How to plan a full bullet journal 2022-2023 academic planner📖✨

Hey guys it's Meg and welcome back to my YouTube channel. Today I'm going to be showing you how I plan a full bullet journal so that you can fill every single page and fit in everything you want included. So let's just get into it. So once you've unboxed your beautiful new bullet journal that I'm sure you're really excited to start using, you need to find out how many pages you've got so that you know what you can work with. You might be lucky enough if you've got a journal like mine that the pages will be numbered in which case you can just flick to the back and see how many usable pages there are. It's important to double check this yourself because sometimes when you buy a journal it'll tell you how many pages there are total but as you can see as I flick through this one sometimes you'll have pages at the back like a pen test page, you might have an index page at the start, that sort of thing. So check how many pages are usable pages for your journaling and make a note of that. And you also want to make a note of whether the pages at the start and at the end are single or double pages because in my journal for example the first page is a single page and so is the last usable page and that's just something you're going to need to know when you're working out whether you can do single page spreads, double page spreads etc. The next step you need to take is to work out what you actually want included. So this is kind of the fun part, you can start thinking about the pages you want in your journal and what pages are going to work best for you and what you want to use your journal for. So some examples of pages you might want to think about are yearly pages, so these will be pages that typically come at the start of the journal, you'll probably want a front cover whether that's the date or your name or something. And then you might want some pages that look over the whole year, so maybe a year in pixels, a vision board page or a future log calendar. Then you can start thinking about the monthly pages you might want included which are probably the more typical spreads that you think of when you think of bullet journaling. So this might be your monthly cover page, calendar pages, quote pages, anything inspirational or decorative you might want at the start of each month. You can also think about some trackers you might like included if that's something that's up your street, I've just listed a few examples here but I'm sure there's pretty much anything you can think of you can try and track, exercise, water, sleep, you name it you can track it so here's some examples but choose what works for you. And finally you need to think about whether you would like your weekly spreads to be single pages or double page spreads. And then we need to do a little bit of maths to work out how we're going to fit all these pages into the journal. So I can't give you a one size fits all formula but I'm going to show you how I would plan a journal and this one is going to be an academic journal example as I'm making this as a custom journal for someone. So first you need to decide how many months you want the journal to cover. So for this one I'm doing it September to July which is usually when you're at school or university. You then need to work out how many weeks this is going to cover. So the best way I've found to do this is just to use the calendar app on my phone or a physical calendar if you've got one and count the weeks Monday to Sunday as they go through from when you want it to start to when you want it to finish and make a note of how many weeks this is going to be. So if you want a full year you're going to be around 52 but never assume because sometimes it can start a little early or a little late just because of how the weeks can often fall if you're wanting your weekly spreads to go from Monday to Sunday for example. However for this example as it is an academic planner and we're doing September to July this is covering 49 weeks. Once you know how many weeks you're going to be needing as weekly spreads in your journal you can then decide whether they're going to be single pages or double pages for the weekly spreads. If it's a single page in this example you just need one page per week so this will be one times 49 which is of course 49 and if you want double page spreads instead you just need to times this number by two so that you've got two pages per week in this case 98 pages for all of the weekly spreads to be double page spreads. Now you know how many pages you're going to be using for your weekly spreads you can decide how many pages you want at the start of each month for your monthly spreads like your cover pages and your trackers. You might have to play around with how many you can include when you add the numbers up and see how many you can fit but for example in this custom the person is having four extra monthly pages on top of all of their weekly spreads so they're having a single page cover page a single page mood tracker and a double page calendar which adds to four monthly pages. You then need to work out how many months your journal is going to cover if you didn't do that earlier so in this case it is going to be 11 months from September to July. You then need to times the number of extra monthly pages by the number of months so you know how many extra monthly pages you're going to have total in this case 44. You then need to add together the total number of pages you're using for your weekly spreads with the total number of pages you're using as extra monthly pages and this will give you the number of pages you've used in total for all of your monthly and weekly spreads. So in this example that's 44 pages used as extra monthly pages and 98 pages for all of the double page weekly spreads and this adds up to 142. You then need to take this total away from the total number of usable pages you have in your book and this will give you how many pages you've got left over to use for your yearly pages. So for example in this book I'm going to be using the first page as a cover page with the dates on and the final page as plans for the next academic year. I will then have eight pages left over which are going to be used for timetable pages yearly overview and things like that. This next part is optional so I'll put a time stamp if you want to skip this part but I use notion to plot all of this information we've just worked out into a simple little table just so I can be sure that everything's going to fit. I can put in all of the details I can put in my plans for the themes colors and I can jot down which spreads are going to be on which pages so that when I come to filling it in I've got something to cross reference. This might seem a little bit overkill but obviously as this is a custom journal someone's paid me to make it I need to make sure it's exactly spot on. I don't want to start filling in the journal and then realise I've made a mistake as you can imagine a full completed custom journal takes hours and hours and hours so I do this just as a fail safe to make sure there's no mistakes and to make sure my maths hasn't gone wrong somewhere along the line. So if you want to do the same it doesn't need to be on notion it could just be on a word document pages document or whatever you use and you just need a table with three columns on the left hand side is the page number in the middle I have the theme or page details colour scheme whatever you want to put and then on the right hand side I've got what kind of spread it's going to be. So in the page number column you just need to make sure they're laid out in the way that they will look in the journal so for example page one in this book is a single page that that is by itself and then pages two to three four to five and so on are listed like they will look as a double page spread. Then you can start filling in all the information about when your September is going to start when May starts when July starts you can plot all of that in so that when you start filling in the journal you've got something to cross reference and just make sure that you've got everything exactly where it needs to be. It also gives you a great place to start dumping in some ideas for your themes and you can easily shift things around without having to be rubbing out on your pages if you'd written it in in pencil already. Then the very last thing to be doing is to grab your journal and a pencil and start writing in what that page is going to be. So for example you'll write July cover page or you'll write September weekly spread one you can also write this in a condensed format something that you're going to know what it means. I tend to shorten all of the words and all of the months you might think this isn't really necessary but trust me when you come to filling it in you're really going to thank yourself it means you don't have to start thinking whilst you're drawing about whether you can fit in all of your trackers this month and it means you can actually fit an entire year potentially into your whole journal if that's what you want included so you don't need to worry about getting halfway through the year and you've already filled your journal. But that is it for this video so I hope you've enjoyed it and I really hope this is useful to anyone who's starting journaling or wants to be better planned out for their next journal. If you're interested in a custom journal from me then check out my website, it'll be linked down below and I've got prices and contact details on there. But otherwise don't forget to like, comment, subscribe and hit the notification bell if you want to be notified when I next upload. I've got a beginner bullet journal series coming your way very soon so make sure you're sticking around for that and I'll see you in the next one.