Bujo

I've been using a bujo since last October; a friend mentioned she was using one, so I googled it and found all sorts of articles and blogs, including, thankfully, the original site where it's pretty minimalist. I'm not artistic at all, but I do enjoy lots of different colored inks and stickers, and this has introduced me to washi tape, so I use those to make my journal pretty or at least to mark important pages. (I also bought a stencil with some goofy shapes to mark important days, but aside from birthdays I haven't had much use for it yet.)

I've found it most helpful as a habit tracker, to mark off which medications I've taken today (better than a pill minder!) and to use the index page idea to keep track of my writing notes. I've got notebooks dating back to college with story notes and I couldn't tell you what's in any of them, so the index is just genius.

The notebook I'm using now is meant to be a daily diary more than a blank journal. It's got date slots and a place to number pages, and even a way to record the weather. For most pages, though I just number it, write a title at the top (Plot Bunny Hutch, WIP notes, Habit Tracker, for example) , and note it on the index page. My signifiers also change all the time--I like checking off a box rather than X-ing out a dot, for instance, so I've yet to stick to a specific system for those.

I can't remember where I saw this, but I have seen a bujo where the user just used colored dots to mark different events: blue for school, green for work, red for family, etc. I like that idea very much. And there's another article (sorry, I've read so much about BuJos now that it's all blending together in my head) that suggested using a different color for each day, so you only carry one pen with you every day.

Since my current notebook is black with red ... deckling? is that the word for when pages are colored on the edges?--whatever that is, I'm just using red and black, though not with what you'd call any kind of regularity.