An Update on the Bullet Journal
For the past few months I have been trying out a “Bullet Journal”. Rather than re-purpose my pre-existing Moleskine notebook, I went out and bought an official Leuchtturm1917 notebook with requisite pages for future logs, indexes, and so on. While there have been a lot of positives to take from the experiene, I’m still not convinced. I will admit that one of the reasons I have stuck at it is because the book cost so much money (I hate wasting money).
Don’t get me wrong – there have been positives. The whole process of migrating tasks from one week to the next has been good. The process of writing up each week, and having to think about what’s going on has also been good.
I experimented with layouts for a couple of weeks before settling on the scheme I have been using, but in general it’s been getting more minimal with each passing week. When I started out I looked at Pinterest, and various blog posts for inspiration, and invented all manner of rubbish that I eventually abandoned – sleep tracking charts, lists of books to read, movies to watch – you name it. I’ve ended up filling the book purely with things I need to get done, and random scribbled notes about whatever I’m working on.
I struggle to understand how some people manufacture the time to draw pretty pictures all over their notebooks, or to fill pages with plans to fill their day – plans that don’t really exist (coffee, yoga, shopping, more coffee, more yoga, movie, and so on). If I filled my task lists in a similar manner, each day would be approximately the same – get up, shower, get dressed, feed cats, feed fish, tidy up lounge and kitchen, wash up anything in the sink, empty dishwasher, make breakfasts, make packed lunches, help children look for things they promised they had already organised for school, shout at children for not doing anything to help, extricate bike from shed, cycle to work, headbutt desk for eight hours, cycle home, and then re-play the morning in reverse order.
Maybe one day I will write out the task list on paper just for fun, and tick things off to make myself feel better about “getting things done”. Perhaps I’ll fill a fake page specifically to photograph for Instagram, with “TMI” themed tasks too.
Anyway. I’m persevering with the Bullet Journal. Will I make it into next year with it? I’m really not sure. Will I revert back to the Filofax? Again, I’m really not sure. I could even ditch all of it and return to Evernote, but there’s something wonderfully eccentric and counter-intuitive about writing in a notebook in this age of electronic gadgets.