Bullet Journal -- Getting Started (and All-Year Pages)

To stay more organized and to use up some of the dozens of notebooks I have scattered around the apartment, I decided to start a bullet journal. For years, I have been making lists of all sorts -- to-do lists, grocery lists, ideas lists, more to-do lists -- they were just scattered throughout different spare notebooks, scrap paper, and lots and lots of post-its. Here's my attempt to centralize everything and make it a little prettier. I used materials I already had (the purpose was to start reducing clutter, not adding more!) so I used a graph-ruled composition book from Staples, my Pilot G-2 0.7 pens, and some colored sticky notes (for the index squares).

Caveat: this was my first time hand-lettering, and I never could draw very well, but I tried!

My main goals for the year. I get to color in each icon as I complete it -- helps motivate me to stay active and keep striving toward these goals.

This page faces the 2017 goals page (above) to create a nice 2-page spread of my year. These are the big events that I have to plan, execute, experience, and enjoy. Since they're like goals for the year, but one-short events, I didn't think it made sense to have the color-me-in icons like for the smaller goals page.

Found something like this on Pinterest and loved it. I've basically copied that page down to the formatting.

I still need to fill this page in, but it's supposed to be my bucket list items with some progress updates/marks to fill in as I work towards checking stuff off the list.

I'm trying to give more small gifts to friends and family to express my gratitude for their love and support. This page can also double as a wish-list and gift ideas page.

Because I'm terrible at remembering when I had my last check-up, annual physical, annual teeth cleaning, etc. I know these things are important, they're just hard to keep track of, so here goes another attempt.

Later edit: keeping it all organized with my indexing system

You may have noticed the small pink squares near the top edge of each of my yearly pages. These are part of my indexing system, shown here now that I've added a few pages for April (yellow) and May (green). Each section is color coded (pink is for annual spreads) and the squares are spaced out a bit so they're easily grabbable to flip to a certain section.