January 2017 Bullet Journal Setup

Wow guys, long time no see! I'm finally going to be able to make my setup post for January 2017. I haven't been able to do many blog related things (including posting on Instagram or even working on posts) mainly for two reasons:

1. I was on vacation in Florida from New Year's Eve till the 8th, and
2. I temporarily lost my bullet journal due to some unfortunate circumstances - read the Instagram caption below!

⚠⚠⚠ PLEASE READ THE CAPTION ⚠⚠⚠ 🌸 Hey guys, Mae-Mae here. Remember the Fort Lauderdale Airport shooting on Friday? Well, I was there in the airport. Fortunately, my family and I are physically well and are safe back home. Unfortunately, when we fled from the airport, I left almost all of my personal belongings in the terminal. This includes my phone and my *bullet journal*. This wouldn't be a big deal if after the shooting the FBI/the airport confiscated EVERYTHING that was left by the gates. Thus, I don't have my own phone nor my bujo. They're still sorting through the 20,000+ personal belongings, so I don't know when I'll be able to get my stuff back. I hope that it'll be soon, since I had school stuff in my backpack (school resumes tomorrow), many of my most used pens for calligraphy (including my Tombow Fudenosuke), and of course, my phone and bullet journal are both incredibly important for my life. Anyway, I'm probably going to be taking a bit of a blogging break. Since my blog is mostly centered around bullet journals, there isn't much I can for OJIJ if I don't even have my bujo, which also had a lot of planning for future posts. Please send your prayers that everyone will be able to get their stuff back (including car/house keys, ID's, and laptops) soon. I feel selfish for complaining about this when there were people that DIED or were injured, but eh. The thing I'm saltiest about is that the "shooting" that I was "in" was a false alarm; this inconvenience is happening for naught. ~Mae-Mae 🌸

A photo posted by Mae-Mae Han (@ourjourneyinjournals) on Jan 8, 2017 at 7:04pm PST

Basically, the TL;DR is that during a second Fort Lauderdale Airport shooting that turned out to be a false alarm, I left my phone and my backpack (which had my bullet journal in it) in the airport when my family and I fled. The FBI then confiscated everything that was left by the gates, so they had to sort through 24,000 items. However, thankfully, I got my phone and my backpack back yesterday!! That means that I get to have my "real" bullet journal again (I've been using a random notebook as a temporary bujo - I might make a post about it sometime), meaning I can actually show you guys my January setup.

Anyway, I'm glad I've you got you guys updated on what's been going on in my life lately. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's get to the actual setup part of this - welcome to the fist bullet journal setup post of 2017!

My bullet journal's first monthly spread of the year // OurJourneyinJournals.blogspot.com

This is my monthly spread for January, and I decided to go with a color scheme of silver and blue to be all winter-y. It's pretty much the same as how I've been doing monthly layouts for the past couple of months except for 2 main differences:

1. I went with a Sunday start instead of a Monday one so that I would have only 5 rows in the spread like I usually do.
2. I knew that I don't need that much space for the miscellaneous column on the right (where I put random tasks and notes throughout the month), so since I was kind of in the spirit of change because of New Year's, I decided to add a goals section. This is where I'm going to put any big, general things for the month as a whole (e.g. "write more music" or things like that - things I want to do that aren't specific tasks).

My somewhat improved habit tracker // OurJourneyinJournals.blogspot.com

This month, my monthly tracker and memories spread are not right after the monthly layout like I usually do (since I messed up when making the spreads), but it doesn't really matter. Anyway, this month, I'm trying to be more helpful (efficient? productive? I can't choose a good word) with my tracker use. I'm taking a page Jessica's book by setting goals for each month. So, I counted up how many days out of the month I did each habit in December, and then I used those numbers to set goals for each habit in January. I hope that by having a concrete, quantitative target, it will help motivate me to do better for the habits that I'm tracking.

The empty monthly memories spread for January // OurJourneyinJournals.blogspot.com

Nothing special here; this is January's blank monthly memories spread, which is just a way to record the highlights from the month. That's the short version of what this type of layout is, but I am planning on doing an entire post on monthly memories spreads in February.

My November monthly memories spread // OurJourneyinJournals.blogspot.com

I actually haven't completed December's memories spread yet (oops . . .), so here's November's.

2017 full year calendar // OurJourneyinJournals.blogspot.com

This is my year-at-a-glance calendar for 2017. I got this printable from the blog Wendaful Designs, which is the same place I got my calendar for last year. I decided to use a printable because it would've been really complicated and time consuming to figure out how to draw out something like this by hand.

My incomplete "reverse bucket list" spread // OurJourneyinJournals.blogspot.com

I'm not nearly done with this spread yet, but I wanted to show it anyway because I thought it was such a good idea. I originally saw this spread - a reverse bucket list - on @hb_letters's Instagram (though she was inspired by @calligraphynerd). Basically, you write out the awesome things that you did or that happened throughout the months. Though I haven't even finished brainstorming the items, I'm still really excited to complete the spread!

By the way, if you're wondering why I didn't say anything about making a future log, it's because the one that I made when I first set up my current bujo back in August of 2016, it spanned 6 months, so it's good until February. I also didn't transition into a new bullet journal for the new year because that would be an unnecessary hassle and frankly a bit of a waste of about half a notebook.

So that's everything in my January 2017 bullet journal setup! Tune in next week for my review of 2016 (which includes a reader survey, so I'll need as many people as possible to take it!) when it comes to Our Journey in Journals, and though it's gonna be a long post, I think it'll be an interesting read to see how my "brand" has developed throughout the year.

How did you set up your bujo for the New Year? Let me know in a comment!

Setup for last month: December 2016
Setup for next month: February 2017