How I fill one journal every month

photo by Dim Hou at Unsplash

Within the Bullet Journal community, I am an exotic. I use up one A5-sized journal every month, which means I spend 40 mins to 1 hour writing in total every day. Sometimes a bit more during the weekend. I get asked how I fill that many pages very often, so I decided to write a blog post about that.

Please keep in mind that I use a lot of symbols and methods from the bullet journal (Bujo) system. But as nearly 1/2 of my journaling entries are my morning braindumps I call my journal (Bu)Jo.

When do I journal?

• Every morning, I journal for like 25 to 35 minutes. When I started this ritual, I used a system very close to the concept of Morning pages. These days it is a brain dump at the beginning of my daily log where I write about whatever feels right in whatever form feels right. Bullet points, mindmaps, long-form journaling… I don´t care if I write about a cute scene from an anime, sensitive topics like sexuality, or a serious internal conflict.
• When I am back home from work, I tend to journal for a few minutes to calm down my mind from a busy workday.
• When I was at a store, I glue in the short version of the receipt… The part from the store name to the total price and the payment method I used.
• When I come back from events I stick in stuff like tickets or 2–3 postcards or parts of flyers I got when I was there.
• Especially during the weekend, I add braindumps or take notes on webinars (or their replays), which are often about 3–5 events per month.
• I journal through the day whenever it feels right. Often just 3–5, sometimes 10 bullet points.
• When I go to bed the first thing I do is write my daily reflection as well as update my plan for the next day(s).

How does this pile up?

Please note that all these numbers are just guesses. Some months I write more, and sometimes I write less. It also depends on the size of the journal I use, the kind of grid I use, etc. So please see this information more or less as flexible rules of thumb. These calculations are based on 30 days and 4 weeks within 1 month for simplicity.

• Morning pages, daily plans, random entries, daily reflections: 5 pages/day, 150 pages per month
• Monthly setup pages: about 10 pages per month
• Weekly setups and weekly reflections: 4 pages per week, 16 pages per month
• Braindumps and webinars: 15–20 pages per month
• Drafts for blog posts: 5–10 pages per month

Roughly calculated this means I use about 200 pages a month. That´s a lot. I write pretty fast, but sometimes the reflection of this feels overwhelming. Some pages are just receipts, stuff from flyers, entrance tickets…

I know I would use 10 to 20 pages less a month if I didn´t add the latter stuff to my journal and just take photos and place them in my PKM system. To be honest: it doesn´t work for me, so I try not to stress myself about this artificial piling up.

The same goes for decorative stickers or adding sketches to my journal. Sometimes it gives me joy, so I do it. If not, no hard feelings. Sometimes I use the same pen for everything one month straight, other months I use a different color of pen for every entry. I do what feels right at that moment and try not to overthink it.

One thing I am observing lately is that I feel a bit stuck with my journaling routine. As a premium member of the official Bujo U community who participated who took the Basics and Beyond course, I watched a few videos about the latest evolution of the bullet journal system, which gave me a much-needed perspective on my journaling routine:

• I need to find ways to write less wordy and more short-form.
• Maybe I should add more abbreviations and nouns instead of verbs to make my writing more concise.
• A guess mindmaps instead of lists would feel less overwhelming sometimes, whereas they tend to take up more space on paper.
• More often than not I write the time at the beginning of all non-morning entries. This gives me some useful perspective about how I use my time. My system is roughly inspired by interstitial journaling.
• My journaling is about 95% about everyday life with almost nothing about long-term perspectives or working towards long-term goals. This explains a lot of mental struggles I have had lately.
• I enjoy some rephrasing within the methodology as well as the new filter questions.
• It´s time to become more flexible with the way I journal, even if it means using more pages. Most of the time they feel crowded and repetitive, so it´s time to experiment with new layouts more often.

Another question related to this what is worth documenting and what not. I´ve shared my thoughts about this topic in this previous post.