(soft music)
- Hello everyone, it's Amanda, welcome back to my channel.
Today is a very exciting day because I am doing
my January 2020 bullet journal set up.
It is the very first monthly set up for the entire year,
brand new year 2020, actually brand new decade as well.
So it's a big one and I'm very excited to sit down
and get a fresh start.
If you guys haven't seen yet,
I did post my 2020 bullet journal setup
with all of the beginning yearly pages.
So if you haven't see that yet and you're curious to see
how I set up my bullet journal
for the beginning of this year,
be sure to check it out, I will link it above
as well as down below.
I've been doing bullet journaling for three years now,
so this is my fourth year bullet journaling.
And it's still a little bit daunting
with the first month of the year,
opening a fresh new book, but we got this,
you guys can do it.
I know a lot of you guys are starting bullet journaling
for the first time this year.
I always get a lot of questions about beginner tips
for bullet journaling and I have a lot of videos on this
but I do recommend you watch my older videos
from like 2017 'cause that's
when I was a bullet journal beginner as well.
But, yeah, you can keep it simple.
There's a lot of different spreads out there
so do your research, do whatever works best for you
and, yeah, it's gonna be fun.
I cannot wait for 2020,
it just seems like such a momentous year.
I'm ready to get planning.
Before we get started I'd like to give a quick thank you
to today's sponsor, Squarespace,
they are an awesome website building platform
I built my website on there.
But I'll talk a little bit more of that later in the video.
So without further ado, let's begin this decade,
January 2020, grab your pencils,
your pens, markers, notebooks.
And if you're just hanging out and chilling with me
then grab your cup of tea and your snacks and let's do this.
For this month's theme, January 2020,
the first month of the year.
I asked you guys over on my YouTube community tab page,
what theme you wanted to see me do.
And by an overwhelming majority,
you guys said you wanted to see me do a 1920s,
roaring '20s Art Deco, Great Gatsby-esque theme
because since we're entering 2020,
it's like the 20s are starting all over again.
So I thought it was very, very fitting
and I love the idea.
I am always very interested
in different eras of design and art.
One of my favorite themes from 2019
was actually the '80s, '90s theme that I did.
Just 'cause I find it so interesting
when a specific era has such a distinct style
and people can instantly recognize it,
and I think that's definitely the case for the 1920s.
And, actually, since me filming this video,
one of my friends, Elizabeth or Plant Based Bride,
she actually did an entire 2020 setup
with the Art Deco them as well,
which was amazing, so I'll leave that down below
if you want some further inspiration.
I love her, she's also from Toronto.
But, for mine, I decided to do this
for January to start off the year.
And I think something that is very, very prevalent
in all 1920s Art Deco designs,
you'll see it in pretty much everything,
is this gold color.
So I actually ended up having this calligraphy marker,
it was very chisel tipped and it worked well
because it was thicker.
So I could create these bold thick lines
and then have this design aspect to it.
So it worked really well and, as you can see,
I'm using a ruler, I know it's shocking
because AmandaRachLee never uses a ruler
but for this, it's almost essential because Art Deco
is very, very geometrical and angular
and almost mathematical
because it was symmetrical everywhere.
And I know this looks daunting and overwhelming
to do at first but I quickly realized
as I was doing it that it was relatively simple
to make because, essentially, it was just one color.
And also once you do one line one side,
you just have to flip it and recreate it on the other side
and go progressively like that.
And then this design slowly starts forming.
For the title, for the January title,
as you can see, I made a typo,
so I had to cut out some paper
to paste it over top, almost like a Band-Aid,
and I used this serif type of font
that I think was very common in this era.
And then I just finished it off with a couple of other
final details, this sun-burst pattern
is also a really common design element
from this time period.
I really like how this cover page turned out.
On the other side I actually glued in some black paper
because, actually, a really common color combo
was black and gold, so this marker shows up really well
on top of black, so I thought I might as well
play with the black paper.
And also, I love doing quotes.
So this quote says, "Today is a new beginning."
I did some serif fonts, some cursive
and then also played with some more of these Art Deco
sort of sun-burst design elements.
I found a bunch of these on Pinterest
and tried recreating them.
Art Deco is a style of design that has been around forever
and recently it's made a resurgence in modern design.
So you'll see a lot of these, actually,
in modern wallpapers and stuff,
but obviously with different twists.
So it was really easy for me to find some design inspo.
But I will link a lot down below,
in case you guys want to try creating
some Art Deco designs for yourself.
But this semi-circle sort of pattern
was very common, so I did that at the bottom,
as a border and also some in the corners.
All right, so moving on to my monthly calendar layout.
So this actually spread that I have never done
in the three years of me bullet journaling.
In my 2019 bullet journal flip-through
where I show you guys all these spreads that I did
during 2019, I mentioned briefly
that the overall, regular calendar layout
with the squares sometimes didn't work for me.
And I've also done the vertical list type of layout before
and that also didn't work for me,
just for various reasons,
sometimes I wouldn't have enough space,
sometimes it wouldn't be visual enough.
So a lot of you guys actually suggested
that I do something like this, where it mixes the two.
So what I had settled on was on this left side,
I have this smaller calendar.
Normally this calendar I would spread it out
over the two pages but for this, as you can see,
it's contained in the one half of the spread.
And then on the other side,
I do the vertical bullet journal
classic monthly list
sort of layout, so you write down one through 31,
from top to bottom and then that corresponds
to the days of the week.
So I think this will work for me this month,
obviously, I'm gonna see what works best and all,
try to evolve and change, as normal.
