Plan with Me | May 2024 Bullet Journal | 10 Minute Setup

Hey everyone, my name is Matt and welcome to the May 2024 Bullet Journal Plan With Me video. I'm going to be showing you my monthly layout, a new tracker that I'm using this month, do a little review of April and a little preview of what's coming in May. Buckle up. I'm excited to share this video with you. What you're looking at is my standard 2-column layout, and this is really simple and easy to use and set up. All you do is make 1 column with all the days of the month and then another column next to it with the corresponding days of the week. So you'll see like for May 1st, Wednesday, W for Wednesday, and so on and so forth. What I'm using this for is almost like you would a wall calendar where you're just putting down like the primary or like big unique events for the day. And I gotta tell y'all, May is nuts. For our family. We started calling it Mayhem a few, you know, several years ago because it's my wife's birthday. It is Mother's Day. It is our anniversary. It is our oldest son's birthday. It's Memorial Day. And coming 2024, most likely baby girl might be, might be coming, might be coming in a little early. The other thing that you'll see on the right-hand page is another single column for the dates., and then a row, you know, again, like all the way across, like the first Wednesday events. I'll get to another tracker in a moment. And then daily highlight is what you see on the opposite page. And if we go back and look at my April highlights, actually filled them all out this month, uh, instead of getting about halfway through like I did in March. But this is just where things that I enjoyed for the day, a memory, a short little one-sentence journal entry, if there was you know, a highlight or something that was really fun or cool. That's where I put this in.

If you want to be around a bunch of other bullet journal enthusiasts, practitioners like myself, then I highly recommend you joining the BuJo U community. This is a place where bullet journal practitioners from around the world gather to connect on their layouts, their habits, life intentions, goals. These are things that it feels kind of lonely to do on your own, and Bullet Journal U is a place where You can talk about the intention of your work, the intention of your life, the why behind why you're doing what you're doing. All these things come up all the time in the Bullet Journal community, so I highly recommend you checking it out. You can actually get started with the Bullet Journal Basics course, which is fantastic. I've been through it. It's fantastic. I said fantastic twice. That's how good it is. And you can get $50 off your purchase just for watching this YouTube channel. Just use the code Matt Ragland when you check out and look for the link in the description below.

Back to May though, that is what the daily highlight might look like, just a single sentence, really simple. The other thing that you're seeing here are these 4 other elements of life that I'm tracking because I talked about this back, I think, in the March plan with me video that I stopped tracking things like journaling or reading or workouts were a big one because I was pretty great at all of those habits. I didn't be like, yeah, I got another workout. Like, you know, it is a habit. It is important for me, but I wasn't getting any benefit out of like checking a box on my bullet journal or making an X in a tracker to be like, yep, worked out again. Instead, I'm thinking about the hard habits that I want to track. So it's limiting alcohol intake. It is like looking at my bank balances, my credit card statements, be like, okay, I'm just going to— I'm going to become more familiar with and friendlier with my money and my financial statements. I want to become more purposeful in the amount of time that I'm spending in prayer and meditation and focusing on my mindset and what am I giving my attention to? So those are like the 3, the 3 like hard habits that I'm tracking. And then the other one that I'm focusing on is just like, what's, what's the day rating like? So I just use a very simple like plus, equal, minus. If it's a good day, it's a plus. If it's a fine day, equals. If it's not a great day, then it's a minus or a negative.

Now, if it's a really good day, I'll go plus plus.

And if it's a really bad day, then I'll go, I'll go minus minus. And then I count all that up like just as a general plus minus at the end of the month. And it looks like right now for April, I'm recording this a couple of days before the month ends, but let me, let me count this up real quick. Okay. So I'm on the 29th. I can, unless something changes, this is just going to be a fine day, but you know, not a plus day, not a negative day. That puts me at 21 for the month so far. So at the most, I'm probably looking at 22 or 23 as as an overall. And I'm looking back and seeing in March that my plus minus for March with an extra day, mind you, was at 21. So, uh, about the same between March and April in terms of day rating. Interesting to think about how could I bump that up a couple more points, get to like 23, maybe 25. We'll say, like I mentioned, a lot of celebrations coming in May, and so potential for a lot of plus-plus days and maybe getting, getting a little bit higher into that mid-20s instead of the low 20s.

The other thing that I want to tell you about the Bullet Journal community is that it's run on Mighty Networks, which is an incredible platform for running your community. And there are a lot of different reasons that I love Mighty Networks. I've talked about it before, but the really good use of AI to generate like icebreaker Q&A questions, polls and topics, things that it's going to learn from the way that you're interacting with and the way that your community is interacting with each other. You can get these like auto-engagement questions going because for me, one of the toughest things, one of the like limiting beliefs that I had about community when I got started with it was like, oh, I have to, I have to show up every day and I have to like not just show up and interact, but like be the tone setter and I have to like be the star and I have to ask all the questions. Well, that's not really the case, and Mighty Networks makes that really easy. So it takes a lot of the pressure off myself in the Father Fire community that I have. But I can also see those things happening in Bullet Journal U as well. The other cool thing that you can do on Mighty Networks is host courses. So the Bullet Journal Basics course is also hosted in BuJo U, where the community is. And so being able to give your community members, your course students, the same experience in the same platform is really powerful. And that's something that Mighty Networks does really well. So if you're a content creator and you are looking for a platform to build your community, to host your courses, and you want to do those in the same place in a very beautifully designed and well-functioning, like very smooth, easy-to-use platform, then I can't recommend Mighty Networks enough. Check out the link in the description below to learn more. And let me know in the comments if you have any questions or just email me.

