SIMPLE Bullet Journal for Writers | 2020 Set Up for CRUSHING GOALS! | Author Brittany Wang - Hey writers I've done a few bullet journaling videos in the past but every
time I take this thing out you guys get really excited and say you want more
including more of a breakdown of how I create my super simple minimalistic
pretty yet totally no fuss spreads also just a disclaimer that most of the
spreads I'm going to show you focus on creating and making sure you actually
accomplish your goals so even though I use this bullet journal as a writer and
helping sort of set and accomplish my goals to write and publish my books and
also some writerly business things that I do with some personal things really
anybody can use these spreads and apply this sort of goal strategy and goals
spreads to whatever goals you have in your life in the future I might create
some spreads that help me plot or help me create a self-publishing plan or
different things like that that are a little more writer focused so let me
know if those kind of videos would be interesting and helpful to you in the
future but in this video I'm going to show you how I set up my bullet journal
for 2020 in a little more detail than I already have I'm going to show you in
real time how I create my monthly and daily and weekly spreads and how I then
use those spreads to make sure that I accomplish my goals and make progress
first let's set up what my monthly spreads look like by creating my
February spread and then I'll give you a little look at what January looks like
pretty much all filled out and how it helped me accomplish a lot of my goals
the first page is just an overview of the month's events where I simply put
the month's name along the side and then events and gratitude at the top this is
the page where I will mark all the big events I know about at the beginning of
the month but then also mark big accomplishments or memories I don't want
to forget for each day as most bullet journal errs do I mark the days with the
first letter of the day and then the months date as you can see here but to
make it even more visually appealing and organized for me I group days from the
same week together starting on a Monday because that's the day I start my work
week then I further group the weeks together with a single
line down the side of each week as you can see here then I highlight every
other line with one of my zebra or zebra however you pronounce it
mild liner highlighters which I absolutely love because they come in a
variety of colors but never bleed through the page which if you're
interested all the materials I'm using are linked in the description below if
you want to check them out to simplify even more and make each month easily
distinguishable from all the others I usually pick just one color to use for
each month then comes my month's goals page here is where I separate my goals
into the ones that have to do with my writing slash author life business stuff
and then my more personal goals to fill this out I then reference my 2020 goals
and game plan overview page where I have my top three goals for the year broken
down into quarterly and then monthly goals so when I create a new month
spread I just flip over to at this page and transfer the big goals into each
category and then I break them down even further into more specific steps here if
you want to see an even deeper dive into my 2020 goals and gameplan and how I
chose my goals and created this spread definitely check out my 2020 goals video
where I show you all the things I also usually take a look at last month's
goals page to see if there's anything I didn't get done that I need to move over
after this I turn the page to set up the basic layout of the first week of the
month I then look at my month's goals and decide which goals I want to tackle
in my first week and list them here at the top then I make the banner for the
first day of the week in my case Monday and list out what
items from the week's goals do I want to tackle on Monday personally I don't like
going ahead and setting up a section for every single day right away because as
you can see with January some days have Perlas than others and I just really
like making the most use of the space I have on each page basically I try to
focus on as few things as possible at a time get those things done and then move
on to the next things or push over things that didn't quite get done to the
next day or week with the arrows you see here
that's literally all I do when setting up at the beginning of the month and
then I go day by day from there then at the end of the month
I take some time to look over the month spread and practice gratitude even if I
didn't make all the progress I initially hoped usually this helps me see that I
did make more progress than I thought or that certain life things just happened
that meant I needed to have grace with myself and not push myself so hard
during that month I can also see here if I got distracted by getting other things
done that we're not quite as important so I can make a point to refocus when I
set up my goals for the following month I also finally go to my future log which
looks like this and I really should rename it because although I do put a
few things like birthdays and big events at the beginning of the year in here I
actually more like to use it as a kind of memory keeper that I add to as each
month passes this way I can look back on a succinct recap at the end of the year
of all the progress I made and the things I want to remember and can be
grateful for because one of my goals is to keep growing my author platform I
also write in how much each part of my platform has grown at the end of the
month here pretty simple right at the end of the day these spreads might feel
too simple for some and sometimes I do really like taking time to be a bit more
artsy or creative because it's just fun to be creative in other ways I've even
been thinking about maybe getting some stickers or something to spice things up
but most of the time I love making it super simple like this so I can spend
even more time making progress on my goals then spending time creating the
spreads themselves to other tools I also now use a ton in conjunction with my
bullet journal are my Google Calendar and a new Trello board I just started
experimenting with to use as more of a daily Kanban board which I first started
seeing videos about this idea of a Kanban board from Sara cannon and a few
other author tubers like Emily borne but I heard about this idea of making a
digital Kanban board with Trello from one of my patrons Kim
and I was like oh my gosh this is genius I need to try this so thank you so much
Jim if you'd like a more step-by-step tutorial about how I set up my Google
Calendar or how I've been using this digital Kanban Trello board thing let me
know that in the comments and make sure you're subscribed and hit the
notification bell so you don't miss when those videos come out but in the
meantime if you want to see a bit more of how I use my bullet journal in my
Google Calendar together definitely check out my day-in-the-life vlog which
I'll link here or you can check out this other writerly related video and we'll
see you there