Plan.Paperless

Hello! Welcome to the first ever blog post on this website! Today I thought I would share with you something that I believe makes my bullet journal unique from the others out there! 

Obviously if you’ve seen my Instagram you’ll notice that I don’t use paper to bullet journal (hence the name plan.paperless).

There are a few reasons why I switched from pen and paper bullet journaling to digital, and a quick summary of them would be:

1. Never ending journal
2. Save money on buying pens and notebooks
3. Mistakes are easier to deal with
4. Flexibility
5. Back-ups and syncing

So without further ado, let’s get to it!

Reason #1: It’s the journal that never ends!

When I started bullet journaling, I was in a thin Moleskine journal that I used every last inch of! 

When it was time for me to switch into a new journal, I didn’t know what to do with all my collections! To me, they were all worth transferring over, because I do like to go back and refer to them… and I don’t want to have to dig though my bookshelf to find a specific journal! 

I tried to do a “refer to this page” collection in my 2nd bullet journal, but then I would have to recreate that in every new bullet journal I ever started!

I thought about using a Filofax instead, but I knew it would get full pretty quickly, and I would have the same problem all over again.

I love collections! If you look at my Instagram you will see that I post a LOT of pictures of the various collections I use. I have everything from trackers, logs, recipes, random little lists, packing lists, tips and hacks, and everything in between. I love my lists, and I want to be able to refer to them easily and when I want to.

Furthermore, I had trackers that I used in my old bullet journal that were too much work to put into my new one… so I ended up carrying more than one bullet journal with me, just for those one or two pages I used every day.

This is when I started thinking about digital bullet journaling, and it is probably the first reason that I made the switch!

With putting my bullet journal onto my iPad, I am able to carry all my collections with me wherever I go, I don’t need to go digging for old notebooks for a certain collection and I can redesign my collection pages whenever I want!

Reason #2: I save money on new pens and new notebooks!

I use my bullet journal a lot. Like, excessively. And that meant that I was running out of pens every other month. This is also the reason I switched to taking my school notes digitally, but that’s another story. 

I also wanted to get a really nice notebook to do bullet journaling in, but then I saw how expensive they were! Being a struggling student, I don’t have that kind of cash just lying around. 

I did, however, have an iPad that my parents bought me almost 5 years ago. I’ve taken care of this iPad, and I already used GoodNotes for taking notes at school and at church, so I was comfortable with the program.

With my iPad I would have endless access to any colour of pen I want, that pen would never run out, and the pigment would always be perfect! 

I could also just do a quick google search for any ‘stickers’ or even wash tape I would want to put in my bullet journal… for free!

ALSO, instead of buying ‘printables’ and printing them every month, wasting ink and paper, I could just create my own templates (that I could personalize, that I actually liked better) and reuse them every month, week, or day! I could make templates for trackers, and I could even change them to my liking if I found that they weren’t working out like they were supposed to.

I guess this reason could also be: “More artistic freedom” since there are really no limits to what you can do on a tablet these days.

Reason #3: It is easy to cover up mistakes or even just get rid of them altogether!

I’m definitely not the best artist. I struggle with drawing, colouring, and everything in between!! I used to hate some of the pages I had my first bullet journal, and the only reason I didn’t rip them out was because I couldn’t stand the thought of how messy that would look!

With my iPad, I can make a million mistakes… and just undo them! I don’t have to worry about writing in pencil first, and I don’t have to stress about making everything perfect the first time I put pen to paper.

Even if I see a page that I used to like but don’t anymore, I could literally just delete it from existence and start over! 

It is no big deal at all if you mess up on a tablet, because all you have to do is press that little ‘Undo’ button, and you’ve got a whole second chance to do it the way you want to! Or a third chance… or 5476th chance in my case!

Reason #4: You can move pages around, duplicate pages, and more!

I think one of my favourite parts about digital bullet journaling is that I can move a page to wherever I want. I can categorize like pages and put them together, and I can continue pages by simply inserting a new one where it is needed… rather than having to say that page 6 is ‘continued on page 77’ I can just move that page right after page 6!

I can also bookmark these sections and specific pages, so if I need to find something quickly, I just go to the page I need right away… rather than search through my whole bullet journal!

And I know that’s what an index is for, but let’s be honest, barely anyone actually uses the index the way they are supposed to!

My point is, there is so much freedom to do whatever you want in a digital bullet journal, because there are no physical restrictions.

Reason #5: Everything Syncs and Backs-Up!

Actually this is my favourite part about digital bullet journaling. Even when I don’t have my bullet journal with me, I can still access it! I can go on my phone and open the Goodnotes app, where my bullet journal is right there, ready to be used! 

I can even open it from my computer, since Goodnotes gives you the option of backing it up as a PDF, meaning that there is always a PDF version of your bullet journal that you can reference from any device connected to the internet.

You can’t sync a paper bullet journal. If I were to lose a physical notebook, I can’t get it back… there is no ‘data recovery’ option for a lost notebook. If my notebook were to be destroyed by water or fire or whatever else was thrown at it, there would be no way I could get it back! 

But if my iPad were destroyed, my bullet journal (as well as everything else on it) would be safe and sound in a storage cloud somewhere, if not backed up to my computer manually.

There is so much peace of mind that this statement gives me, because I know my bullet journal will be safe no matter what.

So in the end,

To sum all of this up, digital bullet journaling fits my needs and wishes much better than a pen and paper journal. And while I understand that not everyone owns and iPad, you could do the same thing on a computer or even a smart phone, if you wanted to! You don’t even need a stylus… when I started, I was just using my finger as a pen!

You just need to be a little creative and figure out what works best for you… which is really what bullet journaling is all about!