Bullet Journal Inspiration for COVID-19 Quarantine

I was recently on a couple different subreddits for bullet journaling, and quite a few people were commiserating together about how wasted they feel like their planners are this year. One person even said theirs has been blank for the past 4 months. And I get it. It's hard to feel productive when the only decisions you make every day are which pajamas to wear and what time to alternate between the couch and your bed.

But it doesn't have to be that way. There are plenty of useful, constructive ways you can use your bullet journal, even if you're home-bound for the foreseeable future.

Physical and Mental Heath

The most important thing you can be doing with your bullet journal every day is contact tracing and symptom tracking. Taking and recording your temperature is a great thing to add to your daily spreads. If you go out into public, write down where you went and anyone you met with. If you become infected, health officials will need to know how long you could've possibly been infected and your whereabouts. By tracking that yourself, you'll have useful information to provide in the event you become infected.

Here's a list of the symptoms you should be tracking. For now, I'm rewriting the list and circling any symptoms I experience every day. You can also make small print outs of the list and glue them into your journal so you don't have to rewrite the list every day.

Symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus. People with these symptoms may have COVID-19:

• Fever or chills
• Cough
• Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
• Fatigue
• Muscle or body aches
• Headache
• New loss of taste or smell
• Sore throat
• Congestion or runny nose
• Nausea or vomiting
• Diarrhea

Look for emergency warning signs for COVID-19. If someone is showing any of these signs, seek emergency medical care immediately:

• Trouble breathing
• Persistent pain or pressure in the chest
• New confusion
• Inability to wake or stay awake
• Bluish lips or , face

Another aspect of preserving your physical health and mental well-being during COVID-19 is to resist becoming sedentary. There are significant health risks that come from sitting too long. If you don't have a habit of interrupting long periods of sitting, now is a great time to start. Exercise doesn't have to be intense to be effective. Short walks, stretching, taking a trip up and down the stairs, or doing a basic household chore can be enough to break up prolonged periods of sitting. The goal isn't to suddenly turn into an Olympic athlete. Rather, any effort you make to interrupt sitting for longer than 20-30 minutes will help you avoid sedentary health risks.

Other health-related trackers you can use: sleep tracking, water consumption, reminders to take medications, mood trackers, and any pain you're experiencing.

Time Management

Take it from someone who has been a full-time housewife for several years, long before COVID-19 was ever a thought: you don't need someone else to provide you with a routine. From the time we're young, we're taught to allow external people and places to provide us with a routine. When those disappear, we often find we're unprepared to provide ourselves with a healthy routine. When we don't have anywhere to be or anyone to see at a specific time, what difference does it make if you wake up at 8 am or go to bed at 8 am?

I've been a housewife long enough to be in the midst of discovering my answer to this: I am worth showing up for myself and my goals. If I don't provide myself with structure, my goals and desires won't be realized. So I need to be a good boss and know how to take control of my own circumstances. I need to gain the skills and discipline to show up for myself. This may not come naturally to me for all kinds of reasons, but it's important enough that the desire to obtain that discipline never goes away, even if I haven't achieved it the way I want to yet.

So how do your create your own structure and schedule where all of the deadlines and appointments are made up, and being "on time" doesn't matter?

My answer to this is twofold: the first is to continue setting and resetting time-bound goals for yourself, even if you don't achieve them. If you create a reading list, try to learn a new skill, take up a hobby, sign up to learn a language, or start a class that you keep migrating in your bullet journal, that's okay! Keep migrating it. Figure out how to make what you want to achieve reachable for yourself and keep reaching.

The second is resisting isolation by reincorporating people into your life from a healthy distance. Make dates and appointments to show up for the people in your life and put them on your calendar. Whether you call your grandmother, do a Zoom call with your best friend, budget time to game online, or seek out volunteering opportunities, either virtually or in-person with proper social distancing. If you need a recommendation, try your local animal shelters and rescues. Cats and dogs don't transmit COVID-19, and their need for care doesn't stop during a pandemic. When you incorporate other people into your schedule, the deadlines and appointments around them require the precision we're used to giving for others.

Isolation is dangerous. It exacerbates mental health challenges and has physical impacts that extend deep into the future. When looking for ways to be productive, make sure that reducing isolation is at the core of your plans. Productivity doesn't mean much if it exists for its own sake, rather than to improve your quality of life.

Professional Development

If your place in the COVID-19 crisis has made you realize you don't like your job, there's a right and wrong way to transition into new employment, especially when the economy is undergoing a lot of present stress. Rather than quitting with nothing lined up, set the goals that will help you reposition yourself strategically.

Where would you like to be in the next five years, and what are the weaknesses in your resume keeping you from getting there? How can you fill in those resume gaps and become an ideal candidate for the job you wish you were doing? Who has the job you want and how did they get there?

If your bullet journaling doesn't include a plan and goals to get to where you want to be in your professional development, now is a good time to figure out how to address that if you're finding yourself with extra time right now.

Spark Joy

What brings you joy, and are you taking the time to savor and experience it every day? So often, we forgo pleasure for the sake of accomplishing "more important" tasks. 

If COVID-19 and the surrounding turmoil should teach us anything, it's that we aren't guaranteed an endless train of tomorrows where we'll suddenly have time for all the joy we didn't feel in the moment. Our lives are finite, with an unknown end date that is coming ever closer until it eventually overtakes us. There's nothing we can do to avoid that fact entirely. The genius of Marie Kondo's approach to cleaning is how it reawakens joy that has been deadened and distracted by materialism and accumulation. That approach works for all facets of life, not just material possessions.

Don't wait for joy to find you. Make time to create it, and let your bullet journal be a means of recognizing when it happens. I want my bullet journal to be a place to create gather memories, not do chores more effectively.

That's a choice I can make in how I use it. It's a choice we can all make if our bullet journals are sitting on a shelf, blank and useless.