What I Learned From My First Month of Bullet Journaling

And how forced gratitude gave way to acceptance

It all began when I started to feel frustrated with my Panda Planner. I had sung its praises for years. I loved the gratitude tracker, the daily check-ins, and the goal-oriented approach.

However, I started to grow weary of the daily documentation of my gratitude for the same few things, especially as I entered a rough period of my life and felt more anxious than thankful. The Panda Planner gave no place to document my feelings. It forced me to focus on the positive, but doing that felt inauthentic. My productivity was being affected by my anxieties — surely that was worth recording?

I added stickers to my planner to make it something I’d want to look at every day.

I switched to the Clever Fox planner because it had sections for both weekly and daily planning, plus a better format for goal-mapping and vision-boarding. I was surprised to find an enormous section of dotted pages in the back of the planner. Not wanting those pages to go to waste, I decided to revisit my approach to journal-planning.

I’d read a lot about bullet journaling (BuJo): the approach, the artifacts, the whole subculture. And yet it seemed…