Over the recent years, I’ve wanted to keep track of how I feel, what my goals are, and other things that show I have grown, changed and learned about myself through time. For that, I set up monthly goals in my bullet journal, and review them every month: have I reached my goal? What do I need to do, in the next months, to keep up with it or go a step forward? This has been particularly helpful with the writing of my novel. My tip is to pick up two or three goals only, that are small, manageable and most importantly, goals that you can track whenever you need to know where you’re at. Another goal I had was to eat healthier. This I broke down into a simple challenge for a whole month: to eat some veggies every single day. On my habit tracker, I coloured a square for every day of the month that I ate veggies. This helped me see easily whether I had made some progress on my goal or not. 

In a bullet journal, you can really make the most of pairing your goals with habit tracker, because creating habits will basically get you to your goals – and even beyond!

In my bullet journal, I also have a page where I write down all the films I’ve watched (which, in hindsight, is not many!) and a page where I have drawn bookshelves and where I add the titles and authors of all the books I’ve read. With these pages, you can get very creative: you could create a double page with mini-versions of all your favourite artworks, a page dedicated to the museums you’ve seen, or the exhibitions you’ve been to. You can also create playlists for your different moods and different times of the year – this can tell you so much about how you feel at certain points of your life. Bullet journals are made to be creative, so this is your change to break free from the to-do list, agenda aspect of bullet journals – and create something very personal and fun.

One thing I want to end on regarding bullet journaling: you don’t need to be an artist to enjoy it! For years, I thought bullet journals were not for me because I’m not very good at drawing, nor have a good artistic imagination. And yet I decided to give it a go and made it work. You can even find some ready-made bullet journals now, with labelled pages which you just have to fill in and use how you need to. 

You also don’t need fancy pens and equipment to have a pretty journal: I only use thin coloured pens in there, I draw and write everything with that one set of pens and everything looks lovely. There is a lot of inspiration for spreads, themes and pages online shared by awesome creators – all of which you can use and change up to make your own. Bullet journals are great if you’re looking to organise your life in a more personal and rewarding way than by using yellow sticky notes for your to-do lists (… not that there is anything wrong with that, though!) As a not-so-creative person, my bullet journal is the one thing that makes me put a little effort into an artistic outlet, and creating my themes and spreads is actually very relaxing. We are all creative in certain ways, and you can pour out those skills in your journal and make it one of a kind.