December Plan with Me! Bullet Journal Baby Planning

Hi everyone, my name is Matt, and welcome to another Bullet Journal productivity video. And this month, it's December. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, whatever you celebrate. I am so excited for this season. It's one of my favorite times of year. And as I'm going through my December plan with me, I'm showing you the main thing that is going to be different about this month compared to other months, and many other months, because this month, really any day, I could get a call right now. That's how close my wife is to giving birth to our second child. A lot of you have seen Kanan, our oldest. He's 3. And so what I did this month that's a little bit different than most other months is that the special thing that I did was I made a list of everything that I need to do and bring once the time starts to occur, once delivery, once labor starts to kick off. And it's probably a very guy thing to say, let's kick off delivery, but That is neither here nor there right now, but you just know, those of you that have been through like the birth of a child, you know that when your wife says it's time, that your mind starts to go a million miles an hour. So I'm going to show you how I thought through the things that I need to bring, the people that I need to call, the different scenarios, like is this happening at night, is it happening during the day? That's the main thing that I put into this month's Bullet Journal. I'm just going to show you some of those things. The other thing is that with the busyness and the different way that this month is going to be with the baby and the holidays, I'm going to really simplify this month's layout, and I'm just going to use a classic bullet journal layout like you would see in the Bullet Journal Method. So with the bullets and signifiers and the circles, everything that you would normally see that is in a bullet journal. So a lot simpler because I just need to concentrate on having a new kid. So let's go ahead and jump in. I'm going to show you everything that I'm doing. Here we go. Alright everyone, let's go ahead and get started. Before we jump into December, I want to show you a quick overview, something that I haven't done great at is a quick overview of how November went for me. So you can see that I did a pretty good job with my habits here. I did a great job with exercise until Thanksgiving Day. And it's not what you think. It's not like, oh man, it's the holidays, it's time to kick back and take it easy on the old exercise. Not the case at all. I actually got sick here and it was very bad. No one likes to get sick over the holidays, so I'm just gonna put an S-I-C-K. Sick sucks. And that actually lasted quite, quite a while, way longer than normal. You can also see this reflected here in my— you can also see this reflected here in my mood tracker that this whole week my son wasn't sleeping well. And it was just a lot of OKs to nopes on the tracker right here. So that's okay. Those things happen. I am pulling myself out of with lots of medicine. Pulling myself out of the muck. Everything else went pretty well on track even with all of that, doing the things that I've been talking about for the last several months, outcomes here, tasks by day, and something that I'm going to talk more about in a minute is that something that I'm going to start doing in December and started actually this week is just trying to do a more traditional Bullet Journal layout and setup. So you can see I'm doing like a circle for an event, a dash for a note, a bullet, and then an X over it for when I accomplish these things. And so this is something that I'm going to be, that I'm going to be working on and trying out in December. There's a couple of reasons for that. So you can see this is all, this is all really normal. I'm testing out this traditional Bullet Journal method right here, and I have I have liked it. It keeps things really tight. The reason that I— and the reason that I'm doing that is because— dun-da-da— get back to this in a second. Any day now, friends, we're gonna have a baby. I know that the day and the whole month of December is going to be different because of this. Your whole life is going to be different, Matt. That's true, that's true. It will be different because two now, not one, two kids. But right here I have my baby list because I know that when my wife says, hey, it's time to go to the hospital, there are— there already need to have been so many things that have happened and are prepared, so we just grab and go. So you can see we have— I have hospital bags here. So every single one of us have our bag ready to go. So you can see, you know, bullet X'd out, ready to roll, and other bag with chargers, got the snack bag in the car, iPad, yoga mat, um, those kind, those kind of things. The other thing that I have down here is what are the different scenarios just so that I can be ready. So like if, uh, if labor starts at night, who we're gonna call, uh, if it's during the day, if it's like, hey, we have to go ASAP, just everyone get to the