Ever feel like planning in your bullet journal requires you have a crystal ball? Figuring out how many pages you need for each section can be difficult and it is something you don’t need to do! Learn a bullet journal hack for organizing your planner without skipping pages “in case you need them.”
Do you skip pages in your bullet journal in case you need to continue a collection later?
When writing in your bullet journal, how do you know how many pages to leave for what?
For example, when you start a collection of all the books you’ve read, how do you know how many books you will read in a year and therefore how many pages to leave for that collection?
It can be intimidating to flip the page to start something new if you don’t know if you’ll have enough room to write all the things you needed to write about a topic.
However, there’s a cool bullet journal hack you can use to minimize this worry, and it doesn’t involve splitting your book in half…
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Splitting Your Book In Half?
Yes, I’ve heard some people start their collections at the back of their journal rather than going page by page. The problem here is you might end up with a bunch of blank pages in the middle and it may seem like the journal doesn’t flow together. To each their own though…this may not really bother you.
Threading
Instead, what I do is something called “threading.” Using the index as well as the bottom of the page where the page numbers are, you can signify that a topic continues later (or earlier) in the book. There’s no flipping through to find it, no having to start over because you messed up a page.
Let me show you what you need for this simple technique and how to do it. If you are new to bullet journaling, I recommend you check out my post on how to start a bullet journal to understand what these parts are for:
Page Numbers
First, it will be important that your bullet journal has numbered pages. The bullet journal I use has numbered pages and a nice index for tracking what is on each of these pages. If you purchased a journal without page numbers, no worries! You can write in your own page numbers either before using the journal or as you go.
Index
Next, you’ll want to have an index page in your bullet journal. My favorite notebook for bullet journaling has this built in, but if yours doesn’t you can make this yourself as well.
What is a bullet journal index and how do you use it?
An index is similar to a table of contents in a book. It’s a page where you keep track of what’s in your bullet journal and on what page. This is my absolute favorite thing about using a bullet journal. I know where to find things in the future without having to go through all of the pages of my book to find it. I also like that at a glance I can see what I all have included in the book.
What Is Threading?
So what is threading exactly? Threading is a technique to show how a topic “threads” throughout your book.
Using the index and page numbers, you easily show where a topic picks up later in your journal It reminds me a bit of a newspaper (do people still read those on paper?) where the article says continued in section B page 6, but MUCH SIMPLER.
Let’s say I start a page called “Funny Things My Dog Did” where I’m collecting funny memories about my dog. I would go to my index and write the title in the index along with the page where this collection is so I can find it later.
I write a few things on that page and even though I don’t know if I will need additional pages to hold all my dog’s antics, I still use the next page for something else. I don’t leave a blank page in between. The next page may be a weekly or any of the 145+ collection ideas I wrote about here. I do not worry about whether I might need the next page for funny things about my dog.
If I need more space for writing funny things my dog did, I would just write them on the next available page, even if it is way later in my book.
Then in my index I will show that the collection “Funny Things My Dog Did” is continued in the future by adding a comma and the next page number where it is located.
So for example if the first page number in which I wrote “Funny Things My Dog Did” was on page 23, I would have made an entry in my index showing this was on page 23. If the next page I wrote this was on page 120, I would add a comma and add 120 like this:
Funny Things My Dog Did 23, 120
Then I would go to page 23 and at the bottom (or wherever the page number is) I would signify that the collection continues later in the book. I tend to do it by writing a slash and the number like this:
23/120
But you could also do it like this
23 > 120
After that, I’d go to page 120 and do the same thing, but I would put the 23 before the number 120 to show that it is on a previous page within the book.
Here is an example from my bullet journal where I’ve tracked my huge Pengem collection. As you can see the collection started on page 7 and then continues on page 65.
I hope this simple bullet journal hack helps you figure out how to use a bullet journal in the simplest way possible. If you want to know more about how to simplify your bullet journal, here are some other posts you might enjoy:
Big help! Thank you.
You’re welcome!
What do I do with all the unfinished things when I run out of pages and need to start a new journal?
Great question! I’ve moved my most important collections into my traveler’s notebook, so it has a dedicated book of 160 or so pages. I haven’t run out yet. Here’s what I would do though. I would first decide which are most important that you want in your new book. Those I recommend actually rewriting. Hopefully those are fun collections or ones that need to be updated anyway! I would then create an index either at the front or the back of the new journal labeled 2020 (or however else you would know which journal it was) and create the index there. Then, if you continue the collection into the new book – leaving the old parts behind – you could write the year, or other label, at the bottom of the page just like you write the page numbers when threading within the book. I hope that makes sense!