Well this has been a long time coming. I’ve been promising to give you a run down on how I found my plan for my planner…how my hobo & bujo are doing…so now is the time!
Well it’s a match made in heaven —with some caveats which I will talk about here and show you my solution in a separate post.
So—let’s do it!
By the by can you tell I’ve just worked out how to do an em—dash on my Mac? Pretty obvious isn’t it…I’m using it all.the.time. “How do you do an em—dash, like that one there between the em and the dash, I hear you ask?” I’m so glad you’re curious because I love a hot tip myself.
Option + Shift + -minus sign concurrently. Cool ha? Put that one away for safe-keeping.
Now back to the hobo & bujo…
First was my yearly overview and this was my premier disappointment. I didn’t really use it much at all, finding the monthly and weekly views enough macro to keep me happy and when Jess, @plannerbynature put up an IG post showing her habit tracking idea for the yearly overview I was devo because that was the perfect use for this section. Because I’d already inked up the yearly view there was no turning back so I had to stick with the plan. *Sigh* there’s always 2017.
So using the 3 bullet point section at the top (horizontally) for each habit like Jess does would be awesome. Moving on from failure is the best thing to do—(hehehehe just laughing at my over-use of the em dash) onwards and upwards.
Second was the month to a double page spread or, as I called it the other day, my monthly which got me some strange looks (when I combined these two phrases I was shown the door :/).
This is exactly what I intended it to be used for and I love it! This is the section I document the family’s major appointments, birthdays, school term dates, deadlines, birthday’s and parties. I now also record basketball game times for both my husband and son and check off if Archie (my youngest) and Finn (my eldest) actually attend their activities. I wasn’t capturing that and found I would often want to use the info to discuss commitment and follow through with them but I didn’t have a log of it. My monthly to the rescue 😉
Third was the week to a double-page spread. My plan was to do my time allocations here at night for the next day. I thought I would be able to allocate time slots to the day’s activities and detail the top 3 for the day; my top 3 tasks that absolutely MUST happen.
I stuck to this pretty much. I added the weather at the top of each day. The high and low temperatures for the day plus a doodle of the conditions – cloudy, partly cloudy, sunny, stinking hot, etc. I really like to have a record of this and it has come in handy more than once because the weather does help you to remember what you did on a particular day.
I kept the weekly completely monochromatic but did try some colour at one point; I didn’t like in the end so I stuck with black pen only.
At this stage, almost 2 months in, I have no complaints with the weekly plan I am currently using. I soon realised I don’t have that many different things to do it’s really just: write, exercise, housework, blog but I know I could utilise my time better so next month my goal is to spend more time at the end or the start of the day planning out my time in more detail. Maybe even by Pomodoro…25 minute blocks…?
What was a bit unexpected was the sketchnoting/doodling that pored out of me in my weekly pages. I loved creating these little sketches by looking at others efforts (thank you—hopefully you know who you are already) for inspo and also using Pinterest to look up icon vectors for the topic. I realised I need this creative outlet. I can spend hours doodling and messing around with new icons; it’s really my idea of fun 🙂 and I feel like I’m in the flow (if you haven’t read “Finding Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-hi) then don’t try coz it’s a bit dry—amazing but very dry, just watch this TED talk).
Fourth is the Day to a page. This also evolved into a fun sketchnotey area to visualise what I had to do for the day in bullet form which I can check off as I go by shading in the square bullet.
I didn’t log my food intake…I never quite get around to that—ever. Wonder why that is? I read somewhere that tracking water intake is next to useless (controversial I know) and I never keep up with it anyhow so that went by the way side. My gratitude section has stayed but I have reworded it to be “cool stuff that happened”… just worked better for me.
In the daily page I take note or sketchnote what I actually achieved for the day so I can compare it with the planned day in my weekly section…which can be very enlightening sometimes 
. I also write down any highlights of what happened should I need to reflect on it later. My learnings section was dropped too. This was something I didn’t originally plan to do but decided I liked the idea of so I adopted it. I soon started to find it hard to come up with anything and began writing down trite crap (excuse the language) so I dropped it. Instead I put in challenges or doodles or something. Here’s a little montage 😉 —I love a good montage (actually it’s not a montage but I wanted to write montage).
Overall I’m pretty happy with the results. This is the first time EVER, in the history of my life, where I haven’t missed a day in my journal or bujo so I think that’s a strong recommendation for the hobo/bujo marriage. WHY?
Four reasons:
- aesthetics – I am an aesthlete so the fact that it looks good keeps me committed
- creative outlet – being a PhD student is creative cognitively but not physically so this gives me some “me” time with a practical purpose underlying it
- logical – bullet journalling makes sense to me
- layout – the hobo gives me the structure I need all in one package without the hassle of drawing up my own layouts (I think I would have given up already if I had to draw up all the layouts I want and need).
BUT, I hear you cry—what about COLLECTIONS…?
This is the small problem with using the bullet journal system with the hobonichi cousin. But that is something for my next post. I DO have a solution and I think you’re gonna like it.
How’s your bullet journal looking? I’d LOVE to hear from you. Any feedback for me? I am going to try to start posting more regularly both here and at hoardinginsite.wordpress.com …with the help of my hobo&bujo 😉 so keep an eye out!
Cheers,
Jxxx
Stand-by! I’m going to be posting my review of my first month using the Hobo as a Bujo… next week! In the mean time live in planner peace – out.
plannerphile 