of my habits are going for the Habit tracker I this month have chosen sleeping by 11 meditating daily and also creating
15:21 content and the key thing here is that I'm not necessarily trying to do all of these things every day it's more a tool for awareness and mindfulness of how often I am actually doing these things and whether this is aligning with the kind of person I want to become or how I want to show up in the world and so the point of the Habit tracker is not to make yourself feel bad or beat yourself up if you've missed a day but rather to just give yourself and Empower yourself with the awareness of how it's going if you feel like this isn't something that would be helpful for you you can just leave off the Habit track a bit and just have the Gratitude bit or if you only want to do habits and you have a lot of habits you want to track then you can just do habits on this side of the page it's all very personalizable which is the beautiful bit of bullet journaling again here for the sleeping by 11:00
16:07 p.m. or meditating if I've done any of those things then I'll just put a cross in the box and for the creating content I have created a key here which is if I have filmed a YouTube video if I have scheduled an Instagram post or posted an Instagram post or if I have written a full newsletter issue then I will write down the corresponding letters in this box either YT IG or then on the next page of the monthly log is a monthly check-in and I really like doing this to check in on how I'm doing in the three main domains which is Body Mind and Spirit I find the monthly check-in really helpful because sometimes it's easy to lose track of how we're feeling in our body Mind and Spirit between the weeks and days and months of the year because we like oh I had that back pain
16:55 at some point in the year but I've kind of Forgotten when that was and so in the emotional second section I use a lot of eye feel statements I try to figure out what my mental state was for the past month and how I'm doing right now and also Link in anything that has impacted on my mental or emotional state in the physical section I will often write about things such as any joint pains I have for example I sprained my back doing deadlifts a couple of months ago and it's taken a little while to heal I reinjured it a couple of times and so tracking that has been very helpful I'll also sometimes track my skin any breakouts or how my skincare routines going or things like my diet and how much exercise I've been doing in terms of the spiritual section this sounds a little bit woo woo but actually is more focused around how connected am I to my
17:40 spiritual practices my mindfulness meditation yoga and how am I feeling in my relationships and so I'll read about that a little bit and also to get a sense of whether I feel aligned with a sense of purpose some kind of mission in the world on this side of the spread at the start of the month I usually do a big brain dump often there are lots of things that just create mental clutter because we're slightly worried about them at the back of our minds there's some things that we're kind of losing track of and so when I feel overwhelmed at all I just like to do a brain dump and you can do this at any time in your bullet Journal you don't even need to do it at the start of the month I just like to do it as a monthly ritual a monthly check-in on all of the tasks or things that are on my mind at the moment I'll often split the page in two because often I have things that are to do with work and things that are to do with my
18:27 more personal life or or other things like admin and so by splitting it up in this way it means that there's a lot of clarity as to where all of the bits and Bobs go so that means there's two double-sided spreads for each monthly log and so on one side there is the daily highlights for the month then on the other side there is the daily gratitudes and maybe a habit tracker obviously feel free to tweak as needed for you and what works best for you and then there is the monthly check-in spread and the Brain dump and so these two double spread Pages set me up for a good month ahead once I've done done my brain dump I like to get straight into the daily logs and one thing I absolutely love about doing daily logging in the bullet Journal method is that you don't need to have prepped in advance loads of pages and pages and Pages for each day or each week and
19:13 instead you just use the journal as you need to use it however much space you need whether you only need one line per day or you forget to use it that day or if you need Pages suddenly for a day because there's so much stuff that's come up so for the daily log what you want to start with is just simply the date and then any tasks or thoughts that you might have so I like to begin with any events I have so for example if I have a yoga class then I'll write that down just to be aware of the rough schedule for the day and then often I'll refer back to my monthly logs brain dump to see if there are any items any to-dos that I could migrate into my daily log so for example from here maybe buying the gift for the Neighbors I can actually add that into here and once I've migrated it to the daily log I can put a little arrow through this to say okay this has been actually moved
19:58 forwards into the journal then if anything interesting happened I want to take a note of I'll use a little Dash here and sometimes I'll also use this little note here to note any feelings then once it's the next day I will just continue below where I finished off so the next day would be Thursday the 2nd of January and I'll do the same thing here and so for example if I hadn't actually done this and bought the gift of the neighbors I could again migrate It Forward another thing that I like to do is that if I have a meeting or if I just even have some in thoughts at some point during the day so for example if I'm having a meeting with our co-founder for one of the apps that we're building then I might write down here life compus meeting notes and then underneath this I will be able to Doodle anything that I want any notes that I need to take during that meeting any to-dos that come
20:44 out of the end of that as well any actionables can just go into this stream of Consciousness which is the daily log another tool that's quite useful to insert into the daily log is a weekly review and so this helps us set the direction for the coming week I personally don't do this as a very formally structured drawing out boxes on a spread because I often find that I either don't fill up the boxes and feel bad about the waste of space or I have way too much for the boxes and then it becomes really cramped and unpleasant to use and so I like to keep it free form and just continue this stream of Consciousness so for example if I did want to do a weekly review I could just decide you know what over here I'm just going to do a weekly review doing a weekly review is one of my favorite ways to check in on whether I'm staying on
21:30 track with my goals and where I want to be and looking back at the past week and then planning for the next week and setting action intentions for how I'm going to move towards my goals so you can either do this in line and I often like to do this just in line in my bullet journal or you can dedicate a whole page each week to doing your weekly review another thing is once you have your daily log set up this is basically where you work for the day and let's say you think of some kind of task let's say booking a Cinema ticket but you don't need to book it today you need to book it next week or in 3 weeks time when the tickets are released then you can essentially Mark with a back arrow like this that you are putting it into your monthly brain dump and so then you go here and then you add in book Cinema ticket and so in this way you can easily migrate tasks from your monthly brain
22:15 dump into your daily log and also the other way around so hopefully then between these two directions nothing gets lost because on a monthly basis you do your brain dump you get all of the things out of your head and you also migrate any any to-dos that you missed from previous months or previous daily logs and you bring them into your brain dump once a month and consolidate things down remove things that are not essential and figure out okay what's actually important here because I'm going to have to write it out again which is one of my favorite mechanisms in the bullet Journal method which is that the analog format of it adds inherent friction which is actually a feature it's not a flaw it's a feature and so then you can move things out of your monthly brain dump into your daily logs and then on the daily basis if you think of any tasks and you just ch them into your daily log just to get them out
23:00 of your brain onto paper then at the end of the day you can decide okay is this something I'm actually realistically going to do today or in the next couple days or is this something that I can migrate back into my monthly brain dump and then figure out where I can slot in in a future daily log the final thing I want to touch on is creating collections collections are essentially a free page where you can write about basically anything you want so you might want to create a collection about your goal settings so let's say it's 2025 goal setting and then you can write down any of your goals that you have this year or another collection that I've personally been using quite a lot is having a meditation Journal embedded within the bullet Journal so here I'll just write at the top of the page meditation journal and then each day I can take some notes on how my meditation was and any interesting thoughts that came up
23:45 any distractions how settled I was I want to say that the collections thing is very much optional the core of the bullet Journal structure is definitely the monthly logs and then the daily logs and so once you have those to basically everything else is optional now let's talk about how to integrate other journaling structures into your bullet journal and so what I like to do is under my daily log if I feel like doing a little bit more reflection I will just make a note I'll make a little Dash and then write down the prompt that I'm working with such as what would my higher self advise me to do in this situation and then I will write down a couple of thoughts based on that essentially the bullet Journal structure is extremely fluid and adaptable to exactly what you need need at any given moment life isn't predictable and it's
24:32 very hard for us to fit our lives into a specific structure because at every moment every day every year our life looks different we have different needs we have different requirements different focuses and so then our Journal should reflect that so that is my complete bullet Journal method which I use to this day and integrate all of my other journaling methods into like I mentioned at the start if you're interested in more journaling prompts I have a bunch of my free fa journaling prompts I have left a link below if you want to hear regular updates from me you might want to follow my newsletter or my Instagram @ izy cely if you enjoyed this video I think you're going to enjoy this video over here where I talk through more of my top journaling tips these are the exact prompts and mindsets and approaches to journaling that I would recommend and
25:18 you can slot these into the bullet Journal system so check out that video over there otherwise thank you so much for watching take care of yourself and remember that the journey is the destination I'll see you in the next video bye
