At the moment I am seriously procrastinating from writing my English essay but oh well! I'll get onto that later haha! A while back, I did a collab with the lovely Nicole from Thrift Vintage Fashion on how to stay organised and I based my post on how I did this using my bullet journal and you can read this post here, but I mentioned in that post how I would like to do one on how to start a bullet journal so here it is!

So step one! Buy your journal! if you look on Pinterest or twitter, you will see that there are loads of different journals that you can use for your journal. there are a few main brands that people use and I have a Moleskin journal but if you don't mind spending a bit more then you can try the Leuchttrum journals. When buying one of these journals you choose whether or not to have the pages blank. lined or dotted and whilst it is down to personal preference, I would definitely say the dotted pages are the best. This way you have a bit of guidance when making your layouts (there is no way I would be able to plan my layouts if I had blank pages) but you can also be more creative with the dots as you don;t have to worry about any lines crossing through you page (if you decide to have one page horizontal, it may be a bit difficult with a lined book) but as I said it is down to what you like!

Now onto step two! Time to add the bulk to your book! Writing in a new book as always a bit daunting as you don't want to ruin the nice clean pages or make a mistake but one you get started you'll realise that you will make mistakes but it all adds to the homemade feel of your bullet journal. The first page you will need to do is create an index/content page. I have left three pages in order to do this as I needed a double page for my yearly calendar but new that a single page was not going to be enough, and I think I was right! So make sure you leave lots of room! You update your index every time you add a new page to keep track of where everything is.

The second page(s) I would say to put in is your calendar. That way it is close to the front so easy to see and you can immediately put in important dates to keep track of. I have birthdays, holiday dates, and general important things that I need to remember and it is just a very easy a clear way of making sure you don't miss anything important! I wouldn't put in here times of when you're going to see your friends or something that you've planned to do the next day as that is something that I would keep for your weekly log.

And that brings us onto our logs! You can do monthly and weekly logs but I have only every done weekly logs, but looking on Pinterest I actually want to try a monthly log as I think that will help to organise the month even more. In a weekly log, I normally take up a double page and have a section for each day of the week. In some logs, I have some added areas where I can write down things I need to do for my blog, any appointments, notes and anything like that. Another good thing to have is a place to write down any dates for the following week as you probably haven't planned out the next weekly log . When you first start your journal, experiment with different layout and you'll see which bits you like and which ones you don't ever use! 

Any last but not least, collections! Collections are what makes your journal that bit more fun! They are pages in your journal that are dedicated to a use, like your To Be Read list, or your favourite films, or recipes you have to try, or ones you loved, basically anything you want to take a record of, you can create a page and design it like you want and there you go! Pinterest is one of my absolutely favourite resources to use when thinking of collections and new designs! I use if all the time to search new I ideas and you can see some of the things I have pinned for my bullet journal on my Pinterest so make sure to follow me on there! Here I have a few ideas, some are my own but I do love a lot of the design ideas on Pinterest so there are a few ideas from there!

So there you go! Now you can go set up you bullet journal however you want! If this has inspired you to set up a bullet journal then please comment and send me some photos of your journal! I would love to see what you guys have done!