What To Do With Old Bullet Journals? (It’s So Simple Really)
The years go by so fast nowadays and keeping more than one bullet journal a year isn’t as uncommon as you may think. The more you journal, you will find yourself stocked piled a few years from now and may wonder at some point as to what to do with old journals or if you should even keep them?
There are two options but first, you’ll have to decide if you really do need to keep them. Once you know its worth, you can then decide to toss them or you could keep them stored in a box. The other method would be to combine both options by scanning your pages and storing them in a binder to keep all pages in one place.
If you’d like to know a little more about whether you should keep them, ways to keep old journals, or to know how to dispose of them, here are a few tips that will be useful to you.
Decide If You Should Keep Them (The Degree of Importance)
Before taking such a drastic step such as throwing away your old journals, you’ll first need to decide as to how important they are to you.
Perhaps, if you’ve only used these journals to schedule your daily routines or things you needed to do for a month, then they may not be that useful to you right now.
However, if you had included important information or memories that you’d like to read in the future and look back at, then discarding these journals may be a big mistake.
Go through each bullet journal again, flip through the important spreads and decide if you really do need to keep them. Be sure to take as many days as you may need because sometimes we may be in the mood to throw things only to regret it later on.
Once you have an idea as to how important an old journal is, you may then choose to keep some of it or throw all of them. For now, here are a few ways to help you decide if you should keep them or let them go:
Reasons For Tossing
One of the main reasons why you may want to throw them is that if you’ve been journaling for many months and years, then by now you might have acquired more than you would have liked and this can be quite bulky and take up storage space.
Also, there might really be no need to keep these journals depending on how you made use of them. And since they do not contain really important information that could be used in the future, there might not be any use for them right now either.
However, if you used your bullet journal as a means to explore your thoughts and feelings through daily journaling but you do recall them being more negative than positive, then tossing these away might be okay, especially if you don’t want to relive these negative emotions and bad memories.
Please do make a proper decision so that later on you will not regret it however there is a sneaky way to keep the content of the journals still but you can discard the physical journals which we’ll show you in a bit.
Reasons Why You May Want To Keep It
Now that you have a few reasons as to why you may want to toss them, let’s take a quick look at the importance of keeping these old journals.
For one, you did invest a lot of time and effort into creating and writing these journals so it may be difficult to see all your work being dumped or even the fun that we had bullet journaling!
In fact, these old journals may hold some sort of value to you whether it’s seeing all your accomplishments, how you’ve changed and grown as a person, to even discovering your progress you’ve made in past commitments.
All of this can have a wonderful impact the way you are today and it also will be an encouraging reminder to work as hard as you have done in the past.
These old bullet journals are a record of the things that you have done and it also may contain important memories you’ll want to revisit sometime in the future.
How To Keep Old Bullet Journals
By now you may have decided on your choice but whichever one you have decided, here’s a way to still keep these old bullet journals even if you do decide to get rid of the physical copies.
The best way to keep them is by scanning the pages and storing them on your computer or you can print out these pages and collect them in one big binder.
This way you won’t have to deal with multiple copies of these bulky journals but you’ll have just one binder to fill for years to come or you could simply just add them to a box and seal them away.
I love this method the most since you don’t have to lose the content at all especially if you think that you don’t need to see it ever again.
But just in case you do on one blue Monday or so, you’ll feel relieved that you do have a copy of your work.
It’s Really Up To You
As mentioned earlier, there really isn’t any set to rule as to whether to keep these old journals or throw them away, but if you do decide to keep them, it’s a pretty simple solution to your problem.
Whether storing digitally or keeping them in a binder, you definitely won’t have any issue with space. However, if you find these old journals to be completely useless to you, then it’s not really worth keeping.
Just remember that you don’t have to rush and make an immediate decision right away.
Perhaps a few days from now if you are deciding to discard them, you might change your mind and decide they’re worth keeping after all.
Sometimes seeing the little scribbles or doodles we did, can spark creativity or a new idea in us.
When we’re experiencing a slump, looking at the small things we tracked such as drinking water, the vision boards created or completing a particular task can be that motivational rock we needed to keep moving forward.
They may seem small and insignificant at first but they can have a big impact on the way you feel and think.