In this video Matt Ragland walks viewers through his April Bullet Journal setup, using the month’s theme of “rebound” to reflect on a challenging March and outline adjustments for the new month. He reviews his habit tracker, noting missed exercise days, reduced activity due to travel, daylight‑saving disruptions, and a successful 25% cut in food spending. He evaluates a time‑tracking experiment where he tried embedding a time log in his journal, deeming it a failure and deciding to revert to portable field notes. Matt then reveals his refreshed April layout: a day‑by‑day calendar grid with multilingual weekday labels, daily habit sections, and new pie‑chart trackers for creativity, relationships, and side‑hustle time. He emphasizes that effective bullet journaling doesn’t require expensive tools, showcasing improvised circles made from bottle caps and straight‑edges from credit cards. The video also celebrates a business milestone—$1 million in monthly recurring revenue at ConvertKit—and announces a giveaway of four Baron Fig Confidant notebooks, explaining the share‑to‑earn‑entries mechanic. Throughout, Matt encourages community interaction, invites comments on personal rebounds, and directs viewers to download productivity packs from bulletjournalguide.com.
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Hey everyone, my name is Matt, and thanks for watching another one of my Bullet Journal productivity videos. In this week's episode, I'm going to be showing you how I'm planning and scheduling in the Bullet Journal for April. Some of the things I'm doing differently from March, some of the things that I learned and did well, didn't do as well in March, and how I'm carrying that forward into April. The theme of this month for me is rebound. There are some things that I didn't do as well in March. You're gonna see that in the habit tracker, and some of the things I did with time tracking, or didn't do. March was kind of a tough month. For me, I'm not afraid to tell you that. And I think it's important to talk a little bit about that. Sometimes it can feel like you're having a bad day, and that can become a bad week, and then a bad month, and then like that can kind of keep creeping up on you. What's nice is that if you've been following along in this journey with me, and I know a lot of you have been going through the 10 blocks and the time tracking challenge, what it really helps me with is that when I'm having a bad week, and maybe I haven't had that great of a month, is that it helps me reset a lot faster. So that's something that we're going to be talking about today. The other thing I want to tell you about before we actually start going through the Bullet Journal is that I want to do a giveaway for 4 Baron Fig Confidant notebooks. So these hardcover notebooks, this is actually the box that they come in. I'm going to do my best to ship them anywhere in the world, so go ahead and sign up, tell your friends about it. The cool thing about the giveaway tool that I'm using here is that the more that you share it with friends, the more entries that you can get, and the more that you can increase your own chance of winning. So go ahead and check that out if you're interested. And I said, I love the Baron fig. It's all I've been using this year, and I'm going to be giving away 4 of those notebooks. Let's go ahead and jump into April and see how things are going to be this month. Let's first look at the habit tracker that we have right here. As you can see, let's compare it to February. Not as much filled in. There was, there was one day, unfortunately, so far, the 22nd here, where I didn't do any of my 5 habits. I didn't exercise quite as much in February. I only missed 1, 2, 3, like 5 days. I missed 4, like I missed 4 days in the first week. Now granted, down here is when I did my marathon. And so I was, I was resting, but even still, I missed 3 days here, 2 days here too. It has not been as much of an active month for me, and I'm definitely feeling the effects of that. I just feel I don't feel quite as good. It's crazy to think that even though it takes more from me to get up and to exercise, I find that I get more back from it in terms of energy and clarity. Still journaling a good bit, but just overall did not stay on top of my habits as much as I did in February and definitely felt the effects of that. One great thing that did happen, just a little note down here, is that we reduced our food spending by about 25% in March. And so that was a big win for us. We were able to put that into savings into our savings account. And so love doing that, that was a big win. A couple of things to point out that I've started noting in the, in the month on the habit tracker here is anything that's syncing up with maybe a little bit of a lull. And so did, for whatever reason, every year I seem to struggle a little bit around daylight savings time. So need to know that going into 2019, I may carve out a little bit more space for that. Went down to Florida, so not as much on the habits. Just anytime I'm traveling, especially like for me that was a family trip, and so a lot of focus there on family time, which is great, but just need to know it. And then I did a Ragnar Relay, and so that, that whole, that whole time was a lot of fun but was like a complete wash of like trying to stay in my habits and tracking time just was non-existent because it was just all doing that. One thing that I did that I ended up adding in March after the video that I did last time were these like pie chart circles.. And so this one specifically is for the videos for Bullet Journal. So did the planning one, did the morning routine, wrote more on an email course, and then additional written content. So just filling this in to let me know that I'm making progress here. And this one was supposed to be for kind of relationship time, and it didn't end up getting filled in. So that is, that's not great. One thing that you'll remember from March that I decided to test was adding my time tracker in here. Instead of having it be a separate little notebook. I can say the result of this experiment of having it in the Bullet Journal instead of in a, like, tiny notebook like this one for these little field notes, for example— thumbs down on that. Man, that's a terrible thumbs down. That did not go well. So X on that. I'm going to be switching back to, you know, just some kind of field notes for, um, for April in terms of my time tracking. It's just not as portable. Like, this just goes in my back pocket. No problem. And so just makes it easier for me to track my time, and that is really important to me. But everything else, you know, top tasks, all that goes over here. What did I learn? What's the main thing for the week? Asking that has been really useful for me. Here's some more