My Digital Bullet Journal – OneNote

I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately when it come to planning and keeping up with it. I haven’t been reaching for my bullet journal and it had kind of found a permanent home at the bottom of my bag. I didn’t bring it with me and I didn’t look at it, which essentially made it worthless. So I started thinking, how can I keep myself organised if this isn’t working for me at the moment (because I will no doubt go back to it)? The answer I came to was my phone.

I’ve already been heavily relying on my iCal to remind me of events, holidays, anniversaries, and deadlines, so I knew I wanted to keep that. I also knew that I needed something more versatile than the Reminder app. Basically I wanted a bullet journal, but on my phone. And then I remembered that I’d read about a bullet journal in OneNote, and decided to give it a go.

The setup and things included is directly transferred from my physical bullet journal, with only a few tweaks to make it fit in this new packaging.

In OneNote I now have one notebook called Bullet Journal, and one called BuJo Archive. I’ll get on to the latter one at the end of this post. In the Bullet Journal notebook I have a Uni section, a Misc section, and one section for each month from March to December.

Uni is the first section, and as you can see from the right sidebar, I have quite a few pages in there. This page you see above is my “Catch up to do list” or things I need to do before my exams. I’ve colour coded it according to the corresponding modules, and grouped ‘similar’ tasks together as sub-tasks. When I’m out and about and using my phone, I’ll usually just jot it down, completely unorganised, before going back when I’m home with my laptop and organising it.

If any of you have seen pictures of my physical bullet journal, you’ve probably seen this page. This is my weekly schedule of what I want to get done each day in regards to schoolwork, and if I’ve done it for any given week. In my physical journal I’d strike through the week I’d done it, but here I’ve just bolded the ones that are done, because that’s easier. I also have a couple of little notices marked by exclamation points. If there was one page that I really wanted to include, it was this one.

Next up are my months, and I’ll just show you an example from March. There’s not much in there yet, but this is how it looks. Social stuff is in purple (and weekends are shaded purple), meetings are in blue, and holidays or other school related things are green. The Easter Weekend is highlighted green instead of in green text since it’s a longer period and I wanted to block it all off.

By the side I also have a note of the Academic Week numbers and which one corresponds to which date, so that I can easily figure that out.

One of the things that I was the worst at keeping up with in my bullet journal was my tracker. I also could never remember what I’d actually done or not, since I sat down with it at the end of the day. With this, I can easily mark something off right as I do it. I knew I wanted to make it a bit fun, so for my mark I chose this tiny little cloud with a face and I think it looks adorable. The shaded boxes indicate that that particular habit is something I only do on the marked days, so I don’t have to worry if it looks like I’m not doing it as often.

Now this will be the meat of the bullet journal, as you could see from the sidebar on my March section. I have one page for each day for easy navigation, and this is the one for the day I set this up. I often start out with task boxes if I don’t have anything planned for the day, and just cross them off as I finish tasks.

Underneath I’ll add any little notes, stuff I thought about, what I was watching that day, if I ended up doing anything fun etc.

If I have something planned and written down in my calendar, I’ll often put it at the top of the page, just for a bright notice that I have something going on.

From the very top of the page, you can see that it says “ALL DONE!!!” and this is just a signifier that I finished all the tasks for that day. When I don’t have any pages open on my phone, it just shows the title of the page and the first few lines, so when a day is completed I like to put at the top wether I finished all my tasks or if I migrated any, just so that I can quickly see that. And if I do migrate any tasks and don’t migrate them to the next day, I’ll stick them on my person to do list, which lives in my Misc section.

As you can see from the top of this picture, the February section isn’t in my Bullet Journal notebook. That’s because as of today, February is in the past. When a month has finished I stick that section in a notebook called BuJo Archive, and label it with the month number and the year. That way I can still keep track of what was going on, but I don’t clog up my main bullet journal notebook. When other pages from my bullet journal become irrelevant or out of date, I’ll stick those also in the archive.

And that’s it really. I hadn’t planned on making this post, but I found myself wanting to tell something about this new advancement I’m making in my personal productivity. Also, when I went looking for posts on digital bullet journals there weren’t that many out there that I could find, so I figured I would help people out if they wanted to start one themselves.

If you have any questions or want pictures of anything else in particular, just leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible!