How to Revive a Neglected Bullet Journal
You know the feeling. Telling yourself you’ll keep up with your bullet journal. You’ll make this the year where you’ll stay on top of it. You won’t skip a single day.
Months pass by, and if you’re lucky, even a year or more where you keep your promise. Then you forget for a day or two, and get caught up pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, that occasional day turns into several days a week. Before you know it, weeks go by, possibly months of on and off journaling, before you finally pick yourself back up and try to get back on track.
I’ve personally been through this many times and know it’s a struggle other people face too. In the beginning, it’s easy to stay motivated, but with challenges and struggles of every day life, it’s hard to stay consistent.
Whatever your reason may be for falling behind in your bujo, you have two choices upon returning to it: Pick right up where you left off and skip a chunk of time, or find other ways to fill in days missed.
Related post: 6 Life-Changing Benefits of Bullet Journaling You Need to Know About
Filling Blank Pages
You can use various methods to fill in missed time. If you enjoy writing daily entries but can’t remember everything since your last journaling session, it can be challenging.
Blank spaces on your weekly spreads, habit trackers, or other pages can also be frustrating. Here are some ways to prevent this problem:
1. Art from the Month or Art Representing the Month
If you’re an artist, you can create your own drawings or paintings of things that represent the month. They can portray scenes from an event that occurred during the time you ignored your bujo.
They can also be a collection of art you’ve created throughout that time or month overall. If you’re not an artist and don’t have skills, you can still print out images or art from online to paste into your bujo.
2. Photos of the Week or Month
Use photos from when you ignored your bullet journal. Pick photos from the same month. Create a mini photo album in your bujo. It’s a great way to fill pages.
3. Journal Prompts
Another idea is to answer journal prompt questions. These can relate to the month or your life at the time overall. There are a lot that can be found online, but for starters, here are some you can use:
100+ Journal Prompt Ideas to Discover Who You Are
4. Little Snippets from the Month (Concert or Movie Tickets)
You can add various items to your bullet journal such as bus tickets, concert tickets, receipts, and more. These little tokens can fill in smaller spaces, like trackers or collections.
They can also fill up whole pages. To paste them in, use a Tombow Mono tape runner, which is refillable, reusable, and better than other adhesives. Other adhesives can be messy or skip, unlike this one.
5. Maps
While many consider physical maps to be a thing of the past, pasting them in a journal can create a wonderful type of aesthetic.
If the map is too big, you can fold or cut out specific parts to fit inside the journal. You can also use it as a background for other things you’d like to paste in, or bullet journal spreads in general.
6. Try to Fill in the Month as Best You can Remember
If you’ve only missed a few days here and there, it’s likely you may remember enough to go back and fill in empty spaces. I do this a lot with trackers and daily or weekly journaling.
If it’s been a while, it’s likely I may forget what I did on a particular day. One strategy I use is to go through my photos and texts from that day, where I can see what we did that day and time. I then go back and write in my entries I missed for that period of time.
7. Quotes
Another way to fill space in your bullet journal is by adding quotes. Find ones that are inspirational or represent something you did during the time you’re filling in for.
Use fun fonts and integrate them into a work of art, or just write them in a simple font to fill up some empty space. Another option is to use a printable with a pretty quote.
8. Memories
Something that you can do if you’ve skipped a good amount of time bullet journaling and don’t remember too much is to fill in the space with a section of memories, which can contain only the major events that took place during the month, and can consist of photos that were taken in that month, as well as some sentences describing them.
Trackers
Habit trackers, mood trackers, sleep trackers, water intake, exercise or goal trackers. There are so many you can keep in your bullet journal.
One of the most frustrating parts of abandoning your bujo can be seeing the neglected trackers partially filled out. Should you rip out the page, or reuse it? What can be done with such trackers?
1. Repurpose Them
If your tracker is partially filled out, one thing you can do is to cover the part of the page that’s blank and neglected with something else.
Some options are snippets of scrapbook paper or stickers, or blank paper that can be covered with doodles or other art, or other trackers.
If you feel like the whole tracker’s a lost cause, you can use a larger sheet to cover the whole page, and repurpose it for something else.
2. Modify Old Trackers and Continue Using Them
If you’d like to continue using your tracker, and have dates labeled that should’ve been filled in and were missed, then those can be covered with washi tape, small snippets of paper, whiteout, or a white gel pen, and relabeled with new dates.
The titles of any monthly trackers, stating the month, can be covered, allowing you to make the trackers no longer specific to that month.
While this may not be ideal to some, it still allows you to continue its use instead of ripping it out or covering it and having to make a new one.
Keeping up with Your Bujo
It’s important that once you get back on track with your bullet journal, you stay on top of it and don’t let yourself fall back into more ruts.
There are a few things that can be done to ensure that you’ll keep up with this habit.
1. Have an Accountability Partner
Having an accountability partner can be a great and fun way to ensure you’re keeping up with your bujo. When there’s someone else who’s doing the same thing as you, you don’t want to let that person down, and have them nag you to get back to it; therefore it’s much easier to keep yourself motivated to keep going.
And if you’re both competitive, it’ll increase the chances that you’ll strive to stay ahead and make sure yours is up to date. Also, being able to exchange ideas and talk about bullet journaling can help keep both of you motivated.
2. Plan Ahead
For some, being spontaneous works great. For others, coming up with new spreads on the fly can be tricky and overwhelming. A solution is to plan out a couple templates for spreads you plan on using down the road, as well as themes and doodles you’d like to incorporate.
An option can be to use a separate journal to plan out new spreads and layout ideas. This way, when you go to update your bujo, you already have a clear vision of what you’d like to create, or if you don’t, then you can flip through your second journal and choose from the samples you created.
This can also help you save time and avoid sitting there with an overwhelming blank page staring you back in the face.
3. Improve Efficiency
If you spend hours making spreads look perfect and feel like you just don’t have the time to maintain your bullet journal, then you may want to practice improving your efficiency and speed with creating your spreads.
Set a timer and challenge yourself to make neat, aesthetic spreads in that frame of time, to avoid getting lost in the details and letting the time drag on.
4. Make it as Enjoyable as Possible
If bullet journaling is a process you never look forward to that frustrates you and leaves you feeling unsatisfied with your skills, or takes forever, then you’ll be less likely to get back to your journal and keep up with it.
Try not to let perfectionism take over and ruin the experience. Put on some calming music, grab a cup of coffee or tea, or do whatever you can to make bullet journaling as enjoyable as possible.
It’s a great feeling getting caught back up with a bullet journal and sticking to it. Falling into ruts is never fun, but can be avoided and when it is, it’s a great payoff.