Plan With Me: Year-End Review and Bullet Journal Setup for January 2018

Happy New Year! I hope your 2017 was filled with lovely things and I hope 2018 is even better! In today’s post, I’m going to be sharing a bunch of different spreads I’ve created recently: my 2017 review, my goal planning for the new year, and my spreads for January.

Unlike a lot of the bullet journal community, I have opted not to start a new notebook for the new year. I am nearing the end of my journal, but I still have space left in my current journal, and I would feel bad leaving blank pages. If you enjoy setting up a new notebook for the new year, I totally get it! It makes sense that you want to start fresh, which is cool. It just feels like it makes more sense for me to keep going in my notebook a little longer. I’ll be sharing a setup post for my next journal, which I’ll be moving into in February, later this month.

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Before even starting to think about my new year’s resolutions, I had to refresh myself on what I’d done in 2017. I was inspired by @the.bullet.journey on instagram for parts of this spread, and I really liked how it turned out.

After writing out the header, I made three sections with four bullet points each: what I’m proud of (from 2017), favorite memories (from 2017), and what I can improve (in 2018).

Next, I made a timeline at the bottom of the spread with a section for each month of 2017. I wrote in a bunch of important milestones, exciting things I did, and just big things that happened to me. I actually combed through my bullet journals from 2017 to find these, because, who are we kidding, I don’t remember anything from last January.

Lastly, I made a fun web of some of my favorite things this year!

Next up are my goals for the new year. I’m using the same layout I that I used last year, this one from Megan @ Page Flutter.

For each of my three categories of goals (life, blog, and reading) there are three columns: goal, action plan, and purpose. This way, I’m not just listing my goals, I’m actually breaking them down and thinking about how to accomplish them.

To show you how this works, here’s one of the goals I broke down in this spread:

Goal: Blog Consistently

Action Plan:

Always plan posts in my bujo
Always write next week’s posts this week and schedule them on wordpress

Purpose:

Posting on the same days every week is a great way to grow your blog.

I also chose a word of the year (energized) and wrote it at the bottom of this page because I had some extra space.

I drew this fun cover page to welcome the new year.

Next up is a cover page for January. I cannot take credit for this design: I saw this spread by Emma @thestudybujo and wanted to recreate it because it was so beautiful!

The main difference between this month’s monthly calendar and last month’s is that my two sections on the side are priorities and tasks, rather than goals and tasks. I wanted to be able to clearly map out the three main things I needed to get done in January.

I’ve tried many different monthly doodle pages, memories spreads, and gratitude logs, but this highlights grid is the layout I always seem to come back to. Each day, I’ll write one good thing that happened to me in the day’s box, sometimes accompanied by a little drawing.

My editorial calendar, where I plan out my blog posts, has been condensed. I spread this calendar out over two spreads last month, but decided I didn’t need so much space per day.

As always, I have a page to track my habits and moods for the month.

Lastly, I lettered a friendly reminder for myself:

Do you like to start a new bullet journal at the start of the new year? Why or why not? What are your new year’s resolutions and how do you plan for them in your journal?

Peace!

♥ Annie