One of the consistent issues that has to be dealt with in journaling of any kind is finding stuff you wrote down when you need it again. There are a lot of ways to deal with this – using some sort of system where you divide up a notebook into section for different topics or projects, taking notes on paper that can be easily rearranged, or just plain not worrying about it. How bullet journaling deals with it is through the index.
First, your pages need to be numbered. If your notebook or journal comes prenumbered, great. If not, just write in your page numbers. The second part of this is the index itself. Some notebooks come with a key or index already added in at the front. If not, just set aside a page or two to be your index.
As you start a topic, add it as an item in the index of your journal and note the page number (or numbers). You may have pieces of a project spread all over your notebook, but as long as you note the page numbers with the topic, you can easily find all of it again. This way you just write up your project tasks or info or whatever as they happen, which lets you be more efficient with your journaling.
As you can see, I made a bit of a mess of this early this year. But hey – I was figuring it out. And it gets the job done 🙂
Another helpful tip I got from Felicity Ford’s class is using washi tape tags to keep track. You can see here that I have two projects that are spread out through the notebook. Each project got assigned it’s own washi tape here in the index.
Then each page that has something on that project gets a tab in that project’s washi tape! This makes everything even easier to find.
My journal is a mix. Most of it is just my day to day notes, tasks, etc. But every once in a while a big project comes up that I need to index and tag.
Do you have a trick for keeping track of projects or topics in your journal? Do tell!
Tomorrow or Friday I will do a short post about how I set up for a month of journaling.
Quite A Yarn 
Very smart. I can see how that would work so well to keep track of times that need to be repeated throughout the year so you know when the last time it was done was. I keep a separate journal for my crafting projects, and books read. But love the washi tape idea for my to do journal to keep track of stuff I need to remember. Thank you for that tip.
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It really does work well! I have a separate knitting journal as well.
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I have a new-to-me technique that I’ve been using to keep track of topics in my commonplace book! Well, it’s not that new; I’ve been using it for a year or more, but it’s new since my BuJo days. I have a list of topics written on a fold-out page (I used washi tape to add it to the back of the journal so it would stay tucked away when not needed) and then I use a felt-tip pen to color in boxes at the edges of the paper according to which topics I wrote about. That way I can see all the places I recorded my dreams, for example, or wrote about work. Since it’s just ink instead of washi tape, though, it doesn’t add anything to the thickness of the pages.
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That is a GREAT idea!! What a clever way to index without adding extra stuff to the notebook!
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I tried all kinds of options before I hit on that one! You can even color-code it if you want. (I just use black ink for my daily book, since that way I only need to have one pen on hand when I take the dairy with me. But if the book never left my desk, I might color-code the tabs.)
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Very cool!
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Washi tape! Brilliant to use it as bookmarks.
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Right? I love using it this way!
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