Dipping my toe into Bullet Journalling...

Hello all you lovely patient people who amazingly still follow this blog, even though I haven't posted anything like as much as I've wanted to recently... It's all The Wrong Kind of Clouds' fault, and my author blog over at www.amandafleet.co.uk!

Anyway, recently, I've been chatting to my lovely friend Helen (*waves*) about my lack of ability to manage my long term plans. I drew up a plan for the year, way back in January, which charted, week by week, what I was hoping to get done. The big problems have been that a) I'm evidently rubbish at guestimating time for projects, b) a whole heap of other stuff came up that I hadn't budgeted for, c) I only put writing plans on it and none of the other life-areas (which were still getting done and still taking up time...) so it wasn't a great representation of life, and d) my levels of productivity and levels of procrastination have swapped roles and I've been b*ggering about too much!

This has really struck home now that Q1 is finished and I'm supposed to be drawing up Q2 plans and thinking about something other than publishing The Wrong Kind of Clouds (which, admittedly, has taken over my life a bit...). I genuinely have no real idea what I'm supposed to be trying to do in Q2, beyond my writing goals and wishing I were a bit thinner and a bit faster at running.

My current planning system (I use the term loosely!) is working okay (ish!) for week to week stuff, but isn't really doing much beyond that and is getting a bit scattered, too. I know how to fix that (and more on that in another post) but I'm really not doing well on my longer-term goals.

So...

I may have a go at a modified version of bullet journalling. Modified in that it will really only be long-term stuff in it and not the daily log aspects.

The sorts of things I think I will have in the notebook are:

• Index
• Year goals for each life area on a LHS with quarterly goals arising from these on the RHS of a spread (one double spread for each life area)
• Monthly goals (broken down into life areas; drawn up month by month, rather than in advance)
• Monthly reviews (done just before drawing up the goals for the next month)
• Quarterly reviews 

There probably won't be any weekly planning in there, because that will still get done in my week + notes diary in my TN, using my long term goals as guidance. That said, if I get into the bullet journalling, maybe I will embrace the whole lot and do yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and day stuff in there.

Now... just have to choose which of the zillion notebooks I have, to use as my bullet journal!