2025 Journal Setup Guide Pt.1

It’s that time of year again, 2025 journal setup season! So along with everyone else, this month, I thought I’d share some ideas, tips, things to consider, and, of course, my own selection of spreads for 2025. 

This is part 1 of my journal setup guide and will focus on pre-planning. This part is the grunt of the effort when setting up a new journal but once it’s done it makes everything else much easier. 

Part 2 will be posted next month and include the more decorative and aesthetic elements along with actually putting pen to paper and showing the final result.

But before all that, let’s jump into the planning!

Step 1: Brainstorm

The first step is deciding what spreads you’re going to include in your journal and writing them all out.

Some questions to consider:

• What worked for me this year?
• What didn’t work for me this year?
• Is there anything I can replace it with?
• What is something I’d like to add to this setup?

If this is your first time setting up a journal then the question to consider would be:

What kinds of things do I want to capture in this journal?

• any habits you want to track
• goals you want to accomplish in 2025
• any memories you want to document

Some staple spreads I always have and would recommend for anyone just getting started are:

Goal Spreads:

-Focus Group Goals: Choose 3-4 categories of your life you want to focus on and then list out 2-3 things under each category that you can do to improve your life in those areas

Example:

Writing:

-Do monthly writing prompt exercise

-NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month challenge)

Self-Care:

-Skincare sundays

-At least 1 hour of rest before bed

-25 in 25’ (a list of 25 goals and activities you want to complete before the end of 2025) this can be a mix of fun activities you want to do anyway, new things you want to try, and goal-oriented action items

Example:

-volunteer

-take a class

-try out a sushi place

-Monthly Notes (more info on this blog post: https://sneakersnshakes.blogspot.com/2022/05/monthly-checklist-deep-dive-into-may.html)

Tracker Spreads:

-Workout tracker (including what kind of workout)

-Cycle tracking

-Expenditure tracking (including what category the money I spent falls under)

General Spreads:

-Monthly calendar spreads to track events

-Year In Review spread to track birthdays, events across the entire year

-Future Me Problems List to hold projects/tasks

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about the things you can include. If you’re looking for more ideas on spreads you can include, this video, this channel in general, is a perfect place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjCKYq7DGuo&list=PLFmDbK4-NLnmB7ro6oV38l8gy210K6RQ6 

Below are all the spreads I brainstormed (just wrote on a scratch piece of paper) that I will be including in my 2025 journal setup.

Step 2. Layouts

Once you have a good idea of what you want to include, then you can start thinking about how it’s going to look and what the best way to capture those topics is. 

The best way to do that is to research. And by that mean, I went on to youtube and watched videos of other people’s spreads and decided which ones I want to include.

Here is a link to a great video about different layout ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8WuWT6O7a0&list=PLFmDbK4-NLnmB7ro6oV38l8gy210K6RQ6&index=5

Then I listed out all the spreads I’m going to include and put the layout for each one next to it in parentheses. Sometimes I wrote a description of the layout, sometimes I sketched out a small design, and other times I just wrote the video that I would like to reference for the layout.

I also took this time to list out the order these would appear in my journal and added if some of them would be on the same page together.

Below is my layout planning list:

Step 3: Preliminary Design

The first thing you need to decide before you start designing is the actual notebook you will be journaling in. Specifically, what size is it?

A5 is the most common journal size (5.83in x 8.27in). I specifically wanted a bigger size that that, so I got a B5 journal (6.9in x 9.8in).

(A side note: you do not need to have a fancy journal, you can use a simple lined notebook as well. I’ve been journaling since 2018 and this time I’ve gotten a fancy dot-grid journal.)

(I got this beautiful journal from Notebook Therapy, in case anyone is curious I have linked it here: https://notebooktherapy.com/collections/back-in-stock-1/products/tsuki-sakura-moon-bullet-journal?variant=41351632191603

This is not sponsored, this is my first time getting something from them. They were the only place that actually had the B5 size I was looking for with a cute design.  I found a youtuber who had a 10% off code with MOCHIBUJO10 and used that to buy it. 

Usually youtubers will have codes to get you at least 10% off, I know JashiiCorrin who I keep linking in this blog post has ones for Archer and Olive and the Washi Tape Shop)

Once you have the journal size decided, you can begin to plan out the design of the layouts. How dot-grid boxes will each box or section take up? Basically designing how each of the spreads you have will fit on the page and how much room do you have for each topic.

Since my journal is dot-grid, I used this handy tool (again from JashiiCorrin) that allowed me to download a Google Sheet template designer: https://jashii.com/products/bullet-journal-spread-planner

From that I was able to size out my layouts and plan how each page is going to look. It’s easier to do this digitally before starting to pencil in and erase, but you can skip the digital element and start penciling in as well.

Below are some screenshots of some of my designs:

-.-

And that’s the end of the planning process. Next month we’ll get into the fun stuff, like decorations, color palettes and final results.

To prep for that I have also gotten stickers and washi tape from Notebook Therapy. I’ll link what I got here:

https://notebooktherapy.com/collections/washi-tape/products/tsuki-sunlit-mystery-washi-tape-set

https://notebooktherapy.com/collections/stickers/products/tsuki-sunlit-mystery-sticker-set

But again you do NOT need to buy a bunch of fancy stuff some colored pens and markers is enough to still make your setup look nice.

I hope this helped in your 2025 journal setup process and I’ll see you next month with part 2!