Say Hello to the All-in-One Journal: Bullet Journaling
- kenem120
- Nov 28, 2021
- 3 min read
You sit back down at your desk after your break. You think of all the things on your mental notes-to-self and task lists and let out a heavy sigh of anxiety. There is so much to do, and you don’t even know where to begin.
This need for organization is where writing down tasks comes in, but there is a slight issue with that; I sometimes tend to put an unrealistic number of tasks on my list, and then when I can’t do all of them in the timeframe I’ve given myself, I feel even less productive. So, how do I fix my unproductivity? Maybe a different method of organizing my tasks will help. I have seen bullet journaling before, and it looked interesting, but it also seemed a little bit like an overrated and overcomplicated version of what I was already doing. But, I never did any actual research on it. That is, until now.
One of the first things I looked at in my research was: What exactly is bullet journaling? According to bulletjournal.com, the main idea of bullet journaling is to write down tasks or other information in the form of bulleted lists in a method called “Rapid Logging.” Ok, cool, I like bullet points, but is there more to the strategy? Oh, there is so much more. Here’s a little rundown of some key points I found in the article:
Bullet points - there are lots of them. Here are a few of the simplest ones:
A filled in bullet point represents a task.
A bullet point with an “X” over it means a task has been completed.
An open bullet point is an event.
A dash is a note.
A bullet point with a right arrow drawn on it means a task has been moved to a different collection – wait. What’s a collection? Read on!
Collections: Different types of logs
Indexes. That’s right. You can put an index or table of contents in your bullet journal.
Future Logs: key tasks or events for upcoming months.
Monthly logs: Provides a quick look at key tasks/events for that month. You can add to this as the month continues.
Daily logs: This is created day-of or night before, and you can add to it and edit it as the day goes on. You log tasks, events, and occurrences of that day.
You can also create other collections for different uses. For example, a fitness tracker, a diary or even a sketchbook.
The author of the bulletjournal.com article also created a 4-minute video explaining his method of bullet journaling and how to do it:
Okay, so I know the gist of what bullet journaling is. Now the question is: why? When searching for the answer to this question, I came across an article on a website called Creative Primer that explains some of the benefits of bullet journaling:
Firstly, it’s fairly easy to start, and there are a lot of things you can do with it – writing on paper that uses dots instead of lines as guidelines allows for more flexibility in what you can create. You can make task lists, calendars, track different things such as fitness or diet, or use it to sketch or free-write. Writing tasks down in this way also helps increase productivity. From what I gather, it’s pretty much the Swiss Army knife of journaling.
Now that I know what bullet journaling is and what some of its benefits are, it’s definitely worth a try. I mainly need a way to write down my schedule and tasks, so I am going to spend a week using my knowledge of bullet journaling from the articles and video to organize my days and write down any noteworthy goings-on throughout the week. Here’s hoping my journey with bullet journaling will be a good one! Do you have any experience with bullet journaling? What would you use it for? Let me know about your ideas!
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