Bullet Journaling 101: Creating Spreads

Hey you guys and welcome back to Bullet Journaling 101! And before we even get into today’s post, I would like to apologize for kind of dropping this series a little bit these past almost three weeks – but I wasn’t feeling like writing them and the last thing I ever want to do on this blog is force myself to write a post just to stay on top of an ongoing series. I feel like that’s going to push me into a blogging slump and that’s the last thing I want to happen.

But! I finally have my motivation back, so we’ll be continuing on in our bullet journal! If you guys are new to this series, I’ve shared two more posts before Intro And Materials and Getting Started. If you’ve kept up with this series and have been creating the pages alongside me, you should have your Index, Key, Future and Monthly Log all set up at this point and now it’s time to create some fun bookish spreads!

One of the very first spreads I like to set up for myself in a new month is usually a habit tracker. I tend to be really bad about doing certain tasks or remembering when I did them last, so this really helps me to keep track of things. I track the days when I read, work on the blog and whenever I post a new blog post – among other things.

To set up your habit tracker, you really just need to create two columns, one for the habits you want to keep track of and one to add the dates and the days of the week for the month. Make sure to measure out the space you’ll need for your dates across the top of the right column (you can use one square per date) and whatever you have left is where you write down the habits (this sounds confusing event to myself, but I’ll include a picture in a second to make it more clear!).

When it comes time to fill in your habit tracker, you can either just do it with your black pen by creating patterns or use a different color for each habit and color the squares in as you go, personally, I do the latter in my actual journal.

Another fun spread to create is a tracker for the number of pages you read per day. You might have set yourself a goal of reading 50 pages each day and I feel like a page tracker is a fun way to motivate yourself to stick with said goal. If you just wanted to document whether or not you read 50 pages, you could include that in your habit tracker too. But if you like knowing how many pages you read in general, this is a great alternative!

To set up this spread, you have to decide in what increments you want to track your reading. Do you have time to read 200 pages each day? Or do you read less? For my example, I created a spread that goes up to 400 pages (as I will sometimes read contemporary novels in a day and I feel like those are usually around the 400-page mark) and broke it down into 50-page increments (each being 3 squares wide). As you’ll see below, I created 9 columns with the first being just a square wide as it’s just there to write down the date and didn’t need as much space.

However, when I was setting this up I didn’t keep in mind that I do a lot of my reading in audiobook format which makes it difficult to keep track of how many actual pages I’ve read. But since this is supposed to be for everyone I figured someone might still find this helpful!

Up next, we’ll create a spread that can be used for various types of tracking which is always fun! What you want to do is draw a bookshelf that spans the entire page (or more, depending on how many books you want to track) and fill each shelf with empty books. That’s the base we’re going to work with here and it might take a bit of trying around with a pencil to figure out how much space you can give to each shelf, etc! It’s important that you draw things out with a pencil first if you’re unsure of your measurements – I still do that all the time too. It helps to make sure I don’t mess things up as I go.

Now that we have our base down, we can decide what we’ll use this for. Do you want to keep track of the books you read throughout the year? Do you want to document the books on your shelves that are unread? Do you want to keep track of the books that you buy? Those are all things you can do with this base! Last year, I used this to keep track of the books I was reading and this year I’ve created the spread to keep track of the unread books on my shelves that I’ll be coloring in as soon as I read them. I figured this would hopefully motivate me to actually read those books sooner rather than later. We’ll see!

Here’s what my shelf of unread books looks like right now in my bullet journal. And yes, I need to update it with books that have made their way onto my shelves and are unread. *hides*

The last spread we’re going to set up today is a Future ARC Log. This is very similar to a Future Log but I decided to create a separate spread for myself to keep track of when I’m supposed to get review copies in the mail to hopefully plan my reading accordingly.

You can either set this up the way I showed you in my Getting Started post or the way I did it for this particular spread which is to divide your page up for however many months you want to use it for (I went with Jan-Jun here) and draw the lines accordingly, leaving a bit of space at the beginning of the page to write down each month.

And while I created this spread to keep track of when I’m supposed to receive a review copy in the mail, you could also use this to plan your ARC reading schedule – if you’re more organized than myself.

Before I sign off for today I just once again want to quickly apologize for taking this long to post this particular post of my series! I’ll try my best to be quicker for my next one!

Now, have you guys been creating any fun spreads in your journals already? Let me know what they were!

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