Basic Page Threading in Bullet Journals (BuJo)

A prior article, Cross-Indexed Bullet Journals, discussed how a Bullet Journal (BuJo) Index Page can bridge the gap between multiple Bullet Journals by using a “volume number:page number” notation. Now let’s look into page threading to link pages together in a way that allows navigation backwards and forwards within your BuJo beginning at any page.

We’ll begin with the simplest technique to manage calendar pages separately from other kinds of pages. In future posts, we’ll refine this technique to build on this idea to yield a powerful way to manage and navigate through the most complex BuJo.

The idea is similar to creating a Christmas tree garland out of popcorn with a needle and thread. Think of each BuJo page as a piece of popcorn, and pages referring to each other by number as the thread. You can then use two or more of these threads to keep things organized.

The simplest way to approach this is to have one thread for calendar-related pages and another for topical pages. A calendar page would be a Future Log, Monthly, Weekly, or Daily page; and a topic page would be anything else. When you create a new page, you add it to the appropriate “thread” as you would add the next piece of popcorn to the appropriate garland.

To link pages together, instead of a simple number on the lower right corner of each page, we might use a notation like the following, where “26” is the page number, and “23” and “31” are the previous and next pages in the thread’s sequence.

Let’s see how this might appear on sequential pages in a BuJo. Having grown up using DayTimers, I happen to use my BuJo as a daily/weekly/monthly planner. I therefore keep pages for each workday and generally address weekends on the Week pages. If you use your BuJo differently, you may want to wait until future posts when we discuss refinements of this technique that may better fit your needs. This does illustrate the “basics”, however, if you’re unfamiliar with the idea of “threading”.

Here we have calendar pages intermingled with topic pages. The calendar pages are “linked” together into one thread (shown in blue), and the topic pages into a second thread (orange).

The Future Log on page 3 refers (“points”) to page 4 which happens to be a Month. Likewise, the Month “points” back to the Future Log and forward to the next calendar page which happens to be a Week. That in turn points backward to the Month and forward to the first Day page then onto the second and third Day pages. That’s all one “thread” of pages beginning with “Future Log” and ending with “Day 3”.

Only two Topic pages are shown, and they are linked to each other, constituting the second thread.

Notice that you can open the BuJo to any page and navigate back and forth within the various threads. This may reduce the number of entries you need to keep on the Index Page at the beginning of the BuJo: you probably don’t need to list all of the Week or Day pages, but you may want to list the Month pages like this so you can jump into these points in your calendar:

Month Jan:3 Feb:36 Mar:68 …

This simple threading technique is fine when there are just a few pages linked together in this manner, but when the number of pages increases, this navigation can become unwieldy. For example, if you want to look back through your Week pages, you would need to navigate through each of the Day pages to get from one to another.

We can make some refinements to this threading technique to facilitate “skipping through” a thread. This amounts to creating “subthreads” that directly link similar pages within a thread so you can navigate directly from one to the other. In addition to linking Day pages together, one to another, each Day page may also refer to its corresponding Week page; Week pages may refer to their Month page; and Month pages refer to the Future Log in which they appear.

This “subthreading” technique also allows us to link together pages relating to the same topic, even when they may lie in different parts of the BuJo. I use this to link together homeowner association and school board meeting notes, for example, and various tracking pages for work. It’s a relatively simple technique that transforms your BuJo from a hodgepodge of different types of pages and notes into something easily navigated without relying entirely on the Index Page.

If you can’t wait to read about these refinements, here’s a clue:

Here’s the plan for this series of posts:

1. Cross-Indexed Bullet Journals,
2. Basic Page Threading in Bullet Journals (BuJo) <== this post
3. Calendar Threading in Bullet Journals (BuJo)
4. Topic Threading in Bullet Journals (BuJo)
5. Multiple-Volume Threading in Bullet Journals (BuJo)