Plan With Me Archives

Plan With Me: June 2018 Beach + Ikea Display Room Method

May 31, 2018 6 Comments

In this plan with me for June 2018, I’ll show you how I used the Ikea Display Room Technique & gradually grew my journal to include only the pages I *really* wanted & needed. If you’ve felt overwhelmed by having too much in your planner, use some of these ideas to help eliminate unnecessary items in your bullet journal and find what’s truly important to you.

It started out this month with my bullet journal feeling like ‘too much’. Besides the fact that summer is the hardest for me to use my bullet journal simply because I get caught up in the ‘lazy days of planning’.

When your bullet journal seems to have ‘too much,’ take inspiration from Ikea’s display rooms and eliminate everything that takes up space. Condense, analyze what you truly need, then reset your planning for the future. I decided to follow those steps this month. Starting with just three pages and adding pages throughout the month as I needed them.

Beach Sign Welcome Page - Watercolor Painted with Crayola Markers | ChocolateMusings.com #welcomepage #bulletjournal #watercolor #crayola

Plan With Me Video: June 2018

In the video below, I’ll show you from start to finish how I created this fun, beachy spread plus the other pages in my bullet journal this month. Crayola super tip markers – one medium I love for ‘painting’ in my journals. I started with absolutely no pencil marks, so you’ll see the whole planning process, doodles and all.

June 2018 Plan with Me Starting Pages

A Welcome page (not necessary but included because I love them, and you still need artwork even in a small space, and I needed something so I could turn the page and have the monthly plans on a two-page spread)
The monthly calendar page (with a daily habit tracker built-in)
Lastly, a monthly journaling page (one that I call All the Things with just the right amount of categories)

The welcome page is one of my all-time favorites. I started doing welcome pages last July, so this makes it my year anniversary of welcome pages! August 2017, January 2018, and June 2018 are my top 3 so far.

June Plan with me 2018 Welcome Page - colorful watercolor sign on the beach with palm trees, starfish, flip flops and sand, perfect for invoking a casual setting in your bullet journal

June 2018 Plan With Me: Rotated Tall Monthly Calendar | How My Journal This Month is Like an Ikea Display Room - condensed, small, minimal, and only includes the necessities | Chocolate Musings - Bullet Journal Inspiration

My Favorite Spread for the month perfect for journaling and memory keeping. | Chocolate Musings - Planner & Bullet Journal Inspiration #bulletjournal #bujo #journal

The Inspiration for June 2018 Plan With Me: Ikea Display Room

Have you ever been to Ikea where they display those ‘living in small areas’, and you see how beautifully arranged all the furniture is and still accommodates all the needs of the person living there? It’s fascinating how a small room can feel like it has everything you need. It’s a revelation to how much ‘extra stuff’ we keep just for the sake of keeping it.

When I was a little girl, I used to pretend in my room that my future house was the size of my bed or the size of my bedroom. It required immense creativity to decide where all my stuffed animals and art supplies would live in this small space. That’s where I got the inspiration for June’s plan with me.

What Small Spaces Require

Small spaces require organization, and you eliminate every unnecessary item. Each nook has a purpose (or two) and storage solutions are well-fitted for the area. When I visit Ikea, I wonder if I could honestly live in such a small square-footage. I’d like to think I could by myself, but definitely not with kids.

Well….that’s kind of what I did for June.

If you saw the plans for May, I condensed the weekly plans down to two weeks per spread. Thinking that was as small as I could get. I guess somewhere in the back of my head; my brain took that as a challenge. Fitting everything in life into 52 dots x 38 dots (the width and height of my bullet journal) takes some creativity and planning.

Monthly Calendar

On the monthly calendar, I wanted a background for each of the boxes, kind of a washed-out background and I used two colors. I wish that Crayola markers had a number on them so I could tell you specifically the colors I used. But I used a water pen to blend the colors from the drawn boxes. The extra two lines at the top of each calendar box are for my habit trackers.

Rotating the book so the calendar is taller than wide adds more space to each day. Each day is eight squares (4 cm) by 5 squares (2.5 cm). I attached my habits using a little washi tape and a sheet cut from a Rhodia Dot-Grid pad (I love lining up the dots, so it’s like the page just continuing onto that little flap).

Rotated Tall Monthly Calendar | How My Journal This Month is Like an Ikea Display Room - condensed, small, minimal, and only includes the necessities | Chocolate Musings - Bullet Journal Inspiration

Was I Crazy? Maybe.

