Persisting with the Bullet Journal
It’s been a few weeks since starting out on the Bullet Journal adventure, so I thought it might be worth recording a few thoughts.
When I started, I looked around at some of the inspirational pages posted to Pinterest, Instagram, and various creative blogs around the internet. This resulted in a couple of days filling pages with doodles, diagrams, bargraphs, charts, and who knows what else – all decorated wonderfully, but of no practical purpose whatsoever. I ended up with the journal of a 16 year old girl, rather than the journal of a professional software and web developer – which is fine, and proved I could do all that crap if I really wanted to, but actually… no.
By the second week I had scaled everything back to pages of notes about whatever I happened to be working on, a minimalist weekly grid, and plans for a more minimal month page for the next month. By and large that’s how I’ve gone on.
I wondered for a while about dealing with longer-range calendar dates, before realising that’s what the month sections at the front of the journal are for – and that as each month comes up, the long range dates should be migrated in.
I’ve started to realise that it might be better to deal with days of the week in the same way – not writing the entire week out to cover a page, but just writing in each day as it occurs, migrating tasks into it both from the general task list for the week, and the month.
I think so far my biggest take-away from the bullet journal process is that it encourages repetition in terms of the migration of tasks from the year, to months, and to days of the week – and repetition helps form habits. I also find that looking through the things not done causes a level of accountability.
I will admit that last weekend I looked back at the Filofax again, but given the epiphany about migrating year and month events in, rather than writing them into future pages of a calendar has the same advantages in terms of reviewing what’s coming up at multiple points, rather than turning a page and discovering what you might have written in months before.
I’m still forgetting to back-populate the index pages with page numbers. I guess the utility of various gadgets like the index will come over time – when I need to look something obscure up, for example.
Anyway. There you go. I’m still going with the bullet journal. I can’t share a photo of mine, because it’s filled with real-world project names from work, and places my kids will be throughout the week. Given the bun-fight that happened on Facebook earlier today about safeguarding, and over-sharing by some parents (I set out a picnic blanket to relax while Rome burned around me), I don’t think I’ll be sharing anything like that. The stock photos that usually accompany my posts are there for a reason.