Bullet Journaling, A Series: #2 Setting up the First Pages in your Bullet Journal

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Hello Hello! How are you?

We’ve been in lockdown here for nearly a week and I’m already bored, I’m feeling quite demotivated at times and struggling to get anything done, so it’s a great opportunity to chill a bit, get some reading done, but also do some more spreads in my bullet journal!

I’m so happy to be back for another monthly bullet journal post. I feel like the first one I did last month was really well received. I loved writing it, so many people interacted with me about it and I think I may have convinced one or two of you to start bullet journaling (*giving myself a pat on the back*).

Today, I’m going to concentrate on some really easy pages/spreads you can do in the first pages of your new bullet journal. You don’t have to do any pages like mine, you can totally wing it and go for something totally different, these are just a few spread ideas that I think are really useful to have in any type of bullet journal! I really hope that they can inspire you and give you ideas for your own bullet journal! Keep reading to learn more and see some pictures of my own bullet journal.

The first pages in a bullet journal!

Presentation page

Last year when I really got back into bullet journaling, I had originally thought of a great theme for each month with colours to go with them. I had decided on Pirates and the Kraken (black), Forest (green), Flowers (pink), Dragons (red), etc, and I did a running theme page so that I could continue with new themes for 2020, but then I realised that being at university on my Erasmus trip and being in a new country would probably be a bit much, so I gave up on that idea. However, my 2020 bullet journal does have a theme! I’ve gone for Flowers and each month corresponds to the flower of the month and the colours are just random!

This is the presentation I’ve gone for this year! I saw loads of people on YouTube and Pinterest doing “dutch door” pages for their bullet journal, I fell in love with the idea, so I wanted to give it a shot and I think it turned out fab! I’m not the artsiest person, but I found loads of pictures online of different things like mountains, flowers, etc, and I just did my best to try to replicate one or two ideas. The first picture shows the first page without the second page, just so you could get an idea of what it would look like if it wasn’t cut out. I also added the word of the year that I chose for 2020 and I think I’m going to choose a different word for each year, it’s like a mini pep-talk each time I open my bullet journal!

The second image is where you can see the second page peeking through underneath. I don’t know if you can tell in this picture, but the first page is the day, and the second page is the night. I really loved how this turned out, but remember, you don’t have to do anything like this, it doesn’t have to be hard!

You could simply just put your name in a pretty font, stick in some stickers or washi tape, print out a picture from online and maybe even colour it in, print off words from your computer and stick it in, it’s really your choice and there are hundreds of different presentation pages out there. I’ll add a few of my favourite that I’ve found on Pinterest to give you a little bit more inspiration!

Key page

A key page can seem like a faff, and a few people who do specifically bookish bullet journals like me don’t bother adding a key. I didn’t add a key last year, and I found that I was always missing something to refer to, so this year I decided to add it. I might add some stickers to this page later, but right now I like how simple it looks! It was super easy to create!

I decided to not hide the other side of this double page so you could see the little quote I added, it is hidden by the dutch door, but I really like that when you turn the page, you see the second drawing and the quote!

Here are some other really pretty key pages from Pinterest!

Spacing Grid

This is another page that I didn’t do last year, but found it in a few YouTube videos and other pictures and thought it would be a very good idea to add to my 2020 bullet journal. I don’t actually have a picture of mine because I apparently didn’t draw over the pencil with pen yet, but it is the last page of my bullet journal and I refer back to it nearly every time I create a new spread.

It’s a very good addition because it helps you count out your spread and prepare it without having to do a tonne of complicated maths sums. You probably already know that I’m hopeless with maths, so this has definitely been helping me. It took a while to get all the lines figured out and mine is a bit different from the photos from Pinterest I’m adding below just because I added lines that I know will be useful for me because of the types of spreads I usually do! I’ll try to remember to finish mine off so I can add it in my next post, but for the time being, here are some pictures to inspire you!

Goal Trackers

This is the last page I’m going to be talking about in today’s post and I think it’s actually one of my favourites to create every year!

Of course, my bullet journal is specifically for books, it only has bookish things (well, I’m thinking of adding a Disney+ marathon page but that’s only an exception ahah), so all of my spreads are book orientated, even my goal pages. You can make your goal page for anything you want and I’ll add some pictures from Pinterest that aren’t solely bookish. I think it’s important to have a goal page, I love to see how I grew through the year, what I have to work on in the future, I love to see how I can evolve and keep myself accountable. Here is one of my goal pages, I have quite a few but I’ll put them in the next post which will be solely for different trackers.

I really like having a goal page and then a Goodreads goal page and I like that I can colour each one in when I achieve it!

Here are some other goal pages from Pinterest to inspire you!

I’m going to have to have a little bullet journaling session before my April post because I don’t have many more pages that are all “penned” out and coloured in, etc, so I need to get a move on! I really loved making new spreads in my bullet journal, I have at least half of it sketched out already, so I think I might need a second bullet journal to finish the year… I just keep getting a tonne of different ideas!

I have to add that you don’t have to be worried about not having any inspiration for your bullet journal. When I started out seriously last year, I didn’t really have any motivation or ideas, I just picked a few ideas I really liked and tried my best to give them a special twist to make them different. But the more spreads I did over time, the more ideas I got, each time I think of a cool challenge to do, a new TBR idea, a new book club to join, a readathon to participate in, a series marathon, etc, I add another spread or two and it really helps to bulk it out (I should probably stop before I finish all the pages in my bullet journal…).

At the start, you’re either going to have a lot of inspiration and inspiration won’t be a problem at all, or you’ll be like me and struggle a bit. The important thing to remember is that it’s a growth “system”, you’re going to start off rocky, you’re going to struggle a bit, you’ll make mistakes and get frustrated and give up for a bit. But then you’ll pick it up again, give it a second chance, and hopefully, my posts will help you to keep going with your journey!

That’s all for now, I hope you enjoyed this post and it inspired you! See you soon, stay safe,

Ellie xx