Moving into a new journal is an important moment in every journaler’s life. Without a new journal my life is prone to… disorder. So I always have a new one ready to go when I have 20 or so pages left.

What do I do to prepare?

I grab my current journal and assess what did and did not work. My current set up where I use a printed year at a glance calendar, a 6 month future log, blog posts to write tracker, and then set up 2 month logs, weekend logs and everything else is a form of collection.

The Muryo system had me thinking about themes for indexing and quick grouping of information. I settled onto a few: SuburbSkills, plans, Useful Journaling, Learning/research, blog, posts, I add and leave behind themes as I no longer need them.

The above is accomplished early, far in advance of the actual journal being finished. When the journal is finished, I start the next phase.

I flip through the journal and make notes on plans and projects. If a project failed I make a note about what happened and why it failed. If it worked but not to expectation, I make more notes. So on and so forth.

I then flip through again with some post it flags and tag the various on going projects. I don’t stick to a particular color, though I should consider that for the future. Some projects don’t get a tag- like the plans for the work bench and pergola. I’ve shifted to a different type of pergola, using recycled materials. The bench is in progress and thus doesn’t need to be tagged.

I also transfer information as needed. I try to keep this to a minimum, knowing that I can grab this journal off my desk at any time. I look at the current month and only transfer what is left in this month’s log to the new journal. The 6 month future log gets the same treatment.

My blog post list gets transferred, and I have to determine if a review or post will ever get done at this point. If an item lived  on my to do list for the life of an entire journal will I ever actually write that post? Probably not. I have turned this list into a pair of lists, one for this blog and one for Suburb Skills, as these are the 2 sites I’m working on currently. Useful Journaling only gets an update when new zines come out. Though I do have ideas to make that site something more.

After all that, I write the end date in the old journal and the start date in the new one. I make sure my new journal has a bunch of tabs and post it notes in the front, and a ruler in the back. After all that, which really only takes an hour or so, I start using the new journal.

As I look at this, it reads as if it is very complicated, and I swear that it is not. It’s a relatively quick and simple process. In Bullet Journaling this process is called migration I tend to call it getting started or transferring. Here are some more shots from my transfer session.