I started this wonderful hobby of using a Bullet Journal at the start of October 2023, shortly after reading Ryder Carroll's book detailing the method. My first notebook was an extremely cheap Chinese-made A5 dot-grid journal that lasted me until the end of December. As I was working on the last page, the last section of paper came away from the spine binding it into the book. I call that one my BuJo Volume 1.
Volume 2 has lasted me the past four months. I purchased a much better notebook -- the official partnering between Ryder Carroll's company and famed publishers Leuchtturm 1917. I chose the Green 23 variety of Edition 2. With careful management, that notebook has lasted me until today, the 30th of April, and I will start Volume 3 tomorrow. It's ready and waiting for me, the original black version of Edition 2.
Through the last four months, I made my share of mistakes and had a few frustrations along the way. For the most part, however, the journal has been a daily joy to, using my word of the year, CREATE in. I have developed my skills along the way both through trial and error and in spending hours examining how others did something I wanted to try.
It is not an overly aesthetic journal, nor is it what other enthusiasts may call minimalist. Sometimes it's a bit of one, sometimes it strives to be the other. It may not always be pretty nor do I find it ugly (well, most of it). One thing it most definitely is -- it is MINE.
This blog entry, then, is a celebration of the four months I spent with Volume 2. A record online of what I achieved before beginning on the journey of Volume 3 which, is already showing some improvements at least in the collection pages I have already inked-out in the new notebook. We will save that overview for the end of August when I suspect it will be time to start a Volume 4.
WARNING: Blurry images are ahead. This is a result of trying to do photography with an aging phone in an un-air-conditioned home in the middle of a heatwave. Most blurs come as a result of my fan trying to turn the pages as I snapped the picture. Other than that, I hope the pages can stand for themselves, for better or for worse here they are. . . .
The first quote page and cover page of my second bullet journal, AKA MarJoJo's BuJo #2. At the time, I didn't realize that it would last me only four months. I decided that all quotes for this year would be from my favorite novel, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. I wanted the image on the notebook's cover page to reflect my hobbies of reading and stamp collecting as well as my job teaching English to kindergarteners in Thailand. I didn't have enough confidence to draw the stamps and postmark so I created them digitally and printed the image on sticker paper.
My first real flub-up in this notebook occurred on the Key page. As you can see, I made the corrections by printing it on sticker paper once again -- something I would do quite a bit in the early days of the year. Still, white stickers on cream notebook paper doesn't really work. It turns out that I never used these color codes anyway. The official notebook has pre-printed headers on the first several pages including Intentions. I was terrible at goal-setting at the time so I made it into a Word of the Year page. CREATE. I quite like it although there's too much blank space at the bottom. I think I should add some examples of my creations.
I have liked that lettering design for "INDEX" for a while now, I used it in my Volume 1 notebook (October to December 2023) and in my new Volume 3 as well. Wow! Look at all of those collection pages before we get to January -- 51 of them! Next year, I plan to have a separate Reading Journal which can be ongoing for several years AND a Teaching Journal to track my classes. I remember being amazed that some fellow BuJo users (BuJo'ers? BuJo'ists?) used multiple notebooks for different kinds of journals. I understand now. . . .
I don't know why I decided to include some of the Volume 3 pages in the Volume 2 Index. I doubt that I will ever open this page again. I did include several of the key Volume 2 page numbers in the Volume 3 Index because I will not migrate any of these pages into the new notebook. The task of making new book cover spaces and stickers actually terrified me. I will be adding in my reading milestones into the old notebook through the end of the year. See, I will already be using a separate notebook for books without having to buy a new one. . . yet!
I really messed up my Future Log. My original lettering for the header was awful as is the fix, again on sticker paper. And the list of monthly tasks and bills looked terrible after I'd hand-lettered them and added color. More sticker paper. I really feel I wasted those little calendar stickers, too. I decided to just give up on using the Future Log as a result, not even continuing it on past March. I relied on the information being in the Monthly Calendars from then on out, until I abandoned that in favor of the Weekly Layouts come April. My new Volume 3 has a redesigned Future Log page with hand-drawn calendars for just four months -- my anticipated life of the notebook.