examples of what I did during the week in terms of top tasks and time tracking. Again, it still works in here. I just don't carry this around as much. I'm still going to be testing it. One cool thing that we hit in March was a huge milestone for the company, was $1 million monthly recurring revenue. It took 1,902 days and 18,881 customers at ConvertKit to, to hit that mark. Alright, so let's look at April. What am I doing differently? One thing that I'm doing differently right from the start is how I lay out the month. So notice in March, I just did a really simple like week by week layout right here. And what I'm doing in April instead is more like a month, a monthly grid starting out on Sunday the 1st. Easter, and then just a Monday through Saturday, Sunday, laying it out this way is what I decided to do. Now, just to keep my brain on its toes, I have a different language here for each of them. So English, Spanish, French, German, and then just one word of Japanese, Nichiyoubi. It's probably a terrible pronunciation, but there it is. So just something to think about. It helps me learn a little bit. Just subtle, subtle learning different days of the week in other languages. Daily habits still here, and then that pie chart for creativity. One thing that I want to point out to you, and I hope that you've seen that this is a theme for all of the videos that I do, I do with you. You don't need a lot of fancy stuff to make a bullet journal work for you. You don't need a bunch of fancy layouts. I mean, even though I like, even though I add more color lately, this is still just a relatively simple layout so that you can concentrate on what matters to you. Like, people, people have asked me in past videos, like, hey, what kind of circle template did you use? Both of these are basically just jar or bottle caps and covers. Like, this is one of my son's, like, sippy cups, and they make a really good— it's a circle. So just think of, think of things that you use that is, that is just a circle, and don't let that be an excuse for you. So, like, try and center it up on the grid. And then make your circle that way. So there we go. Got a circle. And people ask like, what kind of ruler do you use? Well, this actually came with socks. I don't know why, but I'm just using this one. I might upgrade, but it doesn't really matter. And then I can just go ahead and like, you can use anything as a straight edge. There's lots of times that I've used something like a Costco card to make to make that straight line. So it doesn't need to be something that you spend a lot of money or think about a lot. It could be— you can make circles with a bottle cap and straight lines with some kind of credit card or your executive member Costco card. Yes, very, very well off. So that's how I'm laying out April. Everything else is going to be the same. I am still using my 10 blocks over here. This will start April 2nd, and then I am Even though I'm going to be carrying, I'm going to be carrying that Field Notes with me to track my time. I'm still making notes about it here and here in just my daily, like Monday top tasks. I'm still making notes about my time up here. So just more, more mini blocks up here, and then I'll have my agenda. So it's just what I know about Monday already. 10 AM update, 11 AM team call. Here are the biggest changes for me for April besides this monthly layout right here, making it more like a day-by-day calendar instead of a week-by-week spread that I've done here in the past, adding in for real these pie charts to mark my like relationship time and also my side hustle time is going to go in here like I started doing after the fact in March. And the other thing is that just being— just getting back to the basics of like tracking my time, being disciplined. Totally honest with you, got away from it a little bit. Like, I'll show you I'll show you right here. I didn't like fill out my 10 blocks this week. I feel silly about it. I didn't like— actually, this is the current week. This is the current week as I'm filming this. But here's like March 12th through 16th. I didn't like— I knew what I was doing, but I didn't fill it all out. The weekend that I did that Ragnar, that, that long relay race, I didn't track my time at all. I didn't fill out my relationship pie chart here, even though that sounds silly to say, to say out loud. So the main thing that I'm going to take away from this that I'm looking to do this month is that I could tell from my habits, from the way that I did or didn't track my time throughout the month, that I felt a little off. I didn't feel quite as productive or disciplined. And that's not to say that I always have to feel like super on top of everything. But friends, there is a value in being disciplined and focusing on the things that matter to you. Because it's not that I was doing anything, like, more important, it's that I let little things get in the way of the big things that matter to me. So, that's what I want us to focus on, that's what I'm going to be focusing on, is kind of rebounding in April, and doing things that are, getting back to doing things that are important to me. All right everyone, thank you so much for watching. Don't forget, if you want to download the 10 blocks, or the time, start the time tracking challenge, go ahead and go to bulletjournalguide.com, it's going to be linked up here, and also in the description below. You can get all of the productivity pack downloads. And this week I'm going to be giving away 4 Baron Fig Confidant notebooks. That's right. The one that I've been, I've been using this entire year. I love it. You know, you've, I mean, you've seen everything. You just saw it. It's a great notebook, great company. I'm going to be giving away 4 of these. So go ahead and enter in the link below. Okay. This will just be for the giveaway. And like I said, remember from the beginning that the more that you share, your special link with friends, family, people on social media, the more entries that you get. And sharing actually increases your opportunity to win. So let me know if you have any questions. Let me know in the comments what you think about April. Is there anything that you're looking to rebound from, whether it's maybe something with work, relationship, anything like that? Go ahead and leave a comment below, and I'd love to chat with everyone about this. I love your comments, and they really give me I mean, they make me happy. I like interacting with all of you. So thanks for being a part of this community. And like I said, go ahead and give this a thumbs up. Give it a subscription if you haven't watched any of these videos before. I do this every week, every 10-ish days. So usually 3 or 4 videos every single month. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you next time. Bye!
