Setting up a bullet journal weekly spread

A weekly spread is the middle layer of the bullet journal method: more structured than a daily log, more immediate than a monthly. It is also the layer people spend the most time redesigning, which is usually a sign the design is not settled rather than that it needs to be beautiful.

What actually goes in one

The functional minimum is smaller than the internet suggests:

• Seven day sections
• Somewhere for tasks that belong to the week rather than a day
• Somewhere for notes

Everything beyond that is optional and worth adding only after you have noticed you need it. Habit trackers, mood trackers, water, gratitude and meal strips are all reasonable and all easier to add once the base works.

The most common failure is designing a spread with nine modules, using three of them, and concluding that the method does not work.

Dot pitch, and why text spans two rows

Every major dot-grid notebook uses a 5.0 mm pitch: Leuchtturm1917, Rhodia, Moleskine and Scribbles That Matter all agree, with a few outliers at 4 and 6 mm.

Five millimetres is below the minimum for comfortable adult handwriting, which is about 6.35 mm at the narrow-ruled floor. So bullet journal body text normally spans two dot rows, giving a 10 mm line, and headings span three or four.

This is worth knowing before you plan a layout, because a section eight dots tall is four lines of writing, not eight. Most cramped-looking spreads are the result of counting dots rather than lines.

Two layouts that work

Days as rows. The whole week down the left as seven horizontal bands, with a column on the right for weekly tasks and notes. Easiest to draw, most writing room per day, and the one to start with.

Days as columns. Seven vertical columns across a spread. Looks better, holds less: a column across a single A5 page is about 20 mm wide, which is four handwritten characters. Across a full spread it is workable.

If you write more than a few words per day, rows will suit you better regardless of which looks nicer online.

The case for printing one

Drawing a spread from scratch every week is part of the appeal for some people and the reason others quietly stop after a month.

A printed spread is useful in three situations:

Practising a layout before committing it to a bound notebook, where a mistake is permanent.

Keeping a consistent spread without redrawing it weekly, once you have found one that works.

Running the method in a binder rather than a stitched notebook, which lets you reorder and remove pages.

None of these is a betrayal of the method, which is about the logging system rather than the drawing.

Practical drawing notes

Rule in pencil first if you are drawing on dot grid. The dots are a guide, not a ruling, and freehand lines wander.

Count in dots, write in pairs. A 10-dot-tall section is five writing lines.

Leave the right-hand third alone on your first few spreads. You will discover what you actually want there, and it is easier to add a module than to remove one you have already ruled.

Do not date it in advance. Dating a spread on Sunday for a week you have not lived is how you end up with a beautiful empty page on Thursday. Date it as you go.

Migration

At the end of the week, the method asks you to look at unfinished tasks and decide: do it, schedule it, move it forward, or cross it out.

The crossing-out is the part people skip and the part that does the work. Migrating everything forward automatically turns a weekly spread into an accumulating list, and the accumulation is what makes people abandon it. If a task has been migrated three times, the honest answer is usually that you are not going to do it.

If you want the grid without the drawing

Our printable spread is a true 5 mm dot grid with day dividers sitting on the dot pitch, so anything you draw lines up. It is available in Letter, A4, A5 and Half Letter, and A5 is the traditional bullet journal size for good reason: it is large enough for a full week and small enough to carry.

How long a spread should take to draw

Fifteen minutes at most, once you have settled on a layout. If yours is taking an hour, you are designing rather than planning, which is a perfectly good hobby and a poor weekly routine.

The spreads that circulate online are largely made to be photographed. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is worth knowing you are looking at a craft object rather than a working document, and comparing your Tuesday-evening spread to one is not a fair comparison.

Signifiers and the key

The method’s notation is small: a dot for a task, a circle for an event, a dash for a note, an x for done, an arrow for migrated. Adding a priority marker and one for delegated covers almost everything else.

The reason to keep the key short is that a notation you have to remember is a notation you will abandon under pressure, which is exactly when you most need the log to be quick.

Weekly and daily together

A weekly spread does not replace daily logs; it holds what belongs to the week rather than to a day. Deadlines, the two or three things that would make the week a success, appointments.

Some people run both. Some run the weekly spread alone and log tasks straight into the day sections. The second is faster and suits weeks that are mostly appointments; the first suits weeks with a lot of small tasks.

Trying a layout without committing

This is the strongest practical case for a printed spread. A layout that looks right on a screen frequently turns out to be wrong once you write in it: the sections are the wrong proportions, or the notes column is on the side you do not reach for.

Printing a candidate and living with it for a week costs one sheet of paper. Ruling it into a bound notebook and discovering the same thing costs a spread you now have to look at for a year.