But I think because this month is a little less busy,
this list layout works pretty well.
And then I have the visual element
of the calendar on the left side.
So on the right side, as you can see,
I'm using these black sticky notes
that I actually got from one of you guys as a gift
and I thought it worked perfectly
'cause I could just throw it in my pencil case
and always some black paper with me.
So I made these three little boxes
and I'm adding a gold Art Deco border around it
with my marker, as you can see.
But each of these boxes has a different purpose.
So first one is for my monthly goals,
obviously something that I wanna achieve this month,
or something that I wanna focus on this month,
second one is for my monthly affirmations.
If you've watched my 2020 setup, then you'll know
I also had an affirmations page
for the beginning of the year, so I'll probably
end up carrying some over on to January.
But I've been really trying to get
into that affirmation thing.
And then finally I have one for one for my grateful box.
So something that I was grateful for during that month,
which I will fill in at the end of the month.
So I'm trying to include more mental health
type of exercises in my bullet journal list here,
I think it's really important.
And I think that's one of the benefits of setting up
your own bullet journal is
that you can add little things like this.
Next up is my tracker, so of course,
we have my habit trackers,
which I'm setting up using
some of these monthly number stamps,
I'll link these down below.
A lot of you guys ask me where I find these
'cause they are a extreme time saver.
And then I'm, of course, including the habit
that I wanna track above it.
So I have various one, exercising,
which, I mean, I feel like every year
I tell myself I wanna exercise more
and then it never actually happens,
who can relate?
But I also have things like watering my plants
and my vitamins and all of that, normal stuff.
I threw in more of the Art Deco borders for good measure.
This entire them was relatively simple to do
because everything was pretty fast to doodle,
especially those little corner stuff.
Once you got the hang of being symmetrical
and getting in the Art Deco mindset.
For my mood tracker I did the graph layout.
I did this for January and actually liked it.
And I think what I'm gonna end up doing is drawing a line
straight up and then with a little diamond on the top
because that's very Art Deco-ey.
So the length of the line will signify my mood.
Okay, this page, I am bringing back my brain dump page.
So I did the little semi-circles,
I'm calling is seashell design that I saw a lot
in a lot of my Art Deco inspo pics.
So I made a sort of bottom border with that.
And then I didn't add anything too crazy for this
because it's meant for me to spew out my ideas.
So just a title at the top and some things in the corner.
One thing that I wanted to know is
that I actually didn't make a playlist spread this month,
this is about normally the time that I would include it.
I know a lot of you guys are interested
in what music I listen to, but I found that this past month
I actually haven't been listening to that many new songs
and also because it was December,
I was listening to Christmas songs.
So if you guys have any new music suggestions,
leave them in the comments below.
Looking for some new tunes for 2020.
For my very first weekly spread of January 2020,
this might look a little empty,
especially for those of you who are used
to some of my older spreads, 'cause usually
I set up the whole week.
But for the last couple of weeks of December,
I had actually been doing something called rolling dailies,
or rolling weeklies some people call it,
which basically means that I set up
only the day that I'm on.
So you'll see that I write down Monday
and then I don't do anything else
because I'll just write my whole task list for Monday
underneath that and then once Tuesday comes,
I will put Tuesday.
And that just ensures that I have enough space
to write my whole to-do list for Monday,
or if I don't have that many,
then you don't have all this excess space.
And also this means that if I needed to flip over
to the next page, if I somehow have a lot of tasks,
I am free to do so.
So I've been really liking it recently,
obviously, if you like to set up the whole spread,
feel free to do so, but for me,
since my to-do list fluctuates,
sometimes I need a lot of space, sometimes I don't.
I figured having something more flexible like this
works really well for now.
And so before I show you the final flip-through
of January 2020, I wanted to take this time
to talk a little bit about today's sponsor, Squarespace.
I love Squarespace is an awesome
all in one website building platform.
I actually built my personal website, amandarachlee.com
through Squarespace and it was so easy.
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I know first hand that website building can be very daunting
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So if you wanna build a fresh new website
for the fresh new year or even revamp your old one
and you wanna try out Squarespace,
you can head to squarespace.com/amandarachlee
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And that also helps us out here on the channel
and supports us a little bit.
So yeah, thank you to Squarespace
and back to the flip-through.
All right friends, so here's the final flip-through
of my January 2020 bullet journal setup.
We did some 1920s inspired design with the Art Deco.
And I really love this one because it is a lot more simple
than I normally go for,
which I feel like I need for January.
I keep saying this, but fresh start.
So I like that it is (murmurs).
Okay, we did it guys,
January 2020 set up in our bullet journals.
But in all seriousness, I really do wish you guys
a very happy new year.
Thank you for being with me in 2019
and for all your love and support.
It was a crazy year and I can't wait
to see what 2020 brings us.
So nothing but love, happiness and, of course,
lots of doodling for next year.
This outro would not be complete without me showcasing
some of your recreations.
This was from December 2019, which seems like ages ago
but here go, here are some of your recreations.
If you do happen to recreate this month's setup
or any previous setups of mine and you want me to see it,
be sure to tag me on Instagram or Twitter or anywhere,
my handle is just @amandarachlee.
And on there, I also do a lot of other stuff,
like weekly spread live streams
and it's just the best way to keep updated with me.
Anyway, thank you so much for watching,
I hope you guys enjoyed.
Again, happy new year.
There's a lot coming for you guys
from my little doodles fam.
I love you guys so much, so keep doodling.
And I'll talk to you in the next video.
Bye everyone.
(soft music)