Peace of Mind Organizing

My love for my Bullet Journal

15 February 2022

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know I love electronic task management. I made the shift away from paper years ago, primarily so I would always have my task list with me. In 2020 I created a Daily Task Management Trello Board that I was over the moon about. It was automated and worked really for me for more than a year. And then it stopped working for me.

As my love for my Trello task management board started to wane (I still use Trello for lots of other stuff), I started creating hand-written task lists. I enjoy doing hand lettering, so I would use my daily task list to practice my lettering. That worked for task lists, but I longed for a better repository for everything else.

Then, in mid-December, it hit me that I should give Bullet Journaling a try. I’d been aware of the Bullet Journal concept since Ryder Carroll published a website about it maybe 10 years ago. But it always felt laborious to me. My friend and podcast co-host, Shannon Wilkinson has been using a Bullet Journal since it first came out but that wasn’t enough to sway me. Until now.

Here’s the concept: The Bullet Journal is a bound notebook in which you hand-write everything. It can be as simple or as complicated as you like. I prefer the minimalist concept that is closer to Ryder Carroll’s original concept (check out his website to see what I mean). If you search on Bullet Journal on YouTube, you’ll see that a lot of people create videos of gorgeous, creative spreads that seem impossible for mere mortals like me to live up to.

These are the components of my Bullet Journal:

• The index so that I can find the key pages I need (I set aside 4 pages)
• The Futurelog, with all 12 months of 2022 written out so I can jot key dates like trips or important follow-ups
• A page for my Word of the Year (Generosity)
• A page for my 2022 goals
• My monthly log and habit tracker
• My task list for the month (3 pages)
• My daily log

Here’s a photo of my Futurelog. There are many different ways to do it, but this is the one I’m trying out. So far it works for me. With it, I’m embracing imperfection.

The meaty filling of my BuJo sandwich is the daily log. I write the day of the week and the date at the beginning of the day, followed by the high and low temps expected for the day. I write three things I’m grateful for from the last 24 hours. After that, I write tasks and record actions as they happen. That’s my key pictured at the top of this post. There’s too much personal information for me to post a picture off the daily log itself.

When I have a meeting, I take notes in my journal, right there in the middle of the day’s log. Each page is numbered and I’ll add the meeting and its page number to the index, so that if I need to go back to the notes for that meeting, I can easily find it.

I also have pages for TV shows and movies I want to watch, as well as books I want to read and blog post ideas.

One of my favorite aspects of my BuJo is the monthly log and habit tracker. There are five things I like to do every day and I check off when I do them. I also write down something notable from the day. Here’s a photo so you can get the idea:

It’s far from perfect but it’s extremely functional and it suits me well.

One of the reasons I loved electronic task management was that I could always refer to and add to my task list on the fly. I don’t always have my Bullet Journal with me, but I do have an electronic solution. There is a Bullet Journal Companion App that allows for an electronic library of photos of each page of your BuJo, plus a place to temporarily record tasks until you add them to your journal. The tasks added in the app disappear after a few days, so it’s really just a holding place—and the app reminds you to transfer the information to your paper journal. I like this because it ensures that I’m not keeping two nonidentical journals (one on paper and on in the app), which would be a recipe for disaster.

I’m definitely in the honeymoon phase of my Bullet Journal, but I really do love it. Since I spend a lot of time at my desk, rather than in the field working with clients these days, having a paper journal is very easy because it’s always with me. I’ve developed habits and routines that help me keep everything up to date and I’ve come to depend on it!

I created my first bullet journal on December 23, 2021, so it’s been almost two months. I started with what I called a trial bullet journal (to take the pressure off) and on January 1, 2022, I switched to a new journal, one that a client had given me. That dot-grid journal has 156 pages and I have filled 138 of them in just six weeks. When this one is full, I’ll be switching to a new journal (I’ve already purchased the Loyal Companion B5 dot-grid notebook from Archer + Olive). I anticipate enjoying trying out different journals in different sizes. (Archer + Olive has one with black pages that I’m intrigued by.)

Shannon and I published an episode of our podcast Getting to Good Enough on bullet journaling. Is this post has you wanting to hear more, please give it a listen!

If I continue loving this as much as I am now, you can count on my writing more about it. Soon, I’ll create a post about the pens I use for my Bujo and how I store them!

Tagged with: bullet journal, ryder carrolll, task management, time management

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