Be happy to talk to you about it. I also competed in a jiu-jitsu tournament, my first competitive tournament as a blue belt, and also the first one that I had done in about 18 months. I took silver medal, so I won my first match there. You know, they're not a ton of entrants, but I won my first match and then lost in the finals, which I was disappointed by. But one of the things that I talked about in my newsletter last week, and by the way, if you haven't signed up to my newsletter, make sure you do that in the description below. I talked about the, like, mission of continual improvement and growing and pushing yourself. And jiu-jitsu has definitely been something like that, some— something like that for— and jiu-jitsu has definitely been like that for me. It's something that I never did any combat sports or taekwondo or wrestling or any of that growing up. I was just playing ball sports, team sports. And so to start something very intense, very physical, like Brazilian jiu-jitsu in my late 30s. I think I was 38 when I started and continued to progress and grow. And it has been something that I've really enjoyed and something that has been a big way of continual growth and education in my own life, of trying something new, of being like a beginner and like feeling kind of foolish and very underskilled many times. Because usually when you get older, you try and reduce the number of things that you're not very good at so you can just live in your zone of genius. And I think that's very true, but there's something very special and very important about becoming a beginner again and remembering what it's like and experiencing that level of failure in something that's pretty low stakes. Like, it doesn't really matter in my life if I get a lot better at jiu-jitsu or not. Like, I want to, but it doesn't, it doesn't really impact how I am as a father, how like my business goes. Now, you could say the discipline, and yes, all of that, but it's It's more of the tangential, more of the like discipline and learning how to learn aspects of jiu-jitsu that is helping me in all, in all other parts of life. But I could fail at it over and over again. It's not going to change like how, how my like business goes or how I am as a dad. In fact, in some ways it's, it's kind of interesting to think about how it, how my failure at jiu-jitsu could positively impact my parenting and when I think about my son who was at, who was at the tournament, he's almost 9. When he watches me, you know, win and then lose, when he watches how I respond to losing. And yeah, I kind of got, kind of got whipped, made some mistakes, couldn't recover from them. And just seeing me kind of on both ends of the spectrum there and seeing me like not be able to do some things that I wanted to and how that, how I respond to that, that like failure is also a really good lesson for my son to see. How I respond to that. The last thing I wanna show you for the May Plan With Me is a new tracker. This is like a big grid for outdoor hours. And this isn't something that I'll track every single month, but May, weather's beautiful, gonna be outside a lot with the kids. Like I said, also a lot of celebratory events happening. And so every single block on this grid equals 1 hour and there are 60 blocks on this page because I have a goal, like a minimum number of hours outside each month is 40, 40, 45, which is, you know, shakes out to about an hour and a half per day. Now, some days I may not get out very much at all and some days I'll be out 3 to 4 hours. So it tends to balance. The real like stretch goal that I'm going for is 60 hours. That's how many, if I can fill this grid up, I'll be really happy. The one that I looked at when I was tracking this the week before this, I did 18 hours over 7 days.

So that was a little, that was a little over 2.

That's like 2 and 2.5-ish for that week. Now again, like April, May, they are the best months in Nashville where I live. Fall is great, but spring in Nashville is the greatest season in Nashville. So I'm outside a lot in April and May and, you know, inside a little bit more as it's blazing hot in the summer. But you can see that I'm just like, the reason that these blocks are a little bit bigger is so that I can write down just a single word or a couple of words about like what I did during that hour. So did I do a workout? Did we go for a walk on the greenway? Did we go for a hike? Was it just hanging out, grilling? I took a nap on the porch, fixed some lights outside. Uh, my middle son Ben is getting really good at riding his bike, so we get outside and I run and he rides his bike. So that's a couple of things that, uh, I'm gonna be tracking. My intention for May is presence and preparation. Now, presence can actually have two meanings for me this month, but they're all focused on the same thing, which is the number of celebratory events that my family has. Like I said, there's 3 important events that involve my wife. It's her birthday, like in a span of usually 9 to 10 days, she has her birthday, Mother's Day, and our anniversary. So being really attentive and present with her during those times, let her know how special she is and how much we value her and how much I love her. That's really important. And then like for giving actual presents, it's a time of presents for birthdays. My oldest son, his birthday is this month, and there's a chance that baby girl is going to come this month. And it's an anniversary. There's all kinds of stuff going on. And so to be present with the people who are most important to me, to give good presents, also through my presence, but you know, you're getting the gist of it. And then the other part is preparation. Yeah, I've mentioned that our our youngest child is coming soon. First, first girl. So we're going to have 4 kids. And so to be really intentional about how I'm preparing to take a little bit of time off to make sure that the team that I work with at Good People Digital and Hey Creator have a plan in place so that they can, you know, keep everything going while I'm away. That's going to be really important as well. So my intention for May 2024 is presence with the people that I care about and preparation for the people that I work with and also the customers and members that we serve in the creator community. I'd be really keen to hear what your intention is for this upcoming month.

What kind of goals do you have?

What kind of projects are you working on? Please let me know in the— I was about to say in the description, but in the comments below. Be happy to hear from you. I respond to almost all the comments that I get. And then the other thing I'm going to be doing a, I'm going to be doing a review of the Bullet Journal Stealth Set. It came out last month. I just got a copy of it, but man, I mean, look at all black erday coming to you from the Bullet Journal. That includes an all-black pen. Just tremendous, beautiful stuff. So let me know if you have the Stealth Set. We'll go through that together, and I hope that you have a great month ahead, and I'll see you in the next video.