Bullet Journal Organisation: Monthly Spreads

I’m often asked how I manage to do everything that I do while still sleeping 8 hours a night and eating correctly. The secret, other than the fact that my fiancé cooks probably 3/4 of the time, is I’m just a sucker for organising and planning. I’ve had a bullet journal for probably around 4-5 years now and I’ve tailored it to suit my work.

To be honest with you, I’m also a really bad procrastinator. I’m very good at planning and organising a thing to the point where really I’m just procrastinating the thing and not actually doing any genuine planning. That’s something I’ve been working on a bit more this year with my ‘get stuck in’ goal of the year and so far it’s mostly been working. Obviously not everything has been done when planned and things have definitely been written or made the night before if not the day of. But it’s been better. 

My bullet journal is probably my go to for anything organising so I wanted to create a mini series on the blog talking through how I personally use my bullet journal in the hopes that it may be helpful to a few of you.

Monthly spreads

Something I’ve always used since the beginning is monthly spreads, and boy have they upgraded since when I started. Last year I tried out quite a few different monthly spreads and partway through the second half of the year I found a spread I liked. This year, however, I’ve moved onto this calendar style. I find it’s much easier to see where you are in a week and it’s still as easy to fill in events and other fun.

I imagine throughout the year I’ll flow between this design and the design from last year when suits. For each month I also have a monthly spending tracker and monthly blog post planner which I’ll go through in detail in another post.

Monthly themes

Every December I spend a lot of time scrolling through Pinterest looking for inspiration for next year's bujo layout. Usually I’m looking for new page ideas and trackers but this year, after pinning lots and branching into bujo walkthrough YouTube videos, I decided to do monthly themes. So far I’ve stuck to nature florally type themes as they allow for rough and quick layouts without being too detailed. It also means that I only need a set few pens for the month instead of swapping out each week like I used to.

Themes are based off images from Pinterest, I’ve managed to find what I think is the original creator of one of the themes Elizabeth Turn but the others are unfortunately going into a deep Pinterest circle. If anyone knows do let me know and I’ll add it in. 

Keep your eyes peeled for the other three posts in this mini-series coming soon; weekly spreads, trackers, and tool recommendations. I plan to do more posts in the future so if you have any questions or anything you’d like to know from my personal bullet journal experience let me know!

- Sophie

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