My Experience with Bullet Journaling
Written by Allen Souksawan 5/11/2021
As the hectic year of 2020 came to a close, I wanted to take charge of my life and improve myself in the coming year. I already had scheduling, to-do lists, and journaling apps on my phone for a considerable amount of time at that point, but I didn’t make much progress with them. I knew they were important, but my social media was just a tap away. And I often ended up swiping away the notifications of my scheduling apps and reminders from my journaling app believing I would get to it soon.
Wanting to end this cycle of procrastination, I looked at how I set up my goals and schedule. They were specific to what I needed to do to reach a goal and were set at a specific time of the day. These tasks were measurable and manageable. It was the textbook definition of “good scheduling.” Yet in the end, most of these apps just sat on my phone, taking up screen space and waking me up in the middle of the night with notifications about things I didn’t do.
Enter: The Bullet Journal Method
With 2021 approaching, many people were looking for ways to achieve their new year goals and resolutions. Like many, I took to the internet, combing through articles and videos on how to manage your time and goals. One notable trend among them was to write out your goals and thoughts in a journal, several recommending a style called bullet journaling.
In short, the bullet journal combines a schedule, a to-do list, and notes. These elements are recorded using a technique called rapid logging, which is meant to keep things organized without taking a long time to write. The technique is comprised of writing quick notes or tasks that are assigned symbols to explain their purpose. For example, tasks are often assigned a black dot beside them which can be crossed off to mark them as done, while events may be an open triangle symbol.
Daily Tasks: What I need to get done in a day.
Food Tracker: I use this to make sure I eat enough, as I tend to undereat. However, a food tracker is helpful for any health goal.
Water Tracker: Each square represents 32 oz. of water, I fill in the squares at the end of the day to see how much I drank.
Habit Tracker: I abbreviate the names of the habits I want to pick up and count how many days I can keep it up.
Training Log: I call it a training log because it sounds cooler than a workout log. I track physical training like lifting weights but also mental training like meditation.
Today: This is where I write about 3 miscellaneous things that happened in a day.
Notes and Thoughts: This is where I express whatever I’m feeling in a condensed format. If I have a lot to say, I’ll just write it out on the next blank page. I also use this section to write about things I learned or things I want to remember.
Each month, week, and day would have its own page, called a monthly/weekly/daily spread respectively. I would write down what I wanted to accomplish in a month and break it down into weekly goals that I would further break down into daily tasks. I compared it to dropping a quarter into a jar every day to save up for a vacation, but I was investing in myself a little bit each day and week.
Laying out my plans in such a quick-to-read format allowed me to better schedule my week and track my progress. While this process isn’t exactly revolutionary, I believe it was so powerful because it was more versatile than some of the apps you can find on your phone. Before I adopted bullet journaling I would switch back and forth between different schedule and to-do list apps trying to coordinate them. This constant switching ended up eating more time than necessary. Bullet journaling also outperformed the traditional schedule writing techniques I learned back in school. Instead of writing long descriptions of important dates and marking them with “IMPORTANT!” I now had an overview of every month, day, and week in their own abbreviated and clean page rather than a single day taking 3 pages.
“The primary advantage of longhand notes was that it slowed people down,...” - Daniel Oppenheimer, Prof. of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
One of the biggest benefits of bullet journaling’s rapid logging was that I had to slow down and be more mindful of what I was writing for it to be effective. By using the tangible medium of pen and ink to physically write out my thoughts, journaling began to feel more “personal”, I had penned every letter in my journal and filled its empty spaces with my drawings and pictures. This feeling of ownership taught me to be more thoughtful about what was truly important. While slowing down may seem to bring back my previous problems with productivity apps, taking a little time to write in my bullet journal allowed me to manage and make use of my time better than I ever have.