Somehow, it’s been a full year since I last shared my monthly goals and their accompanying spread in my bullet journal. Does anyone else feel like the past 6 months of pandemic-life have made time fly by?
I finally cleaned my home office/desk space after letting it become a mess of a storage area all summer. I had justified that with the fact that I was doing fieldwork and needed all my equipment easily accessible, which was technically true, but summer crept into fall and my desk was still piled high with unnecessary papers. Last night, I finally dragged myself out of my election season-induced funk and put my space in order. It feels awesome, and I’ve used the accompanying burst of inspiration to create what might be my most “artistic” bullet journal spread ever.
I’m usually pretty by-the-book with the standard bullet journal method—on a normal day, the most I’ll go beyond to-do lists and notes is slightly fancy lettering for the day of the week—but this time, I took inspiration from some monthly spreads I found online to add some fall cheer to my journal’s pages.
On the left side, I’ve listed the days of the month with dates and events to keep track of, and near the center, I’ve added an activity tracker to cross off the days when I’ve made an effort to move my body.
On the right, in addition to some fun tree stickers and pumpkin doodles, I’ve written out my monthly goals. I’ll likely add to these as October goes on, but I like to start the month with a few specific goals. Let’s take a look!
Read 4 books.
This one’s pretty self-explanatory! It’s a goal I usually set every month, and last month was the first time in awhile that I achieved it.
Complete basic data analysis.
I finally wrapped my my master’s fieldwork last month, and now it’s time to delve into all that data I collected. I need to do some self-guided learning about multivariate statistics, but for now, I want to make sense of the data with the methods I already know—quantifying it with descriptive stats and ANOVAs.
(By the way, I know “data” is technically a plural noun, and I’m usually a total stickler about grammar, but in this case…I have just always referred to it as singular. Maybe it’s a generational thing? Is it really that bad? Language evolves with the people who speak it, so maybe this is a case of evolution in action. I’m probably not going to “correct” myself, but I’d love to hear what you think about this topic in the comments.)
Write 4 blog posts.
Again—this one’s pretty obvious. I’m on track to publish this on the first of the month, so hopefully it bodes well for the rest of them!
Be active 15 times.
This is how I’ll use the “activity tracker” on the left page of my monthly spread. Especially now that I’m not out in the forest 4 days a week (which feels very bittersweet), I need to break up the desk-sitting monotony and move my body. As the weather turns colder, it can be easy for me to get into a routine that doesn’t include exercise, but I always remember how much better it makes me feel when I get back into it.
Pitch a story.
Since my life doesn’t *entirely* revolve around grad school, I’m trying to pursue my interest in journalism (and specifically science writing) in my free time. That means pitching stories! I’m pretty rusty, but that’s no reason not to try.
Gather all landscape variables for LANDIS initialization.
This is a pretty technical one. If any of you readers are familiar with the LANDIS-II forest model, please let me know if you have any tips!
Looking at this list, I am realizing that it’s pretty self development-focused, whether that growth is personal or professional. I should make some goals that reflect outward, too. I do volunteer weekly with a local organization, but I would love to do more…actually, this realization just prompted me to sign up for a volunteer shift tomorrow. Exciting!
Let me know what your goals are for this month in the comments below. Also, if you have any ideas of blog posts you’d like to see, I would love to hear them. Happy fall!
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