This is truly one of my favorite pages in the entire notebook and I plan to create new About Me pages each year in the future (as long as I am still Bullet Journaling, anyway). I don't know how much might change for next year as my favorites and my hobbies will remain the same. Hopefully, my job continues as well. I can do different doodles. I have gotten pretty good at drawing a Subway foot-long, for example, and I can probably do a passable plate of French toast. now.
My Phuket Bucket List is another of my favorite pages although I didn't tick much off. I was originally going to create a page listing places I wanted to visit all around Thailand. It's been a while since I have gone north. However, I realized that I would probably not be able to get off the island of Phuket at all this year so I put things down that I felt I could do during my summer holiday (March through early May). There really aren't very many things that I haven't done in the nearly 20 years that I have lived here; I last visited Wat Chalong many years ago and it's changed a lot since then. I may still do the hike and the plane-spotting before I return to work but the Thalang Battle festival will not occur again until next March. The Elephant Sanctuary is extremely expensive but there is always the possibility of visiting on a school field trip.
This was my first attempt at a Daily Routines page. I made two or three more but this was probably the best.
The 60 Things to Do in 2024 spread was inspired by one of the best Bullet Journal YouTubers out there, JashiiCorrin of New Zealand. This was also my first attempt at creating a "Dutch door" effect. That didn't go so well but I am quite pleased that we are just approaching the fifth month of the year and I have already ticked off more than half of the items on this list. I will continue to use these pages until New Year's Eve. 
This is another layout inspired by JashiiCorrin. While the "60 Things" list are mostly one-time to-do's and to-buy's, 24 24's for 2024 is more to track certain habits and events occurring regularly apart from the habits I track on a monthly or daily basis (as we will see in a few pages). I did well on a number of these but dismal on others (only three movies this year so far! one documentary!). I think the grid is very messy as my dots meandered out of their columns and the ink often transferred onto the facing page. For my Volume 3 notebook, I have made a continuation of this layout but will start new (post May 1) tracking. Rather than putting dots to indicate completion, I have gridded the page with lines to fill in the resulting boxes. The logs including dates and details of each occurrence, are the same but I will try to fill them in much more neatly.
The Mail Log makes me sad. I don't get real mail anymore. All of the items here came from orders placed on Lazada -- one of the Asian versions of Amazon.com -- and delivered from within Thailand. Mail from overseas has rarely made it through since COVID-19 shut its borders and even domestic mail is still backed-up somewhat from flooding that occurred nationwide two years ago. This is a difficult pill to swallow for a lifelong stamp collector and longtime Postcrosser. I think things may improve if I can get a post office box. The waiting time for one of those to become available was estimated at more than two years long the last time I checked.
This is the cover page to the "Reading Lounge" section of my Bullet Journal. More stickers but I created the 2024 filled with books digitally. I will continue to use this section of my Volume 2 notebook for the rest of this year. Next year, I hope to create a separate Reading Journal and will recreate or redesign most of the next several pages and add a few more (such as mini-book reviews for each one I finish, good or bad).
Daily Reading Streak creates a year's overview. So far, I have read every day of 2024. In fact, I am approaching a one-year reading streak in which I did not miss any days at all. My longest streak since I began recording such things was 2279 days or about six-and-a-half years. That one ended when King Bhumibol Adulyadej died in October 2016 and I watched documentaries on his life for a couple of days in a row. In addition to coloring each day read, I also record the number of pages as well as whenever I finish a book. Simple but useful. The hardest part is deciding which color to use so that the black ink is easy to see. I think May will have to be orange or yellow.
I love the Books Read section with book covers placed each time I finish a book. It is my favorite way to remember what I have read earlier in the year. It is also the main reason that I did not want to recreate most of the front matter in the new notebook. My printer is also not working well, thus some recently printed book covers have a distinct pinkish shade. I have not printed covers for the last several books I have finished as I am waiting to use the printer at school when I return to work next week.
