Bullet Journal for Teachers, Scholars, Hot Messes

When I went back to teaching, I went back to having a dedicated planner/calendar just for high school, and desperately missed Jim Burke's now discontinued, Teacher's Daybook which is what I used to love and adore (and I still think he should do a fundraiser for, because LOTS of people would pay for that). The worksheets and such are available online but it's just not the same. I tried a variety of "teacher" marketed planners. I used them, but didn't love them. I liked the tabs and color coding, I didn't love the lots of pages I didn't use. So either I felt guilty for not using pages or just ripped them out and felt guilty I paid ridiculous money for them. During grad school, the Passion Planner had just come out, and I used that for a while, but eventually it seemed to have a lot of things in it I just didn't use, so I stopped. In addition to all this, I had an old-school red leather, Working Girl day planner for everything else- scholarship, personal stuff, etc.

I limped along in this way for a while, but started messing up scheduling things, or forgetting doctor's appointments because the two planners did not talk to each other.

Now, I've always kept a writer's notebook, religiously, and this year introduced my students to keeping daybooks (which I've blogged about) but despite my love of color coding and crafty stickers, I resisted the idea of a bullet journal for a couple of reasons:

• weird suburban white woman-ness
• it seemed SUPER regimented, and while I like order, I do not like being constrained
• the seeming requirement to spend hours, days even, crafting your monthly and weekly calendars (see first point). I mean, come on, who has time for this shite?

It all seemed a little, okay a LOT, ludicrous.
But I follow @raulpacheco on Twitter, because of our mutual love of office supplies, and his Everything Notebook was close to how I used my writer's notebook (tracking conference notes, projects, etc.).

So I though I'd try MY idea of a bullet journal and the Everything Notebook, dump the rigidity, and keep the order.

So: bonuses, I love that this one notebook has everything, I never have to remember where things are, and it goes everywhere.
I can't make my mind up about hating or loving the index. I certainly think that in the next notebook, I will do the index differently, maybe take up a couple of pages? I'm not sure yet.

I have a couple of pages that will go in every notebook:

• to read list
• wish list
• a page for my bright line eating
• this, a long term goals page, that also serves as a yearly calendar. I planned some things out, but too, as longer term stuff comes up, I put it here

I then create monthly calendars as needed. As you can see, I'm up to June. I like putting the calendar on one page, and then what needs to happen in certain weeks on the other side. I have little Post-It flags for the months.

I then use the month to create weekly pages.
Again, I like to follow the same style each week- the calendar up top, with stuff that has to get done during the work day, then under it other to do stuff.
I also like to color code, use stickers. Just cause.

Other pages cover a bunch of stuff. I had one for SAA, another for stuff to see in LA, one about planning Kzoo, another for budget. This one is one of the pages where I planned out my National Boards portfolio, due in a few weeks

My overall is that I love having stuff in one place.
I still go back, revisit pages, layer things like I did for the writer's notebook/daybook. 

Now, I'm NOT sure how moving to a new notebook will be. Some pages, like the long term, budget, money tracking stuff may move to a Google Doc, something easily printed out and added to as I move to each new notebook. But I'm fine with that.