This plan with me was a little disjointed and crazy. I learned a lot about what I needed (and what I didn’t) for the month. I might have been crazy to try condensing all of my plans so much, but I think you’ll agree, sometimes there’s not a whole lot going on, and it’s ok to modify your bullet journal to suit your needs for any given month. Even if that includes eliminating weekly or daily pages. That’s the thing with this type of planner, you can adjust it to suit your needs and add or remove elements as needed.

Post Plan With Me: June 2018 Through the Month

As the month progressed, I added a few extra pages including a beach packing list and a spending log. I loved using my “all the things” journal page to record specific memories as a family and make general notes. There’s a reason why I like to include these particular pages. One reason is they provide a quick overview to the good things of the month. Another reason is that I feel like I recorded a journal entry without feeling like I have to jot every detail down of every event.

Track your spending by category & need vs want review at a glance | Chocolate Musings @ChocMusings #bulletjournal #finances #money #tracking #spendinglog #spendingbloom

Planner Question:

Do you use the same pages/layout each month/week? If so, how long did it take for you to decide on that layout? If not, what makes you change each month?

Are you ok with leaving blank space in your planner when life is less planned, or do you condense everything down?

No Matter Which Notebook I use – You’ll Always Find These Supplies Close at Hand

My Muses #3: Favorite Reasons for Habit Tracking & May Mid-Month Habit Check

May 17, 2018 1 Comment

Favorite Reasons for Habit Tracking, Creating Habits & Favorite Quotes for My Habit Tracker

I’m going to combine two topics this week. Usually, I post a mid-month habit-check for my accountability and hopefully providing a little inspiration for you too! I decided to combine My Muses (favorites) with my habit check this month. Here are a few of my favorite reasons for habit tracking, creating habits, and favorite quotes to use in my habit tracker.

We Manage What We Monitor - handlettered quote #change #habits #handletter #quote #handlettered

-Gretchen Rubin

Why I Track My Habits

Every month I post my progress on forming habits. To date, I think I’ve posted just one true habit success story- “dishes aren’t a dirty word anymore” (FYI, it’s still a success). Other than that at a glance and in comparison to other’s progression, my habits seem to go nowhere. Just looking at the data, there’s little progression. But that’s not how I see it. I’m still trying, and that makes all the difference. I know I am trying to make a positive change in my life. This is why I track my habits. We manage what we monitor – one of my favorite chapters from Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin. To paraphrase: monitoring doesn’t require change but often leads to it.

I know I write a lot about not making improvements or lack of progress, the truth is: creating a habit is hard. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be more than 30,000 books on Amazon with the word ‘habit’ in the title (with more added all the time). I’ve read a few, and many have helped me in my journey here are a few of my favorites:

Other Habits in “the Works”

Right now I am working on decluttering my house using the KonMari method, and if that’s not a change of habits, I don’t know what is. If I don’t change my shopping habits, I could end up where I was before I started. And I never realized how much stuff I have! Getting rid of it is exhilarating and completely exhausting, but what’s more amazing to see the other members of my family follow my lead, that payoff is thrilling.

If habits weren’t hard to create or break, there wouldn’t be a need to track them. (Do a search on Habit Tracking at Pinterest – it’s a fun rabbit hole – I’ve got a board dedicated just to tracking with all kinds of tracking ideas). Round, Square, linear, weekly, box grid, dots, patterns, there’s a lot of variety in tracking methods.

Percentage calculator for monthly habit trackers

Success Rate Percentages

Want to figure percentages in your habit tracker at the end of a month? I’ve done the calculations for you, so you can quickly jot down how you did.

Gretchen Rubin says in her book Better Than Before, “It’s simple to change habits, but it’s not easy”. And I couldn’t agree more!

The principle of getting up at 5:30 in the morning is simple, and the reason is genuine. It’s so I can have some much-needed time to think, write, and read before the chaos of the morning starts, but getting up at the appointed time is difficult. Well, as you can see below (personal #5), I’ve not succeeded in many instances (just once so far this month). I keep it on my habit tracker because I want to form this habit, even though I know I am not ready to commit to the actions needed to create the pattern (yet).

creating habits, mid-month habit check, sometimes it's the journey not the speed, favorite reasons for habit tracking

One thing I love on my habit tracker is a good quote. January 2018 featured one of my favorites – Sometimes it’s the Journey, not the speed.

Habit Tracker Quotes

Here are some other great quotes for your habit tracker. I love finding inspirational quotes from Brainy Quote. Goodreads surprised me with a fun quote database. If you’re on twitter, check out @Inspire_us for some great and inspirational quotes, they influence my feed for good.

I hope you’ve enjoyed a snippet of my inspiration my favorite reasons for habit tracking and some resources I enjoy using on a regular basis. If you have any resources you use, drop me a line below in the comments! I’d love to hear about them.

