How to Get Back on Track With Journaling
If you’re like me, it can be easy to forget to use journals, habit trackers, or even to do lists when things get busy. I ended up not using my journal for the month of March, and didn’t use it for most April either. I have a process that I use to get back on track if I haven’t used my bullet journal for a bit. I’ll share that with you here!
The first thing that I like to do is to fill out any yearly trackers I have in my journal. I have a tracker for the year that keeps track of what days I’ve exercised, and what kind of exercise I did. I have another tracker that keeps track of hymns that I’ve played at my church, so that I try not to repeat the same ones over again too often there. Recently I added a tracker for my freelance work. This is so that I can keep track of what days I worked for someone, how much I earned, and if there were any expenses I had to pay for. I do side hustles alongside my writing, and I need to keep that information organized for everything to run smoothly.
The next step I do is leave one blank page open (so that I can make notes of things that happened when I wasn’t using the journal.) Next I set up my monthly calendar, even if the month is almost done. My calendar is more compact, but still gives me an overhead view of what I’m doing. Sometimes I’ll fill in what happened over the course of the month, but other times I won’t, it depends on how busy I currently am. Here is what my calendar page looks like:
After that I get out a separate sheet of paper, and start writing down current goals and projects, along with a to do list for the remainder of the week. I have a tendency to want to start my journal on a Monday, (which is the first day of the week for me) but I think it’s best to ignore that if I can and just start using it again whatever day I’m trying to get back on track. Here’s the spread I use for my weekly tasks and goals:
Once this is done I can go ahead and set up my daily spread, which is filled out each day, (which makes it harder to show.) The one thing that I would say helps me the most with getting back to using a bullet journal is to keep things simple. Sometimes I go all out and try to make cool designs, but when I’m busier I have a simple layout that I always fall back on. This helps not only with getting the journal set up quickly, but also helps with it not feeling too overwhelming to get back into again. If you’ve fallen behind on using your journal, I hope this helped!