Bullet journal page template

A5 dot grid with a 15 mm margin — the standard bullet journal page, with more air around the dot field than a shop-bought notebook gives you.

Open in the generator →

Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.

A wider margin than the notebook allows

Shop-bought dot grid notebooks run the dot field almost to the edge of the page. Printing your own lets you set a real margin, which gives the spread room to breathe, keeps the outer column of dots clear of a ring binding, and leaves somewhere for the date and page number that is not carved out of the content. It is a small change that makes pages look considered rather than crowded.

The four spreads that actually matter

The original method is four things: an index, a future log for the year, a monthly log, and daily logs. Everything else — habit grids, elaborate headers, mood trackers — is accretion, and most of it gets abandoned by March. If you are printing your own pages rather than buying a book, print those four and add the rest only once you find you genuinely want them.

Threading and page numbers

Because loose printed pages can be reordered, the index matters more here than it does in a bound book, and so does numbering each page as you use it. Threading — writing "continued p. 34" at the foot of a collection that picks up elsewhere — is what lets one topic run across non-adjacent pages without rewriting the contents every time.

Print a month at a time

Set the page count to about thirty and produce a month's worth in one go. The system fails on friction far more often than on motivation: a stack of ready pages sitting beside the printer is the difference between still keeping it in March and quietly stopping in February.

Printing it accurately

This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100% — not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.