Letting go of the daily to-do list.

The Background

Here’s the lead-up. I’m tempted to skip the background. It seems extraneous. But I think it is necessary to understand how I got it mixed up. Because maybe you’re doing this too.

Getting Started

It was originally a write-up in Lifehacker that got me interested in bullet journaling. I remember looking into it, bookmarking the website, and thinking I’d try it. After I tried some other things first.

I came back to it later (after another outside recommendation) and decided to finally take it seriously. Since June 2018, I have bullet journaled regularly.

Of course I scoured the directions on the official Bullet Journal website. I thought I understood. And yet, at the same time, Pinterest and Instagram offered so many other possibilities. Images of spreads that made sense.

The thing about the bullet journal, and why it is so attractive to so many, is its flexibility. It can be what we want it to be. There doesn’t have to be a thing to it. At the same time, we aren’t shackled by the layout of a calendar or ways of marking time that aren’t our own.

As I found myself gravitating to other people’s spreads, I found these made intuitive sense to me. Much more than the classic system does. So I found myself trying to perfect the weekly spread.

But the chaos I was feeling didn’t subside. Even as I bullet journaled diligently, I found no change significant change in the way I do things.

I finally started reading the book.

I didn’t think I needed to. Why read a book about a system you’ve been doing for four years? Especially when all the instructions are online. For free.

The book, The Bullet Journal Method gives more breathing room to the ideas. And as I read it, I realized my problem.

I wanted this method to solve my problem with calendars by replicating the problem with calendars.

Or

I wanted this method to solve my problem with to-do lists by replicating the problem with to-do lists.

In other words, I wasn’t actually following the bullet journal (BuJo) method. I was keeping an old school calendar and slavishly supporting the old to-do list.

Suddenly it was all becoming clear.

I was finally realizing why there is a Future Log at the beginning and monthly logs: concepts I never fully embraced because calendars don’t work that way. And I was trying to keep my bullet journal like a calendar and a to-do list. Separately.

I needed to give up how I saw the to-do list.

I’ve tried the methods.

I like GTD (Getting Things Done) and the Eisenhower Matrix. I like the Big 3 concept (of naming three must dos and then everything else is extra). This was a particularly helpful one for me, as I learned to appreciate the essential and let go of the inessential.

But my slavishly literal view of a calendar-bound to-do list: here is what I have to do today or else I suck as a human being: kept infecting my thinking.

What I misunderstood about bullet-journaling is that the to-do list isn’t bound by the calendar. And vice versa. Nor are they competing concepts that need to be fully and functionally separated.

The calendar can mark the time you’re in there. It can help create order for the bullet journal. But the log—the ongoing collection of thoughts and actions—is the heart of everything.

You really do just put your thoughts, all of them, into it. And keep going! It doesn’t matter the day. Just log them. And when you do happen to do it, you mark it as complete! Done!

That’s what I didn’t understand.

We aren’t truly bound by time.

You may understand this intuitively. But I didn’t. Not because I didn’t understand the methodology, but because the whole concept of time management and productivity is itself a whole bundle of dysfunction.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand BuJo (or any other system). It is that I made time dictate everything!

I had adopted a worldview that was informed by all of that other stuff that conflicts with the principal, liberating heart of the BuJo method. So I had to fully break down that other worldview to see it.

And what I’ve found is that this even makes a system like GTD make even more sense. Because I am now taking more time planning and reflecting than I did before. I am going through my logs and updating my agenda for the day. And most importantly, I got more done happily last week than ever.

This is the secret at the heart of bullet journaling that took me four years to learn. That I can be free of the slavish approach to time and productivity that was stifling both for me.

And in that freedom lies more opportunity.