Noticed a weird trend at my local stationery store's planner section

Stopped by Paper & Ink in Austin on Saturday to grab some new pens and noticed half the aisle is all these pre-printed weekly layouts now. Barely any blank dot grid notebooks left on the shelf. Is the whole point of bullet journaling to make it your own system or are people just buying the fancy templates because they look good on social media? I get that some folks want structure, but I spent 3 years tweaking my own collection of spreads and still change things up every month. Anyone else feel like the original flexible method is getting buried under all these ready-made options, or am I just being a purist about it?

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gavine411mo ago

Watched the same thing happen at my local shops here and it bugged me too at first. What helped was just accepting that the pre-printed stuff and the blank notebooks can live side by side, since the templates got a bunch of new people into journaling who never would've tried a dot grid on their own. Those folks usually figure out pretty fast that a fixed layout stops working once their life changes, and that's when they start hunting for blank pages. I kept my own setup simple, one blank notebook and a few spreads I redraw each month, and I stopped worrying about what the shelf space looks like. Stores stock what sells, and right now that's the pretty planners, but the method itself hasn't gone anywhere. You're not a purist, you just already know the blank page works better once you've put in the time.

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