140: Bullet Journal, hey!

One day back in May, extreme fundae maven, tasteful item-number maverick, and #1 reason why mothers are naming their child so, Aadisht, asked what the big deal was about Bullet Journals.

Is there any real advantage to bullet journaling compared to using calendar and todo apps except for showing off your drawing skills (which I think is worthwhile and brightens the day of people who see nice bullet journal photos)?

— EPF Ghost (@aadisht) May 31, 2018

I accidentally kinda sorta answered this on Instagram Stories (instagram login needed!), so I’m schlepping it here too. Here we go!

(Extremely) simply put, BuJos break calendar years down into manageable timelines –

• To help you plan and put goals and tasks into their appropriate buckets (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily goals)
• To offer you retrospection with different lenses (what happened today, what happened this week, this month – though this leg tends to be heavily skewed to the daily)

The information is compacted using bullets instead of running sentences, and codes tracked with an index.

It’s not uncommon to see beautifully brush-lettered, watercoloured, carefully art-directed layouts of BuJos on Instagram. They’re used to track just about anything from finances to water intake to TV watched to circulation of salad dressing. There’s a tonne of gorg. stationery taking cue too (par exemple: this coffee journal, sketch journal, travel journal). But overall, there seems to be a super-creative, artsy and craftsy, expensive, heavily key/legend-ed *look* to BuJos that could come across as intimidating.

Just like the path to knowledge, god, or that other obvious analogy, there is more than one way to do this.

Before I get into that, let me get something pressing out of the way. I hate the nifty, smarmy coinage, BuJo; it has the cult-vibe of OPOS and smacks of AoL yuckery.

So Bullet Journals, hmm?

• They’re quick
• …also because the idea is to keep them with you wherever you go
• They’re super-flexible and customisable — usually a stumbling block in standard diaries
• They’re focussed: you want some sort of direction in/template for what to keep track of everyday
• This isn’t a priority for everybody – but just like old school diaries, they can be made pwuddy and treated like a creative exercise too.

I devised a retrospective system of my own using the parts of the Bullet Journal system that I found most beneficial.

I have some creative chops, but painting and lettering isn’t something I want to do everyday. I recognise that if I mandate it to everyday, it is going to be a hurdle. The creativity in this for me, is in devising the system itself and breaking a complex question into simple, measurable parts.

The result?

Treating my days like a data set answers questions for me in this fashion:

A few questions came by. And yes, I couple this monthly tracker with a to-do list, and a daily bullet-style summary.

(Sorry, little St. Gyan happened here.)

To-do, and Diary

A part of this exercise for me is that it’s an excuse for me to work with stationery after a day of screens. You could do this on Git. You could just as easily do this on Excel and spin them pivot tables, you Spreadsheet Jockey you.

And now, some words of …discouragement:

• You’re going to fail a few times. In the beginning, in the middle, in the end.
  • when you lose interest
  • when you get a hit of accomplishment (like quitting smoking for about a month: nice to know you had it in you after all)
  • or, best case scenario: when you’ve found closure on all the tabs you wanted to keep
• It is going to frustrate you:
  • Bending the timeline to suit your cause is going to be gnarly
  • You may start too ambitious – it only means you have to make it more basic
• It will take some of your time and attention – but ONLY at first, it gets almost reflexive if you let it. I’m venturing a guess that it’s a bit like growing a beard.
• It is going to be MESSY at first, so start in a notebook you aren’t too attached to (you know, Canara Bank type diary, or that glittery flowery notebook someone gifted you three years ago), or start on loose sheets of paper that you can stick into a more favoured diary
• Have extremely basic expectations:
  • Admit to yourself this IS a commitment for it to be meaningful in any way
  • Just start with wanting to make this a part of your everyday – then go pedal-to-the-metal
  • Make the system really easy and intuitive for you – like I said: recognise what your hurdles could be and simplify it for yourself
  • Finally, be honest, nobody has to know what you’re measuring, nobody cares if you’re failing at your goals
• Social Media can somewhat be your friend
  • If you run on validation fuel*, share your progress: a week of table conquered is such a high – acknowledge this and applaud yourself!
  • Repeating myself – don’t fudge your data because you don’t want people to know you suck at restraint or discipline
• You won’t find *answers* here:
  • At least, not most obviously
  • Getting to the right question will take trial and error. Lots of error.
  • Any which way, be prepared to be *surprised* by your data; like any data, it will give you insights
• This is not a sign that you have it together
  • It is, however, a route to get there
• It’s ok to ditch this altogether and do something more worthwhile with your time: I mean, in ten minutes, you can watch half a Brooklyn 99 episode.

In concluuuusion: this has proved helpful for me. It’s well-suited to my attention-incapacitated, stationery-hungry, colour-fueled upstairs. In especially dark periods when I ~feel~ I haven’t accomplished jack, this has q. visibly demonstrated otherwise, or has simply been proof of life.

—

* I actually tracked this for a month, but I needed to rephrase the question and metric.

# My apologies for the less than ideal image grids; my blog’s layout favours text.
^ Of course you’re welcome to share the contents of this post, but please link back and credit me!