New Year’s Resolutions in your Dingbats* Notebook
It’s hard to believe that this year is actually in its final few days! It seems that 2018 has literally flew by and I can’t believe that 2019 is just around the corner. With the holidays upon us, days seem to go by faster than ever, making you feel like you have a lot less time on your hands than you’d thought.
A lot of people have already started thinking about their New Year’s resolutions! January 1st has a fascinating effect on most people, acting as an opportunity to change everything. Now it’s the perfect time to setup our bullet journals for 2019! I like to take this time to reflect on the year that is almost over and to plan ahead for the new one that’s coming. It helps me to put my head and thoughts in order and to get a head start before the 1st of January.
During the past few years I like to add a few pages in my bullet journal to help me with my New Year’s resolutions. They make planning and organising so much better and they help me focus more on my goals.
The first page I always make is a Review page for the year that ends. It’s nice to reflect and to actually see what you’ve done during the year, what worked and what didn’t, your accomplishments and your mistakes. All these will help you to plan better for the next year. You can change your strategy and the way you’re doing things in order to be more successful and to achieve everything you want. Like last year, I decided to include some questions on little notes that I drew on the page. That way, it looks more fun and the different categories are highlighted better.
The next page is dedicated to my Word of the Year. My word for 2018 was ‘believe’ and it was the perfect word for me! During this year I believed more in my dreams and myself and that word would always remind myself to believe more in what I do. So, for 2019 I chose the word ‘ignite’. That word has so many meanings for me and I’m sure it will help me to move forward and to ignite my life in more ways than one! I have a blog post on how I choose my word of the year each time, if you’re interested.
One more page that I like to add in my bullet journal in the beginning of the year is my Bucket List page. There were times where I felt that my days were passing by without any tangible output to speak of. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t write things down and make plans for them, I tend to spend most of my time caught up in a flurry of day-to-day activities and I completely forget about all the things I want to accomplish.
So, I decided to create this page in order to write down:
- all the goals I want to achieve
- the dreams I want to fulfill
- and the life experiences I want to experience during the year.
In this page I plan to write a list of 20 things I want to achieve during 2019. What’s on your bucket list? Let me know in the comments below.
After reading Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning book, I decided to recreate his ‘Level 10 Life’ and Level 10 Goals in my bullet journals.
In his book, Hal Elrod explains a concept he calls ‘Level 10 Success’:
“If we’re measuring our levels of success/satisfaction in any area of our lives, we all want to be living our best lives at a ‘Level 10’ in each area. Creating your ‘Level 10 Life’ begins with creating an honest assessment of where you are.”
On the left hand page I created a page about my Level 10 Life, which is an assessment of your life as it is now in 10 different areas. The idea here is to review each of the 10 areas of your life. For each area, you have to rate your satisfaction on a scale of 1–10 and fill in each column with the respective colour of each category.
Then on the right hand page I created the Level 10 Goals. Here you’re getting clear on your ideal conditions for each of those areas and establishing the ways and habits that will help you get there. The ultimate goal is to start making positive changes in your life to slowly increase your satisfaction in each of the 10 focus areas. Eventually (in theory), you will be living a Level 10 Life.
You can see here how I’ve filled in these pages in my previous journals.
And lastly but not least I created a page for my Goals per Month. This is an annual overview planner that helps me see the big picture at a glance.
You can use this spread to pre-plan your personal life, vacations, important dates, launches, work projects etc. in a 12 month calendar. Essentially, this should help you to brain dump and schedule all your ideas, plans and to-dos for the coming year in an organised way.
I like to use this spread to add my goals throughout the year and allocate a few goals per month. That makes it easier for me to take each goal or project individually, and focus on that only, during that month.
It’s easier as well for your project planning, no matter what it is you want to do. From creating a new course or planning the Xmas Vacations. It all goes here and once you know what you have to do each month, then you can take each goal and create smaller steps that will lead you to the end result.
I used this spread last year, and was very helpful for me to plan my goals like this, so this spread it’s coming back for this year as well.
So, there you have it. 5 pages to add in your bullet journal to set up the tone and help you to plan your life during 2019. What spreads do you like to add in your bullet journal for the new year?
