The end of the year is nigh, and so is the end of my bullet journal.

I enjoyed using my bullet journal quite a bit more than usual during the month long insanity that was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I decided that I would incorporate a few elements from my November bullet journal spreads into my December plans.

I decided that I wanted a winter theme (snowflakes) rather than a purely traditional Christmas theme. So I dug through my art supply drawers and finally found my wooden block rubber stamps that were different snowflake shapes and the blue ink pads.

I had previously used these stamps to decorate bags of rosemary that I dried for Christmas presents. If you don’t mind your house smelling strongly of rosemary for a week, these are a great cheap DIY Christmas Gift.

This of course, meant that I was doomed to have blue fingers… which I currently have thanks to my lack of hand-eye coordination.

I also decided to use some of my washi tape that was a nice striped pattern with colors ranging from white, blue, purple, and green. I was able to find several markers that matched the colors of the washi tape, so I was off to a great start.

I have the quote page, which I used to highlight a seasonal blessing (May the season be festive and the laughter be contagious) rather than a motivational quote.

The Monthly spread for December is a two page spread with boxes that are 5×5 on the grid paper. This allows for plenty of room to write down when you are traveling, meeting up with friends, movies, and word count goals for those of us still writing our NaNoWriMo project.

I decided to include a goal page for my Writing, YouTube, and Personal goals for the month. I enjoyed reaching some of the smaller and short term goals during November and decided to keep using this method to motivate me. Hopefully it will continue on into the new year, too.

The single page spread for keeping track of my word sprints was very helpful in keeping me writing for longer periods of time, and I completely filled it out. This is pretty rare for me as I do not often consistently use the same trackers (I either get bored of them or they just don’t seem to work for me). So I decided to use it for a second month and included it in my December bullet journal layout.

The Weekly spread layout also is changing for this month, and I am trying a new design. I normally go for horizontal boxes for each day within the weekly layout, but this time, I went for vertical. For each day, there is now a small box (5×5) for the tasks, and then a vertical column underneath that box for the hours of 6 AM to 12 Midnight (06:00 – 24:00). I will be attempting to use the vertical weekly layout this week, and if all goes well, I will continue to use it for the rest of the month.

An additional thing that I noticed (my brain wandered to…) when I was creating the weekly layout: We start the monthly calendar spread weeks with Sunday, but I often start my weekly spreads with Monday – the beginning of the work week. This is just habit at this point; I learned how to use an agenda from the ones provided at school, and they always started with Monday (and had horizontal boxes for each day).

Let me know if you start your week with Monday or Sunday in the comments!

I also included a progress monitor tracker for my work-in-progress, Gravely Mistaken. I have the first 11 chapters completed, but the rest of the chapters are all still in pieces or are mainly just notes at this point. So I now have a place to write down which chapter I finish, when I finish it, and how many words each chapter is. That way, when I am completely done with the draft, I will be able to see if any chapters are too long and need to be divided, how many words total I have written, and how many pages long the manuscript will be.