I left an empty page at the end of the Books Read pages just in case I end up reading more than 104.
I record the books I read for the Crossing Continents and Bookish Books challenges on this spread, coloring in the book spine with whatever color I designated for the month I finished the book. I forgot about the Bookish Books challenge for a month so I have some catching up to do!
Some of the information on this page seems redundant. I pledged to read 98 books this year in the Goodreads challenge and color in the brick when I finish each one. I also write the number of books read each month in spaces to the left of those bricks as well as in the yearly chart on the right-hand page. There's also a space to record my favorite books read each month and the total number of pages. As I do most of my reading using an e-reader, the page counts are quite high.
January's quote from To Kill A Mockingbird and the cover page. Still cannot figure out why I used stickers as I am sure I could have drawn better fireworks!
January calendar
As most of my monthly trackers are more or less the same, I will just show those from April. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite daily pages. . .
I lived in the Kansas City area from 1977 until 1994 and still consider them my "hometown" team. They never won much when I lived there. This year, they won the AFC Championship game, sending them to the Super Bowl, January 29. This happened to be World Local Post Day for which I designed a stamp, seen at the lower left along with my local post's cancellation. I made a fairly decent doodle for Wednesday's Scout Camp at a local park.
At the end of January, I made my first monthly reflection page. I really cringe to read the "Embarrassed by" section now -- I was not happy with our classroom's new assistant at the time and was tired of the overcrowded conditions on the buses going to and from work each day. And there is never an excuse for yelling at a child. Let the Thais do that. . . . For February's cover page, I combined Chinese New Year with a Valentine's Day card, putting the To Kill A Mockingbird quote on that. It looks pretty good but I wish I had done a two-page spread.
February calendar, maintaining the Chinese New Year theme.
I am quite pleased with my Charles Dickens sketch and the Chinese shaker below. I need to do more doodles like that.
Sticker-heavy pages for the Chiefs Super Bowl win and Valentine's Day but that's okay. I would have ruined it by trying to draw a helmet or football myself. In Thailand, it's tradition in schools that the kids have heart stickers rather than cards. They stick these all over the fronts and backs of their friends' and teachers' shirts. When I got home that night, I peeled off the stickers that hadn't fallen off on their own and pasted them into my BuJo.
More doodles, this time marking President's Day which is a holiday in the U.S. marking the birthdays of George Washington (sketched here) and Abraham Lincoln.
I guess I was feeling quite doodly this week with a calendar for "On This Date" (need to do that more often!), one for my students' big dance at the swimming pool, a reminder that my February assessments were due, and one for Makha Bucha Day -- a VERY big holiday in Thailand. My Buddhas always turn out lopsided.
I did very well with my March cover page and it's St. Patrick's Dau theme. Another successful To Kill A Mockingbird quote page even with stickers.
March calendar. I chose not to do monthly calendars for April or May as I never really use them after their creation, tending to rely on the Weekly Calendars instead.
I started several daily challenges in mid-March, right at the start of our summer holiday. Since it is not with the other trackers at the start of the month, I tend to forget about it. As you can see, I am a bit behind so I should go and update it when I finish this article.
I found a cool Morning Routines layout on Pinterest (sadly uncredited) and pretty much copied it for my own use. I like it but it's buried in the middle of the month and thus not often encountered.
My favorite still-in-service big ship visited nearby one day so I trekked to the next bay north to see her at anchor. It was a frustrating morning, however. What I didn't mention in my little write-up was my disgust at how I had to step over passed-out drunks on the beach while trying to photograph the liner (that town has a reputation as a 24-hour party destination and I try to avoid it as much as I can). Not to mention, I was mugged while waiting for the bus to go back home. I was pretty happy that I had not withdrawn cash from an ATM so they didn't get more than 500 baht (about USD $12).
