Here’s how I made use of my bullet journal for November.

How the #*%& is it December already?!

I feel like I say this every freaking month, but it was so busy despite having four days of vacation time. This was also one of the hardest months for me, as I have a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder and was trying so hard to jump that hurdle by keeping myself busy with both work and personal projects. My sleep has been all over the place again: as I’m writing this it’s just about midnight the Friday before publishing. By the time I’ve wrapped this up, I’m hoping to have tired myself out enough to pass out for some shut eye!

In case you missed it, this was the first month in my new bullet journal. I’ve tried to keep my collections and weeklies as to-the-point as I can. So far, I’ve been pretty happy with how everything has gone; there’s a lot of room for most of my tasks — and I no longer feel like I need to cram everything into smaller spaces now that I’ve been utilizing two-page layouts (instead of condensing a week to just one page).

I do — and I don’t — like my cover page. I love that I’ve had the chance to utilize stickers and colour. Unfortunately, I used BiC permanent pens to colour in the page, and it turns out they bleed so, so much. Blegh! Seeing as I couldn’t write on the other page, I decided to cover it up with some cardstock and create a “reasons why I love November” page. This was fun to look at, and was mildly helpful to reflect on when I was having a bad day.

Seeing as we did quite a bit of our Christmas shopping in advance, I ended up filling up my expenses page pretty quickly. I’m trying to keep it down to one page (about 35 lines worth of spending per month) so that I can avoid overspending. I feel like I’ll fare better in December seeing as we don’t really have much to spend for anymore. I’m also working towards a few financial goals (i.e., continuing to stop overspending) and I’ve been good for the most part the last two years — so it’ll be time to up the ante in 2019.

Moving forward, I won’t be incorporating a “monthly bills” page, either. I didn’t use this at all to keep track of my expenses, as I explained in a previous post that I keep track of my finances in another notebook that I keep at home. While it was fun to put the ‘dashboard’ on the other page together, I had no use for the former page, so, adios!

The majority of my spreads are FULL. I really loved the first week I had set up but I didn’t have too much to do, so it looks relatively empty. Oddly enough, the week of the 19th to the 25th looks as though it had a bomb go off in it. It is wall-to-wall full of tasks to do, despite having some vacation days during this time. It’s totally paid off to keep the layout simple, as it allowed me to keep track of what projects were due, and what goals I was working towards for the week and the month.

It was a mixed bag for the last week of November, as I had decorated this well in advance — and at the time, Jon and I were actually going to go on the second half of our honeymoon to Las Vegas! I’d decided to do a Vegas-themed layout…but we cancelled the trip, so it was a somewhat bittersweet reminder of what could have been. 😦 We are rescheduling our trip for March; we’re still not sure where we’re going to go yet, but we’ll have to wait and see!

One other thing I changed in this bullet journal was where I put my ‘memories’ section. In my last bullet journal, it was all at the very end of the book, which I didn’t like (and, some months didn’t decorate). I felt like I could accumulate all the stuff I wanted to by including it as a one-page thing (two pages if I really wanted to, but I think the one page allows you to condense the ‘highlights’ for the month). This also helps get all the extra scrapbooking cravings out of my system.

What did you do for your bullet journal this month? Be sure to leave me a comment here, on my Instagram page, or on my Twitter!