Bullet Journal Mistakes + how to survive them

How many of you procrastinated to actually crack open your bullet journal and get started? I know I did! I remember I was so anxious to get the time to go downtown to buy a new dotted Leuchtturm1917 so I could get started, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it! And then once I had it, it took me a week or so before I actually started to use it. I was scared to make mistakes – to misspell, to make not-so-pretty doodles or headers, to create collections I’d end up not using. The list can go on and on. But, I knew I was bound to make mistakes no matter how long I waited. And I also knew that this book, my bullet journal, should be a true ”worker”. Not a shrine that I should keep perfect at all times (a natural tendency of mine) but something that should be used. It should get messy and it should include errors. Otherwise I would be using it all wrong.

One thing that actually helped me in the beginning was a mantra I created for myself. You see, I’m a constant self-improver and for the longest time I’ve created ”mantras” for myself whenever I run into something I want to change about how I think or do things. So early on I realized that I was procrastinating delving into the bullet journal world because I really didn’t want to mess it up. I jokingly say that I’m a recovering perfectionist, and it’s sort of true.

Anyways, I came up with the mantra ”imperfections brings personality and life” so that whenever I would make a mistake I would put a positive spin on it. So whenever I didn’t want to do something in the bullet journal because I was scared I would get it wrong I would think of this mantra and do it anyways. The same for every time I did make a mistake! I would think of this mantra and it would take the edge of that bitter feeling and it would fade away pretty quickly.

I hope that tip might help some of you move past the fret / frustration / irritation / + a million other not-so-great-feelings that we feel when we make mistakes. And I thought it could be a fun exercise for the perfectionist in me to show you all the mistakes I’ve done so far ;) So, let’s get started!

This is no biggie, but I wish I would have thought through the header before I wrote it.

This is where I write the monthly mantra I mentioned earlier. I named it “Build New Habits”, but what I’m really doing is working on mindset shifts so a better heading would have been “Build New Mindset”.

If you want to know more about my thoughts behind this process and how I use it (with great results) you should make sure to subscribe (which you can do here). I plan to write about just that in my next blog post.

Ah, this one bugged me before I came up with the mantra I talked about above. It’s kind of stupid to let a minor thing like this affect me at all but as a recovering perfectionist I guess that’s just part of who I am.

If you couldn’t tell already, the header ”expenses” is a bit misplaced, it’s not centered above the column. Plus what you don’t see (as I’m not sure I’m comfortable sharing my finances completely open on the internet) is that I had to strike through what I’d written in February’s Expenses and Diff columns as I somehow calculated it wrong. So I had to strike through and write the correct amount below the original one. Not pretty.

Oh yeah, this is a fun one. I was learning Italian via the DuoLingo app and thought it would be fun to write the name of the weekdays in Italian to sort of marinate in Italian in all possible ways :)

I did a super quick google search and it showed that Thursday translated to ”Lunedi”. I didn’t even reflect on that it sounded more like Monday than anything else (I know French and the languages are similar). I realized the mistake the next week when I was searching for the translation for Monday and found Lunedi as the result. Well, well…

This one took me a while to get ok with.

I was creating my spreads for March – my monthly tracker, my energy log and my gratitude log. I had written the headers for them all and was about to write the outlines. So, for the energy log I want to record my energy levels in the morning and in the evening so I write the date then ”morning” on one row, and ”evening” on the next row. I also mark the beginning and end of the scale (a ten level scale) by drawing a dot. As for the gratitude log I just write out the dates and nothing more.

So, I started to fill out the energy log with dates and the texts “morning” and “evening”, and mid way through I realize I’m NOT on the energy log spread, I’m actually on the gratitude log spread. Bah!

I actually considered scrapping this spread by writing a big X over both pages and create a new (correct) spread. But I don’t know. I guess I’m frugal when it comes to wasting bullet journal pages, so I kept it. Instead I started to write one thing I was grateful for in the morning, and another thing I was grateful for in the evening. And I actually kept that idea the following month.

If you’re wondering about the big empty space in the middle where I didn’t write anything… Well, I had too much going on at work, I had no energy to do anything else than recuperate when I wasn’t working so I decided it was ok to take a break from all my “musts, wants and should’s”. And that’s why I didn’t write anything down. But being grateful and thankful is such a part of my personality so even if I might not have written anything down, I was still thinking of things I was grateful for during those days.

It still stings when I make mistakes, but it’s not that bad any more.

This is just a simple error where I thought I was writing down the correct information on how to take care of the coral breeze flower I had just bought. But it turns out I was wrong. So I simply put a line over the text that wasn’t correct and added the correct information.

How about you?

Have you made any mistakes in your bullet journal? Does it bother you to make mistakes, and if so, how do you tackle that?

Love + Hugs,
Eva