March in Review page. I have now kept the same basic format for the last three months. Time for a change at the end of May, I think. . . .
At this point, April is my favorite of all the monthly cover pages. The month includes the Thai New Year which is locally called Songkran. Since this year is special with the UNESCO World Heritage declaration, the Tourism Authority of Thailand went all out in their promotion. They managed to confuse locals and tourists alike who thought the water play would last almost the entire month when in actuality it was the same three or four days as usual.
Here is yet another attempt at a Daily Routines page, this time showing my Weekday and Weekend Routines during the Summer Holiday. My new notebook has one more, although the Weekday Routines part is waiting for my new class schedule. I should receive that in another week or two. The Sleep Log has not changed much since the first one I made.
I included a Financial Tracker of sorts every month so far this year but have decided to drop it starting with May. The app I use on my phone -- Bluecoins -- is much more useful (and attractive!). I tinker with my Habits Tracker each month, sometimes adding new habits while removing old ones. It now includes the things I (usually) do during my Morning Routine as well as the Daily Challenges I attempted to maintain during the long holiday.
The daily Reading Log also has received a few adjustments throughout the year but is essentially the same as the first one in January.
Up until this one, the Blog Log has always been a list and is usually accompanied by a Site Updates page. I did away with the latter in April and have changed the format of the former for May. I won't continue the Photo A Day Challenge beyond this month, however. I had difficulty with many of the prompts on the original list (some due to the current heatwave) and so changed a number of them. What I plan for May is kind of a Photo Bingo where I will choose a photo at the end of each day -- keeping variety between the subjects -- and then draw a doodle on the page to represent that day's photo. It's okay if I don't fill in a square with a doodle every single day of the month.
In Kata, the Songkran water festivities lasted one entire day which was perfectly fine with me. The next bay to the north had four or five days of water mayhem. I went out Saturday alone as my friend had cut her toe at the beach the day before. I had a very enjoyable time just walking along the two big beaches near my home. In fact, it was the most fun I'd had for Thai New Year for many, many years as everyone I encountered was polite when pouring ice-cold water over my head or shooting me from behind with powerful water guns; everyone respected my requests for them not to smear my face with that awful paste; and everyone I saw just had big smiles on their faces. I think it would have been different had I ventured up to the big party town so I was glad I stayed away. The doodles on these pages came out rather nicely, too!
For most of the year, I have changed the style of header every single day. Some designs worked very well, others were atrocious. Trying to find a style I could copy was sometimes very time-consuming. Over the last few weeks, I started changing the designs only for each page. This last week of April, I kept the same style for each day's header. I also have a uniform layout of boxes for the time clocks, challenges and tasks. This was done mostly to make sure I had enough room in the notebook to finish out April. This style allows no room at all for extras like doodles or stickers. As I will not continue most of the challenges into the new notebook, that gives me some room. I will need to rethink the format of the daily spreads as I move forward but will likely return to a full page per day rather than just a half-page.
And, so we come to the end of the 2024 Part One (AKA Volume 2) notebook with an April In Review page. I am not sure what I will put on the bottom of the page this time as I never liked the "Best" and "Worst" of the month categories. Maybe a pointer to Volume 3!
Oh, no, we are not done yet! The April In Review page is right before the end-of-the-notebook Pen Swatches (Test) Page where I checked each of my markers, pens and highlighters for actual color, ghosting and bleed-through. Only the big Japanese markers -- the Touch-dayu twin-tips -- showed on the final blank page before the inside cover and its handy pocket.
Well, there you have an overview of my past four months of Bullet Journaling. This takes the place of the flip-through videos so many other enthusiasts put on their YouTube channels. I think I will buy a camera stand before the next time I feel the need to document an entire notebook. The flip-through video sounds much more appealing than trying to take a decent photo of so many pages all at once!
Still, I enjoyed the journey down short-term memory lane that looking at the pages and writing captions for the pictures took me on. I hope you liked them, too.
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