People all over the world celebrate New Year’s Day in a variety of ways. Some stay up late, others watch football. I, like many other nerds, prepared my Bullet Journal.
What’s a Bullet Journal?
Bullet journaling is a self-directed organizing process that helps anyone organize or keep track of their life with only a notebook. If you want to know more about bullet journaling, here’s what I’ve written about it.
Is there a right way?
No.
What’s your way?
My approach is minimalist and traditional. I like to only use a pen and a journal. Sometimes I use a ruler if I feel like being fancy.
What I’ve learned
Some of the things I have learned about how I use my journal:
- I can’t do too fancy because I want to use it anywhere and feel like I can mark it up at any time. Sometimes I like to prepare for the week in the evening. But I don’t want to rely on that. So my regular approach has to be simple.
- One of my primary struggles with bullet journaling is dealing with conflicting desires around tracking my habits:
- daily is messy for my daily log and makes it hard to keep track at the bigger level
- monthly doesn’t give me the granular detail I want
- I forget to update my yearly pages and worry about filling them up
- So I’m leaning into testing out two new weekly tracking strategies.
- I struggle with the desire to use my bullet journal as the one resource while needing a more formal calendar. My biggest problem is that I keep changing my mind about how.
- Weekly spreads don’t fit into my approach. And neither do monthlies. I’m leaving that to my calendar.
- I am terrible with migrating tasks. I never use the Future Log. And really only keep a small primary task list. I’m rethinking how I approach tasks for 2022.
- My primary behavioral motivation for bullet journaling appears to be recording things first, habit-tracking second, and keeping track of tasks third. This is a reverse of what my mind tells me it should be. I’m planning to see if I can use my motivation to record things (like what I watch and read) as leverage to better integrate all three of these in a new way.
My Plan for 2022
Future Log – I’m not going to obsess over the idea that I don’t really care about it. I haven’t yet formatted it for the year, and might decide about it later. This is based on one of the fundamental principles of bullet journaling: using what makes sense for you.
Goal Pages – I set up some goal pages at the front of the book with the same idea in mind. I found a couple templates I liked and copied them, but haven’t started working on them yet. Perhaps you use the week of Christmas to work on this for the new year. I’ll make retreat time, probably first week of February for that.
Main Trackers – One of the things I always do is make trackers for the books I read and the movies I watch so I can go back to see how I’ve done over the year. One of the debates I have with myself is recording everything or only new things. This year, I’m planning to track both.
Rapid Log – I’ve renamed the monthly task list, calling it “Opportunities”. Since this is the weakest part of my version of the bullet journal system, I’m integrating this with my calendar and my to-do list app on my phone, which I’ve set up to use with David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. The app will be my primary task list, which lets me use these pages to capture potential.
Notice how I am making a clear distinction between a BuJo-style rapid log, a classic task list, and what this “Opportunities” list is about. While it will likely migrate within the bullet journal normally, what is different is that nothing in the Opportunities list is a necessity. I’m using this only for potential actions.
Habits and Dailies
My plan for this year is to experiment with the interplay between tracking habits, the daily logs, and weekly and monthly measurements.
Habits (Monthly) – the monthly habit trackers have rarely appealed to me, primarily because I use an app on my phone and that is faster for recording. What the monthly spreads are good for is review. I’m trying a new spread this year that mimics the style of an app.
Habits (Weekly) – Part of my habit tracking has been macro-level (did I read today). But I also like to track how much so I can see how it compares month-to-month. So I also measure time and pages. This has made simple trackers insufficient, but crowd into weekly and daily spreads. I have two approaches I am currently testing out.
Adding to the dailies – In this approach, I’m using color to mark off on the page something I want to record for the day: the book I read, how long, and how many pages, for instance. Putting this on the daily means I actually think about the habit as I’m planning the day.
Adding to the week – While I don’t do a traditional weekly spread, I do mark the beginning of the week. So I will be testing how these specific habits I’m trying to track will work if I make specific space for them at the top of the page and then begin the dailies below them.
Other priorities
One of the other major decisions I’ve made with this year’s bullet journal is to make it more valuable to me, not less. Which is kind of counterintuitive for me, and maybe for you too, but bear with me.
Last year, I started using it as the One Notebook. I loved the simplicity of this. And this matched the vision I fell in love with. In practice, I found it full of useless notes I took in meetings that didn’t justify the space. And worse, cluttered it with material of varying value to me.
For this year, my plan is to take notes elsewhere and put opportunities in the journal. This will mean going over the notes I take elsewhere and then put what I want to keep in the bullet journal. While this goes against the “fresh page” ethos of BuJo, it brings a kind of clarity and accessibility I desire from my journal.
Of course, all of these plans may change. I might see new spreads I have to try on Instagram. Or there is just too much inertia to do what I want to do.
But that is the best thing about bullet journaling. You really do get to see if the system works for you. And if it doesn’t, you turn the page and make it different.