Question:

What’s your favorite quote to use in your habit tracker?

~Tricia

Plan With Me: May Weekly Layouts {+ Video}

May 13, 2018 2 Comments

New May Weekly Layouts!

I’m testing out a new set of layouts for May! The May weekly layouts will be two to a page to accommodate less planning needs. Thinking about May’s plans (and on into June and July), I plan less and relax more. Sure, we will have a week of family vacation but other events are on the ‘unplanned’ side and ‘off-the-cuff’ decisions.

I work during the summer so my schedule stays the same. The only thing I need to worry about is my sitter for the kiddos and the occasional planned outing. Consolidating the weeklies will help ‘space waste’ across my spreads.

Creative planning or bullet journaling is so versatile! When you need more space, take more space, when you need less space, plan your spreads accordingly. This month I decided to try two weeks to a page and have two different spreads to try.

May Weekly Layouts

Watch the video below (be sure to subscribe for more content!) and see how I layout minimal planning and add bits of color to each page.

Summer Mode: Loading

May Horizontal Weekly Layouts + Plan with me video, layouts and reason for condensing two weeks to a spread

My kiddos finish school the end of the month (before Memorial Day in the US) and about Mid-April we lazily fall into summer-mode. The days are warmer, the sun shines longer, the pollen is thicker (in the Southern United States, we have Winter, Pollen Season, Summer then comes Autumn), despite the yellow haze in the air and yellow film lacing my car from all the pollen, it feels like summer is coming.

Summer Plans = Planning Less?

Though we may do more during the summer, I tend to plan less. Rather than leaving whole pages blank due to lack of planning, I decided to condense May to two weeks to a spread. True to form, I always have to try more than one spread for the month and decide which I like best. The area of the squares is the same (same number of blocks) but the layout is different. I’m already loving the vertical layouts. The horizontal layouts don’t have a designated place for meal planning and that’s an important part of my budget, so I’ll have to add that back in.

Same Layout Different Backgrounds

Just to see how different a spread can look, I like to use different backgrounds for each spread. Vertical & horizontal. In this month’s spreads, I use diagonal, vertical and horizontal watercolor painted stripes plus the last week uses circles instead for a completely different feel.

It’s just my way of making each page different when they are essentially the same.

May Vertical Weekly Layouts + Plan with me video, layouts and reason for condensing two weeks to a spread

Question:

Are you ok with leaving blank space in your planner when life is less planned, or do you condense everything down?

~Tricia

Planning May: What’s Staying vs Changing + April Flip-through

May 10, 2018 1 Comment

Planning May: What’s Staying vs Changing from April

What’s staying vs changing (and why!) in my planner for May. My favorite thing to see from other’s journals are the flip-through segments. I decided to slow it down and do a flip-through of the pages that I like and what didn’t work out for me.

Sneak peeks from the video:

After the pen for “All the Things” page
Journals for my kids (one for each!) and a little flip-through of those
Circle Badges for all the months and days showing off the preview sketches – coming soon to the shop! Thanks to @Darknss (find the handle) for the recommendations!
‘After the pen’ weeklies
Writing on spreads that are ‘too pretty’ – spread from the eclipse after the pen
Habit by number
Declutter my life two spreads (Initial & Updated)
How I bookmark/tab pages with washi tape

Watch the video below and hit the subscribe on the lower right-hand so you’ll be notified when a new video comes out.

Welcome Page

Welcome pages are funny things to me, it took a while for me to start using them because they just seemed like ‘fluff’ pages. They might be ‘fluff pages’ but other planners have welcome pages or monthly separators. It’s usually where the tabs are attached. Last July was my first-ever welcome page and I’ve used one ever since. It almost became a summer seasonal welcome page, but I combined it to the Welcome May and Summer page.

Calendar Page

When I set up my current planner in March, I made the future log pages very large, one month to a page, two months to a spread. I intended to drop monthly pages and just jump straight into weeklies. That lasted all of one month. I need visual planning!

In April I tried again to create a monthly ladder layout, I really love the concept of listing everything in linear form (that’s why I keep going back to it). I think that’s what the original bullet journal was designed with, but a calendar grid works better for me at a glance. In May I’m experimenting with smaller boxes and larger notes areas.

Coming soon! All the months in circular badge format! April’s creation inspired me so much that I sketched out (and started working on the months in this format.

April Weeklies

In April, I chose a common color scheme and theme for the weekly pages. Using a common color scheme across the pages was definitely challenging. It was a fun challenge that I’ll accept month after month. Space and circles dominated my weeklies, I do wish they had a little more structure but that is something I can do in the future. Space is always a fun theme and I like using circles too! In fact, if you didn’t see, I have a whole post about using circles.

