The Very First Plan With Me!

I just want to welcome you to Planning Mindfully’s first Plan With Me for April 2018! If you want to know why I started a ‘Plan With Me’ series, you can check out the introductory post here and learn more about it!

Regardless, I’m very excited to share with you my set up for April! It is truly an honor to have you be involved. We have a lot to go over in a short amount of time, so let’s get started!

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

Plan with Me for April 2018

April 2018 marks my 19th month of bullet journals! I’m excited to say that I’ve now transitioned to bullet journal number four. I had a lot of fun setting up for this new bullet journal because it’s been pretty hectic with a new work project. I enjoy any opportunity I can to be creative because it’s very relaxing for me.

The notebook used for my April 2018 bullet journal spreads is the A5 Dot Grid Scrivwell Notebook. This is actually my very first time using a notebook from this brand; the owner and I collaborated on Instagram and she was super kind enough to send me a few notebooks to try! I’ve been very impressed so far. It’s worth noting if you are looking for a hardcover dot-grid notebook style that’s a little less expensive than most, you’ll definitely want to look into the Scrivwell brand!

Theme For April: Weather

If you don’t know much about my process, each month I select a bullet journal theme. Having a theme ties my whole month together while still allowing me to try some different decorating techniques between my weekly and monthly spreads.

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

I’m actually a huge fan of weather and have been looking forward to this particular theme in my April setup. As a child, I would literally watch the weather channel for hours. In an alternative universe, I’m relatively sure that I’m a meteorologist!

Read: Awesome Theme Ideas for Your Bullet Journal

I take advantage of using different types of doodles, some of which are on Pinterest, and others on Google. If you’d like to see the source of my inspiration for my Plan with Me for April, make sure to check out my ‘Planner Doodles‘ board on Pinterest! Weather is such a vast topic, thus I drew many different types of weather doodles.

These types of doodles are in my Plan with Me for April 2018:

  • Clouds
  • Rain
  • Sun
  • Wind
  • Rainbows
  • Snow

Plan with Me for April 2018: Cover Page

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

In the past, I always created one-page cover pages for my bullet journal spreads. And while this is a worthwhile option, I spent much of my third bullet journal working toward optimizing my layouts so I could utilize my spreads for more drawing and creativity. So for April 2018, I decided to try a two-page cover page instead!

In my home state, April is known for being a very cloudy and rainy month! Thus, the beautiful gray clouds are an homage to our weather. The best part of clouds is that there is no ‘right’ way to draw them, especially as doodles! The patterns were a fun way to give the clouds personality while keeping them cute and fun.

Materials to Create Page Cover Page: Grayscale Tombow Brush Pens, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, White Gel Pen

Plan With Me for April 2018: Monthly Calendar

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

Because April is literally such a busy month, I chose to make my monthly calendar as simple as possible. To stick with the weather theme, I chose to decorate my monthly calendar with rainbows!

I always feel like there’s more space than I need for the side of most of my monthly calendars, thus I tried something different by creating my header on the side instead of the top! The boxes for each day are 6 x 6 in size. The boxes for the days of the week are 6 x 2.

Materials to Create Monthly Calendar: Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Tombow Twintone Markers, Zebra Mildliners, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, White Gel Pen, Moxiedori Stencil

Plan with Me for April 2018: Habit Tracker

I love making habit trackers! Over the last few months, I transitioned to a two-page layout for my habit trackers. The one-page layout is a bit squashed and often had no extra space to create pretty doodles around it.

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

The whole concept of the habit tracker revolves around whether I did or did not do something over the course of the month. The habit tracker differs from my goal tracker in that I’m not necessarily trying to fill in all the boxes. At the end of each month, I compare my habit tracker to my mood tracker to see if there is anything I need to adjust in my daily functioning.

I love AmandaRachDoodles on Instagram and the snowflakes are inspired by her December 2017 pages in her bullet journal.

