 Hello art citizens, my name is Courtney and I'm a brain education instructor from Boston, Massachusetts. Today I'd like to show you my journaling routine, more specifically my experience with bullet journaling and how it really helps me to stay organized and prioritize while improving my mental health. There's something about getting our thoughts and feelings out of our head and down on paper. We just start to see things more clearly. In fact, there's been studies on how journaling can help you relax, manage anxiety, and cope with depression. Journaling is good for both emotional intelligence and self-discovery because you get to know yourself better. You get to develop a deeper understanding of your reactions, strengths, weaknesses, as well as what you need to thrive. I also use my journal to keep my thoughts and schedule organized because I've found being prepared helps reduce my anxiety, helps me manage my time, keeping my tasks prioritized, and reinforces that I am capable of completing things. Journaling is also good for goal setting. The act of writing down a goal can make you feel more real and right away your brain can start to find ways to achieve it. Research has shown that writing information down by hand is an effective way to commit ideas to memory. So if you have an awakening about yourself or the world, writing it down helps imprint it on your brain. All sounds great, but how? To me, journaling has been about finding a balance of structure. Too much structure and you get overwhelmed and don't keep up with it. Too little and you look at blank pages and you don't know where to start or you don't stick with it. Enter bullet journaling. It's the only method so far that's helped me be consistent about my journaling practice. It's important to note that this is a style I've developed over time by looking at multiple videos and I advise you to do the same. Play with it and make a system that works best for you. There's a lot of information in this video, so I made sure to put chapters below so you can find the information that is relevant to you. If you're coming with me, you may want what notebook that has dots instead of lines, a ruler, whiteout, and a couple different highlighters and pens. This is not necessary, but a part of the process that brings me joy. So if I did just give you an excuse to buy more pens, you're welcome. Today, I'm going to show you what I do to get organized for the year, the month, and the week. And to be upfront, some of the calendar drawing can be a little time consuming. I happen to really like this process and find it meditative and enjoyable, but you might prefer to buy yourself a pre-printed planner and you can still use this system. Bullet journaling has several unique qualities. The first being it encourages us to use an index. This is a dedicated number of pages in the beginning of your journal to log your work so that you can find it later. Especially for those of us that have trouble staying organized, this is genius. Plus, it gives you total freedom to write on any page within your notebook, so long as you mark it down in your index. This does require your pages to be numbered, which you could do by hand, but there are many brands of notebooks that are already doing this for you. The second feature unique to bullet journaling is creating yourself a key. For example, a bullet for tasks, an X for completed tasks, an arrow to migrate your task, a circle for events, a star for an important idea, or you can cross out a task if it becomes redundant. If you're going to be creating your own calendars or dividing your notebooks into sections for any reason, you can count and mark down the number of boxes you use, and this will reduce a lot of work for yourself later. Please feel free to customize your key in any way that works for you. Now I'm going to show you how I set up my yearly future log. I've tried this a couple ways. This time, I'm trying it like this. You can use this space to enter important birthdays, anniversaries, trips, projects, or goals you'd like to accomplish each month. And when you get a new journal, you can migrate what's relevant from the old to the new. Are you with me so far? We're just getting to the good stuff. At the beginning of each month, there are several things I do. One is I check in with myself. How am I doing? How did the events of last month affect me mentally, emotionally, spiritually? This can become really useful information if you're tracking yourself recovering from an injury or illness or to help develop emotional intelligence. Bullet Journaling also offers the idea of a monthly log. Good for those of us who have a hard time remembering timelines and it's recommended to wait until after the event to log it because as we know, things change. Then perhaps you've heard practicing gratitude is good for your mental health. It works by helping you focus on what's good in your life rather than what's not. I will number a page and try to fill it up within one month. Make sure to jot it down in your index and you can come back to it anytime. Then it's important to leave yourself a little room to be messy. Your brainstorming page is where you can empty out what's juggling around in your brain. Maybe it's things you want to get done or improve about yourself and they don't have to be organized. You can put tasks, idea and events all in one space thanks to your key. You can reference this page to get organized about what your weekly plan is and come back to it when you need to get something out of your head. I will often make a section for work and a section for personal. Then I move on to my goals or visions. Using the beginning of the months to reevaluate your goals helps to stay organized about what you want and as a part of that I will sometimes set up a habit tracker useful to help make some new habits or break some old ones. To do that I draw out two to six mini calendars one for each habit. I found that the habit tracker helps to remind me of what I wanted to focus on plus I find it satisfying to color in the days and check my progress. However make sure you're not beating yourself up if you miss a day or two. Then I like to draw out a few calendar months in a row but especially if you use the index function you could definitely do this just at the beginning of the month. This is where I enter my work events and content planning. Finally we're on to our weekly planning where I cut my journal into six sections. The last section could be both Saturday and Sunday as my to-dos tend to be a little bit shorter. Then I split the page in half. The top part is for tasks another opportunity for you to use the key system and in the bottom half I put my schedule and appointments. At the end of the day or first thing in the morning you can look at yesterday's tasks cross out what you accomplished migrate over what you still need to do or cross it off if it's redundant. And just as a general tip as much as I like to cross things off make sure you're prioritizing what needs to get done first. For some reason this style of journaling is really helping me to stay organized and lay out the steps I need in order to complete the tasks and projects I want to. Then the rest of the pages for whatever drawing journaling just make sure to mark them in your index. And that's pretty much it. Please keep in mind I had to go through some trial and error to find the elements that worked best for me. I also had to practice being okay with making mistakes. Most important is make it fun for yourself. That's the best way to keep up with your journaling practice. Okay your citizens I hope that's helpful as always if you'd like to experience a full one hour of brain education find a body and brain sensor near you. See you next time.