Bullet Journal - Large or Small

In my last post, I shared the start of my bullet journal journey.
It was working quite well, so I decided to go ahead and order a Moleskine large dotted notebook from Amazon.com. When it arrived, I was shocked at how small it was. My handwriting is not naturally small. This seemed like an impossibility.

I had also ordered an assortment of pens based on recommendations online, but that's another story.

Here they are - Moleskine at the top, current notebook (with weekly layout) at the bottom:

Once again, not wanting to "waste" that $20 notebook, I thought I'd first see if writing this tiny would actually work.
I measured the Moleskine pages and drew them out in the larger notebook. Also note that the dots in the Moleskine are only 5mm apart. For those not used to the metric system, that's about 3/8"!

Here's my attempt at entering my weekly layout in that tiny space. Not good, not good at all!

I figured that maybe I didn't have the right pen, so I tried out different options and decided that, if I had a finer pen, and with some practice, this may actually work.

Here's my first weekly layout in the Moleskine:

This is going to be a functional organizational tool, not a work of art. Although there are some stunning examples out there, that is not my priority.

This is an evolving process, so stay tuned for more posts on how it develops.

Bullet Journal - Yes or No

I posted this on my quilting blog a couple of weeks ago but thought this would be a better place.

You may have seen a lot of posts about Bullet Journals popping up all over social media (and even real media).
If you don't know what I'm talking about, just search Bullet Journal on Pinterest or #bulletjournal on Instagram. The official website is bulletjournal.com.
It is basically an analog way to organize your life, plan, journal, and pretty much whatever else you would like to put in there. The idea is to have it all in one place and easy to find.

(I'm going to have to do several posts on this topic because, if you're attention span is as short as mine, I'm probably already losing you.)

Reasons I think this may work for me:
1. I already kind of do this. Just not in quite as organized a fashion. I have multiple notebooks for different things (see photo above) and, truth be told, most them are rarely looked at.
2. I'm a list person. I love lists. I love structure in my life.
3. I LOVE stationery. I know it's weird but I also know I'm not the only person who cannot resist a stationery store.


Soooo...I decided to give it a shot. I already knew that I wanted to tweak the original idea a little.
(I'm writing this post assuming you already know the principles of bullet journaling. If not, I suggest watching the video on their website first.)

Three days ago, I grabbed a cheap composition book and got going. It's not ideal but I wasn't about to spend $20+ on a journal/notebook and messing it up.

I'm going to start off by focusing mainly on the daily/weekly log. I like to see my whole week at a glance. Here's my messy first version:

See why I didn't want to start off in a pricey journal?

In my next post I'll share my small notebook vs. large notebook dilemma.