Lina & Sofia If you want to start a bullet journal, you will have noticed that there are a lot of terms that may be new to you, especially when talking about different ways to fill your pages. In this post we hope to help all beginners out there by explaining some basic terms and spreads you will encounter when diving into the bullet journal community.
Key – in the key you will explain and identify any kinds of symbols you will use in your weeklies or dailies (e.g. ticked, crossed out or blackened boxes from to-do lists)
Spread – a spread is any double page dedicated to a specific topic like monthly overview, yearly overview, tracker etc.
Monthly – (monthly spread) this is usually an overview of a month that you spread over two pages in your journal which contains important dates and a monthly calender.
Weekly – these pages give you room to plan out your weeks more detailed and add things like goals or to-do list to a week. It is basically an overview of a week in a month. It usually spreads over two pages and includes small sections for daily documentation and tracking.
Daily – a daily page is one page dedicated to only plan and organize one day of the year. It is usually quite detailed and can include trackers, brain dumps and other additional information.
Year at a Glance – an overview of the year (you can mark specific days in the small calenders that might be important)
Future Log – this is a very common spread. You basically draw different columns for every month where you can add important events or dates to have a yearly overview of months and important events in advance.
Year in Pixels – form of a tracker, working with different pixels for each day of each month that you colour depending on how the day was (different colors for different category, e.g. blue for a sad day, green for a good day, pink for a perfect day etc.)
Habit Tracker – you use this “tool” to track habits that you want to follow, usually good habits (e.g.: cleaning, reading, studying, drink enough water, eat healthy, no money spent…)
Expense Tracker – budgte planning “tool” to plan or document expenses in different sectors (e.g. for clothing, house, food etc.)
Food Log – this is, as the name suggests to track what you are eating and also how often you eat. This can be helpful if you want to get in the habit of only eating a specific amount of meals in a day or get control over your food intake (I used to split my food log into 5 sections: breakfast – lunch – snack – dinner – snack).
Brain Dump – this is basically a quick notes page/spread. If there is something on your mind, you can drop it here quickly in any form you want (words, sentences etc.) to look at it again and make something of it.
We hope you liked this post and use it for your own first steps into the world of bullet journaling!
Check out this post for more info and tipps, you might find helpful when starting a bullet journal:
