Three Good Reasons to Start Journaling in 2018

Journaling. A word that reminds me of childhood and adolescence, of diaries hidden under the bed, of flowers between the pages, and of pictures of young crushes surrounded by red hearts preserved with excitement.

Now, Journaling really has acquired a whole new meaning with time. It is no longer a way to vent about the injustices of my adolescence, but a tool for organising my life, giving myself new challenges, and pushing me to always be the best person I want to be.

There are plenty of agendas or journals that can help us to organise better our life. At the beginning, I used the calendar on my phone to keep all of my duties organised; then I bought my Filofax, and absolutely loved it; wanted something funnier, I bought an agenda from Mr Wonderful, and loved it even more.

The reasons I stopped using them and made the decision of starting a bullet journal are simple. As for the calendar, it could only keep track of my meetings or to do notes, but nothing about my day, or about my travels, shopping list, or the list of books I was reading. I had to keep other agendas or post it for that, and I wanted to use one single tool for everything.

My Filofax helped me a lot from that point of view. I personalised it a lot, and added a few pages to keep track of my travels, movies I wanted to watch, books I wanted to buy, and so on. But I found it a bit too “serious”, I wanted something more colored and funny, and that's when the Mr Wonderful agenda came out.

I bought one, and absolutely loved it. It is so colorful, funny to fill in and personalise, thanks to cute little stickers coming with the agenda itself. Again, I really loved it, but I found I couldn't really make it “mine” cause everything was already set. I wanted to be free to add new pages, to have empty ones to doodle and practice handlettering, to add pictured taken with my Polaroid.

And so to me, one of the new goals for 2018 is to start a bullet journal, which is to say one of those journal with empty pages that we can enrich, draw and organise as we please. And here are three reasons why you should start journaling, or keeping an agenda, as well.

Reason One: Keep Your Life Organised

The first reason, and the most important of them all if you ask me, is that a journal or an agenda will help you so much in keeping your life organised. Of course you can use the calendar on your phone, as I used to do. But that will only apply to meetings or duties, where an agenda will also act as your diary, and give you an opportunity to write down pros and cons of your days.

You can use your journal to keep track of your sleep, or routine. You can use pages to write down you goals, and travel logs, or a list of the books you want to read, movies you want to watch and Netflix shows you are following. There are infinite possibilities you can use your journal for, and you won't need anymore to keep many different journals for different purposes, cause you can keep everything in one.

Reason Two: Keep Your Memories Stored

As I said, I used my phone calendar to record all of the daily duties and meeting I had to attend, and also used them to summarise in a line the most important event of a day. It surely was a good way to keep things organised, but then, changing the phone, or losing it, meant losing everything I had stored in it. It is a shame to lose in this ways our memories, and this is the reason why I decided to keep and agenda/journal, so that one day I can take them and live again those beautiful memories from the past. One of the easiest and funniest way to do that is store some Polaroid pics in between your journal pages, don't you think?

Reason Three: Have Fun with Doodles and Calligraphy

Last but not least, personalise and enrich our journals is so funny! If you type on Google, or Pinterest, or Instagram the words “bullet journal” you will be presented with tons and tons of doodles, images, layout spreads and handlettering fonts you can use to make your journal reflect your own personality. It is not only funny, but also keeps us busy with new hobbies, that we might find useful in the future. This Christmas for example I wrote my Christmas card myself, thanks to the handlettering skills I had learnt from writing down my journal. So, it is worthy give it a try!

You can use Youtube or Pinterest to find funny spreads to copy and personalise for your journal, but also to practice handlettering if you're a beginner. You can find the materials needed in any shop, starting from WHSmith or Amazon, and I can promise you once you start you won't be willing of stopping anymore!