May Weeklies

The weekly layouts are the biggest changes for the month. I didn’t foresee using a spread per week as summer nears. So I decided to condense two weeks to a spread. Each day still has space for events and notes, it’s just condensed. So far, so good. The boxes are the right size for all the things I need to do, including tasks and events. This just might be a thing when I have less to plan.

For the month of April, I switched to a Sunday start on the weeklies. In May, I am switching it back to Monday start. The May monthly calendar page shows Sunday-Saturday, but the weeklies are Monday-Sunday. The biggest reason is to keep the weekend plans together, it just seems easier (and I like to make my weekends feel bigger).

Collections

All the Things

I created an “All the Things” page to replace the failed “One Line Per Day” page. It is my new favorite page of all, perhaps ever. It was rare that I wrote on the ‘one line per day’ page daily. Instead, I write in spurts when I have a moment to reflect and think. So I would end up with several blank lines and missed details. “All the Things” uses categories instead of days. One section I’m going to add a “to journal” to keep a blurb for the things to add to my kid’s journals.

Habit Tracking by Number

I started “Habit Tracking by Number” in April. Using numbers to define my habits made a huge difference in tracking them, but not just tracking, but the motivation to do them. Each habit had a definition and something measurable!

That shift plus the shift in perspective that I needed to give these habits priority instead of trying to do them all in the last moments before I went to bed made a significant difference in my attitude towards these acts I am trying to form into habits.

Personal Habits & Business Habits

I’ll track the same personal habits for May as I did in April and add a section for habits for chocolatemusings.com. Also staying: flip-out habit definitions. I might use that idea on other pages too. And I just realized that I forgot to add a quote to my habits page, that is something I miss. I like motivational quotes on the habit tracker page. Especially the one I created in January.

Things I Miss Already & Things I Love So Far

I loved April’s theme – space, circles and the colors. Lavender fields inspired May’s color scheme, and I really enjoy it, but maybe I need to do a lavender space theme. I enjoyed the whimsy and the free-flow of the different pages. I’m looking forward to the structure of the May boxes because I tend to write until I run out of room. Maybe that’s why I like circles, they are whimsical, but have edges to keep me inside, If I want to. I really like the two-to-a-spread weeklies so far.

Question:

What pages in your journal do you change-up every month and what do you keep?

~Tricia

Plan With Me: May Monthly Layouts {+ Video}

April 29, 2018 3 Comments

May is the Gateway to Summer – May Monthly Layouts: Plan With Me

May doesn’t officially start summer in our house until the kids are out (the last week and a half of May) but summer is definitely on the brain. Since school is almost out, I wanted to accommodate our summer plans/May monthly layouts in my bullet journal. Looking back at my planner for the past month, I’ve filled out less and less of my weekly spreads as I get more and more ready for summer.

Watch the Planning Video Below

Make sure to hit subscribe in the lower right-hand corner of the video! I decided to do the April flip through & May weeklies in a different video.

How I Created the Spreads:

Welcome Page:

I went back and forth on the welcome page – on the one hand, I wanted a welcome page for May, for another, just an introduction to Summer. So I switched the banner from ‘May’ to ‘Summer’ and added the blurb about May on the left side. My amazing friend Kiki (find her Instagram here) created a class on SkillShare – how to make consistent block letters. All I have to say is ‘and how!’ (is that a real phrase?!)

Monthly Calendar

For the monthly calendar, I took my favorite supply of Crayola markers and painted the colors inside the boxes like a paint swatch. You can erase pencil when watercoloring this way unlike regular watercolor paints and write over them with any ink once dry (takes a very brief amount of time to dry). Once the page dried, I erased the pencil marks.

In this case, each box was 2 cm x 2 cm square or 4 boxes square. Perfect for visual planning and plenty of space around the edges for notes and to-dos.

I’ll show you what I did for the weekly pages in the next post. Here’s a hint: I didn’t know what I was going to do when I started on the pages, it’s simple, and I like it.

Mentioned in the Video:

Skillshare – Making Consistent Block Letters by Kiki B
Color Combinations Pinterest Board or My Pinterest Profile
April Plan with Me – Monthly
April Plan With Me – Weekly
March Plan With Me – Weekly
Favorite Beginner Lettering Supplies
May Plan With Me – Weekly

Question:

What’s your favorite technique in your planner?

~Tricia

Save this layout to Pinterest for later – while you are at it, follow me on Pinterest for more inspiration!

Follow @ChocolateMusingsCreates

« Previous Page
1
…
4
5
6
7
8
…
14
Next Page »