How To Fill All Your Empty Notebooks

By: Lanie Brice ‘24

If you’re anything like me, you’ll never own enough stationary. You follow Notebook Therapy on Instagram, or you can’t walk past a gift store without discovering a notebook you have to have. I mean, you can never have too many notebooks, right?

With a habit like that, you can collect quite a few journals over the years between gifts from family and friends and your own stationary buying. And as much as I love them, there’s certainly a level of guilt around having tons of empty notebooks. How do you fill them all? Here are 8 ideas for how to use your precious notebooks. 

Compile Your Recipes Into a Custom Cookbook

If you enjoy cooking, you likely have some favorite recipes pulled together from cookbooks and the web that you’d never want to lose. Add to that family recipes passed down through generations on batter covered index cards and in your mom’s email folders. Why not take an empty notebook and turn it into a custom cookbook? You can write out your favorite recipes to make sure you don’t lose them and categorize them into breakfast, lunch and dinner or sweet and salty or any way that makes sense for how you like to cook.

Try Bullet Journaling 

I’m a huge fan of bullet journaling and the endless possibilities. From using habit trackers to build new tasks into the day like exercising or flossing your teeth at night to colorful mood trackers and budget guides, there’s infinite ways to customize your journal in useful ways. Bullet journaling has genuinely changed my life over the last year and a half and has made me so much more aware and cognisant of how I spend my time and what I’ve accomplished. 

Turn It Into a Custom Planner

Similar to bullet journaling, you can use blank journals to create custom planners to keep all of your assignments in order, which is particularly useful for college students who have so many projects and meetings running at once. I’ve been a devoted planner user since elementary school, but I struggled to find a planner that had enough space to write out tons of tasks or assignments, and they clearly just weren’t designed in the way I liked to plan. I’ve been so much happier since I bought a blank journal and pulled out a set of markers to create custom planner templates. I’m finishing up my first year using one, and it’s really revolutionized the way I’ve planned. 

Make a Reading Journal

If you love reading, fill up a journal with tons of information related to your reading. Some spread options include a TBR shelf in a journal, top 10 favorite books of the year, or a grid to collect tons of data on the books you’re reading like page count, genre, and the dates you read them. Also, you can fill up pages by writing down your thoughts, reviews, and major takeaways on pages devoted to the books you read so that you never forget the feeling of reading your favorite book for the first time.

Keep All Your Ideas Together in a Crafting Notebook

If you enjoy crafting like knitting, painting, drawing, cooking, or sewing, you likely have tons of ideas of possible projects and not enough time to complete them all. Instead of losing spur of the moment ideas, create a journal to collect and dream up potential projects. Use the blank pages to create rough sketches, compile supply lists, and take notes on how to execute the projects, or whatever might be useful in creating the next great crafting success. 

Try Morning or Night Pages

While blank pages can be scary, they can also be therapeutic. It can be incredibly helpful and freeing to start or end the day by writing out anything that’s on your mind from what happened during your day to things you might be worried about or anticipating. From a single page to a couple depending on how you’re feeling, it can be a great way to work through anxiety and get to the root of how you’re feeling about complicated things. 

Save a Memory Journal

One of my favorite parts of my bullet journal is that I can save memories and important moments to look back on. I feel like this memory aspect could be expanded to fill a whole journal. I like to choose an Instax Polaroid for every month of the year to remember one particular image in my regular bullet journal, but you could make multiple page spreads for each month to collage photos and write down big and small moments. It’s also fun to record favorite books, movies, TV shows, or albums as each month goes by so you don’t forget the book series that kept you reading till midnight in January by the time the end of the year comes around. It’s really nice to have a place to cherish the little things. 

Test Out Dream Journaling 

Ever have a crazy dream, but when you go to tell your friend about it, you suddenly can’t remember any of the details? Give dream journaling a try. When you wake up, write down everything you can remember about what you dreamed the night before. Some think this can give valuable insight into what your dreams are trying to tell you. Others think that dream journaling can teach you how to lucid dream if that’s something you’ve been looking to do. I personally just find dreams fascinating, so this could be a fun way to dive further into that world. 

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