hospital. People that we're going to call, and then other to-dos, just things that have come up. So this is my baby list. These are the things that have already— that need to have already happened, or need to— like, this is what needs to happen when labor begins. And the reason that I wanted to go ahead and write this down is when your wife says it's time, you don't really have time to like think of new stuff. You just want to look at the list and and get going. Coming back then to a very normal layout, what you're used to seeing from me at this point, of the month, the habits, the mood tracker. You can see I've been doing this for a few months. Here's November again. This is the way that I see the big picture of the events that are happening during the month, the habits that I'm tracking: exercise, reading, journaling, Meditating. I did a terrible job, as in not at all, with meditating in November. And then the mood tracker right here, and I just do a really simple mood tracker. So green for good, orange for okay. This would normally be yellow, but yellow is a little hard to see on a notebook in general, and especially on a video. So I do it for you guys. And then bad or nope is the red. I need to, I need to keep an eye on those days and those stretches. You can see again that I had one last week, but that was mostly because of sickness. So we're still going to have fitness tracking right here. I haven't done all of those, I haven't done all those grids yet, but you can see that so far I've done a pretty good job in November, but the, the stretch of sick really threw me off. The thing that's different but the same with the Bullet Journal method that I'll be using, like OG Bullet Journal stuff, is I'll just be doing, say, like Monday. This will be December 3rd. Will I have a baby then? Who knows? Monday, December 3rd. So, I'll still have the header for the day, block it off, but then I will do the event circles. So, it would be 10A, Marketing. Oops. 11:00 AM. Success. So I'll get— I'll still get my meetings out first. And then I think I've got 2:30 PM. Corey. So I'll still get my events in here first, and then I will just start adding in the bullets. So, add one-on-one items. So then I'll just start going, going through. This will just be like a normal, a normal bullet journal method of having the bullets, having the— if something doesn't get done, you have this migrating arrow there over the bullet. The only thing that I have trouble with still when it comes to the Classic Bullet Journal method is that this tends to get, at least for me, tends to get a little messy, at least in the way that I like to look at it. I do think this looks and feels a little messier, and it is hard for me to pick out the things that I know I don't have to do right away but are due on a specific day. So something that I'm doing to try and fix this in December is that for each week, I'm going to have this like tasks by day. So for something that needs to be done on a specific day, but like I'm not going— I can't— the way that a bullet journal method, like the classic method would work, you wouldn't like pre-put in your days. And so that's why I'm going to— I couldn't just like put in Tuesday, do this thing, because it doesn't go with the natural flow. And so that's why I have this little tasks by day bar chart down here. And so this is just like 3, you know, 3 lines for each day. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So then when something occurs that I know needs to happen on a particular day, I will just go ahead and add it in right here. So that's what I'm doing for the month of December as I plan. Still have the normal Month at a Glance, Habits, Mood, Fitness Tracking is going to go in here. I'm going to stick with the same bar style that I did in November. The Baby List, Notes and Tasks—this is like the brain dump for the month right here—can expand as needed. And then Outcomes for the Week, Tasks by Specific Day, and then just a again, a standard, more classic Bullet Journal method as a day-by-day tracker. Thanks so much for watching this December Plan With Me video. If you have any questions about the work that I'm doing, or how I lay things out, or think through problems, please leave a question below in the comments. I'd be happy to chat with you. I love all the comments that are left. It really lets me know that the kind of stuff that I'm talking about is resonating with you, and if there's something that you have additional questions about, I'll make more videos about it. And so, please feel free to leave a question. Go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe if you're here for the first time. There are a lot of great videos coming soon. There's the 2019 planning video for big goals. There is even the small habits video that's going to be coming out soon. And next week, there's going to be the Bullet Journal Guy gift guide for 2018. So, Keep an eye out. That's 3 videos that are going to be coming over the next few weeks. Can't wait for you to see them and to be able to continue to share this content with you. See you next time. Bye.