One Book July 2018

If you have not yet come across One Book July, I would recommend that you start here. This is the first announcement video for this year’s challenge.

If you’re not one for following the YouTube videos, simply put it is a planner challenge based around the idea of one book, one pen, one month. Over the past couple of years there have also been additional challenges or themes for each year. There are essentially no rules, its more about getting back to planning basics for you.

Last Year, I took part for the first time. You can see how I got on with it here.

I love the process last year but had a few hurdles. Firstly, I didn’t get on with my initial planner set up and needed more room, so I switched back to my bullet journal, but then ran out of room part way through the month so had to switch again! Despite all this, I really enjoyed the process of stripping away everything and getting back to basics so I have been really looking forward to this year’s announcement.

The announcement had me laughing quite a lot! Mainly because Rhomany said that part of the reason that it takes place in July is that a lot of people are at that point in the year where they are on holiday in some way, referring to the school holidays of course. I don’t actually break up from school until half way through the last week of July! Nevertheless it is a good time to look at the basics of planning where there is so much going on at school, and we are beginning to think about the next year and the next class that we will have. All of this means that it is good to strip back and make changes.

So… I suppose all that remains for the moment is to explain what I will be doing for One Book July 2018! Well, I have thought quite a lot about this and while I could have stuck with my bullet journal again, I have actually decided to use my Passion Planner. Now I don’t want to have gaps in my bullet journal so I will be journaling in it for the month just not weeklies/dailies as normal.

The extra challenge this year is digital planning, now I have never thought about digital planning before and at the moment I just don’t have any interest in it! For me refining my paper planning is more important. I do use Google Calendar to share a calendar with my husband and I also use a lot of electronic stuff linked to work. But don’t worry I will be doing an extra challenge – I’m trying go big or go home. This was last year’s challenge and it didn’t work for me so I am hoping that it might this year. I have realised my problems from last year and will be trying again!

I have done a quick intro video here where you can see me talk in a bit more detail about last year’s experience and what I am planning on using this year. It is very chatty, but it also shows you a lot of the planners that I talk about.

If you are interested in the progress this month, I will be doing regular update videos on my channel and I will add updates here as well. There is now also a dedicated One Book July YouTube channel to look at videos past and present and look at how other plan and adapt the challenges to suit them.

If you are taking part or not, I hope you enjoy setting up the month of July in your planner or planners! Happy planning all!