The entire box is 30 x 24 dots, and the label lines are 8 dots long. The dots for the dot grid serve as a way to separate each box and habit. It takes a lot of time to draw out all the lines, so it’s nice to not have to draw every single line to separate the boxes.

Materials to Create Habit Tracker: Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Zebra Mildliners, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, White Gel Pen, Moxiedori Stencil

Plan with Me for April 2018: Mood and Goal Tracker

After months of trying to play with my Moxiedori circle tracker stencil, I finally figured out how to incorporate my mood and goals in the same circle. It was so irritating when I had to draw two circles because I didn’t have the space to write out my goals next to the trackers!

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

I bet it looks a little confusing to see two trackers in one circle, so here is how I break down the two different subjects. I separated the trackers into two sections; the mood tracker is in the inner circle and the goal tracker is in the outer circle. The circle with the days of the month is the separation between each tracker.

Mood Tracker

For the mood trackers, you’ll see the colors I use to track each mood on the lower left of the page. I rate mood by intensity; I do not like to define each day to have a specific mood because I have a lot of different moods throughout the day! So the lighter the color on any given day means the mood is less intense; likewise, if the color is darker and vibrant, the mood is more intense. I tried rating with numbers in the past; I felt like that was pretty difficult as well.

Goal Tracker

The goal tracker was a little trickier to implement as I’ve always liked to have more than one way to reach a goal throughout the day. I create goals on four different planes; personal, family, financial, and professional. I found a way to create two boxes for each type of goal every day instead of just one box by using a ruler to separate each daily section in half! It wasn’t a perfect art, but it got the job done!

Materials to Create Mood and Goal Tracker: Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, Moxiedori Circle Tracker, Ruler

Plan with Me for April 2018: Sleep Tracker

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

This layout for sleep trackers has been one of my favorites. It takes a little longer to set up, but by creating this structure, it’s way easier to track my daily sleep as a whole throughout the month. Much like the habit tracker, the dots make it easy to label the boxes without having to draw a ton of different lines.

I love the little sleeping clouds and the sun trying to wake them up!

Materials to Create Sleep Tracker: Grayscale Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, Ruler

Plan with Me for April 2018: Weekly Layouts

For the most part, I try to keep a relatively consistent layout structure for each weekly layout of the month. Sometimes careless errors prevent me from keeping each layout exactly the same (sometimes I’ll forget to draw a box, or I’ll write the wrong thing in another box), but for the most part, they are pretty similar.

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

For Week 1, I went with a zentangle cloud and rain theme.

Materials: Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, Tombow Dual Brush Pen, Ruler

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

In Week 2, I went with a ‘Cute Clouds’ theme.

Materials: Pastel Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, Ruler

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

For Week 3, I went with an ‘Outside in the Rain’ theme; this was especially fun to create! I used these Rainy Day Decoration stickers from ‘paperkumaco‘ on Etsy and they were literally perfect for this!

Materials: Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, Ruler

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

The last week of April, I went with a Sun theme!

Materials: Tombow Twintone Pens, Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen, Gold Gel Pen, Ruler

Plan with Me for April 2018: Monthly Review

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

Well, this is what my monthly review looks like for the month of April! Something I always like to do for my monthly reviews is to find a way to tie together the themes of the current month and next month.

Any idea what the theme for May will be?

Read: Why You Need a Monthly Review in Your Bullet Journal

I can’t really go into a lot of detail over my month in review for April because, well, April hasn’t even started yet! But one of the things I want to do with the Plan with Me series is to take some time to review the monthly review… just from the previous month instead! Going through the previous monthly review is how I make the adjustments necessary for the current month. I don’t want to create options that always waste time, or make layouts that I don’t use. It’s also an opportunity to review goals, habits, moods, and more.

Materials: Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, White Gel Pen

What Changed from March 2018

While this spot will be more valuable to you as I do more ‘Plan with Me’ posts in the future, you should at least get to know my process and what I learned from my bullet journal in March 2018.

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

March 2018 was my very last month in Bullet Journal #3. And I’ve always noticed something interesting when it comes to the last month of any bullet journal.

Read: Bullet Journal Ideas for Spring

It’s literally like I completely forget to update the thing. I don’t know if it’s because that month in my bullet journal just happens to be naturally busy, or because I’m so busy setting up for the next bullet journal entirely that I just space. I think this year when I get to the second of the last month in my bullet journal, I need to set up that month and the last month at the same time so I don’t forget to use it!

March 2018 was also the beginning a new and complicated project at my full-time job. I’ve been working overtime and weekends, which isn’t normal. I’m beyond exhausted and my time is more limited than ever. Thus for April’s spreads, I tried to do whatever I could to simplify my layouts. I’ll likely have to do the same for May 2018. My project ends in May, so I hope after that I can get my spare time and energy back.

My goals and habits haven’t changed tremendously. In March I pre-emptively simplified those areas because of the work project. Besides trying to find time to fill the trackers out, it’s relatively sustainable.

See? I consider myself a professional when it comes to bullet journals and planning… and I’m not perfect. It’s totally ok to forget sometimes, or even focus on real life.

Materials Used: Tombow Dual Brush Pens, Sakura Pigma Micron Fineliners, MoxieDori Stencil, Scribbles that Matter A5 Dot Grid Notebook

What I’m Looking Forward To in April 2018

First, super excited that the Plan with Me series is now rolling! What I’m more excited about is that I would love for you to get involved in any way possible! If you are inspired by any of the spreads that I create and make them for yourself, I would love for you to share them with me! You can tag me on Instagram and Facebook, or even email me what you’re creating that’s inspired by the Plan with Me series!

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

In the future, I hope to include your content in future Plan With Me blog posts, social media shares, and possibly even Youtube Videos! If you followed me on Instagram, you know that I love to share content with other bullet journalists! Not to mention, you get credit as well! Maybe even a surprise from me if your content blows me away!

So how can you get involved?

Instagram

First, follow me at @planningmindfully on Instagram. If you create any content that comes from the ‘Plan with Me’ series, please use the hashtag #planwithmemindfully

If you create any bullet journal or planner spreads you want to share in general, you can share using the hashtag #plannerpicturefeature!

(Keep your eyes out for an amazing giveaway on Instagram, too… it’s coming very soon!)

Facebook

Hop over and follow me on Facebook, too! You can always tag me in any of your bullet journal and planner posts! I’ll be sharing other content a few times a week.

Twitter

I need to step up my Twitter game, so follow me here! Make sure to tag me in any of your bullet journal posts that you’d like me to feature!

  • #planwithmemindfully for content from the ‘Plan with Me’ series
  • #plannerpicturefeature for any planner or bullet journal content you want to share

Email

Have you joined my email list yet? If you, you should join now and get involved. You get lots of cool information, updates on products, and discounts on stationery! Not to mention, you’ll be among the first to hear about any new products that I’m working on (and have the opportunity to get it before anybody else!).

After you get my welcome email, you can then reply back if you’d like to share your bullet journal images with me! If you share your content by email, you’ll have the opportunity to be featured in my weekly newsletter that goes out every Saturday.

How Are You Planning for April?

Tell me about what you’re setting up for April in your bullet journal or planner! I’d love to hear more in the comments.

If you have any suggestions or recommendations for future ‘Plan with Me’ content, feel free to share through comments or reach out on my ‘Contact Me‘ page! Thanks so much for joining in on my Plan with Me for April!

I cannot wait to see what you create!

Until then,

 

 

 

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Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!

Ready to set up your bullet journal for April? Plan with me for April and learn how I set up my bullet journal for the month. Get tons of creative bullet journal ideas for layouts and spreads, and plus, this weather theme is AMAZING!