What I Learned from 4 Years of Bullet Journaling

Over the last several years, there has been an uptick of conversation around a Bujo or Bullet Journaling. In it’s simplest form, it’s a way to keep track of your tasks, habits, to do’s calendar events, etc. in a single place like a notebook. While first given it’s official name and title back in 2015 by Ryder Carrol, who founded the Bullet Journal method, the idea of a ”Day Planner” goes back as far as 1773, when Robert Aitken, an aspiring Publisher from Philadelphia claimed to have marketed America’s first daily planner. Though it’s a huge departure from the modern Bullet Journal method today, it shows that over 200 years ago, people had and or needed a method to keep track of their lives, especially since the avenue of a Digital lifestyle wasn't on the horizon for a very long time.

Today, the Bullet Journal system is separated typically into a few different “Views” that are referred to as log. Typically it looks something like this:

• Future Log - Tasks that are coming up but may not be in the current month
• Monthly Log - Tasks, events etc that will happen in the current month
• Weekly Log - Contains a 7 day view of the week with your tasks, events etc.
• Daily Log - Contains tasks you’re working on for that particular day

If an item gets completed, you mark it off. If it doesn’t you move it to the next day. At the end of the month, if you still haven’t completed it, then you decide whether or not the task is even relevant.

When marking tasks, there are several different marks you can place next to a task in your journal to show it's state. For me, I use the following in the picture below to depict my specific method. Some of these are from the Bullet Journal method, some are my own creation:

I had tried highlighting my tasks as work or personal but that never worked well for me. Instead, I used a highlighted task in a specific color to indicate the highest priority task to complete that day. If you read the book "Make Time" by John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp, the idea of a task that is most important to complete in a particular day helped me stay on track when I had a lot of competing priorities. These tasks in the book are referred to as Highlights and should be a task that requires at least 60-90 minutes to complete. The highlight color tells me whether this is a personal task of priority, or a work task of priority.

My versions of a “Bullet Journal” started back in 2004. At the time I was still very green in my current field as an IT Professional, but I needed a written way to keep track of my tasks. So I started with a single subject notebook and just wrote down my tasks to do every day. I think I spent $1.30 to start off. This was mainly for my work since there were requests I received each day for support work, project work, walk ups etc. If there were any constants in my early career, it was interruptions and tasks.

While this served me well, it wasn’t until 2018, where I was going through some major life changes that I started to look for ways to keep track of all my tasks. My kids were entering school, things were changing with my marriage, and my personal life overflowed as did my work with tasks to complete, dates to keep, and places to be.

I had all these disparate places I kept track of events. My head, the notebook at work, calendars for home, calendars at work, to do apps, etc. What I really needed was a single place to keep track of everything. Here's where Bullet Journaling came in.

I hadn’t ever considered merging these things into a single notebook, much less keep track of everything in a notebook I took with me everywhere.

I had found a lot of different systems out there and in the beginning, I really tried to emulate a system someone else created. The first thing I learned is that while one style of Bullet Journaling make work for some, that same style may not work for me.

So over the next year through 2019, I tried a lot of different methods, and over time I developed a style that suited my lifestyle and the way my life operates.

Which I think is the defining characteristic of Bullet Journaling.

Flexibility.

The ability to change your style based on your life or work changes that occur. Over the last 4 years Bullet Journaling has truly changed my life. Here’s How.

Organization

I mean this should be obvious since the primary goal of the Bullet Journal system is to organize everything into one place. The caveat to this little gem though is that we’ve got many sources of input for calendars, tasks, and reminders. I still need a digital method for these items because I may need to share them, or they may contain confidential information I can’t put into my journal verbatim. So I needed a system that I understood, yet protected information both Personal and Professional. So for calendar events such as meetings, I would place a set of initials that would be relevant only to me then a quick description of the call. An example of this would look something like this:

O - DA in Cleveland @ 3:30pm

O - Indicating that it's a personal appointment (So I know what Calendar it's on) DA (indicating the type) Doc Appointment, location and time.

Repeating this process for any work appointments, meetings etc.

By building out a system that takes all of my data sources and combines it into a written format I can easily understand but mostly ambiguous to anyone else who sees it, it allows me to protect my information, my work information and customers, but allows me to centralize everything. If I were to ever lose it, I have all the digital information on my calendars and To Do apps, so I can recreate it easily.

You’re probably wondering why go through all that trouble?

Studies done by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology have found data that suggests people who write down their tasks are 42% more likely to complete them. Similar studies completed by The University of Chicago and Duke University also found similar results. I also found similar results. I was late far less to events, I had way less overlap in meetings or calls, and I did a much better job of scheduling my personal life events around work events.

The little bit of extra work I do upfront to put everything in one place, saves me time and energy later on.

Impact on my Work Life

The most immediate impact I felt in my work was that I had better visibility into my personal life when it came to scheduling. Especially work trips, after hours work, or when I was in an office, what time I needed to leave to get to an event, whether work or personal for that matter.

One of what I consider unfortunate events of being in an office before COVID, was interruptions. As I noticed that oftentimes I wasn’t making headway on a project or task as much as I'd like, I started my WUT-I or “What E” Tracker in my day log. Short for "Walk Up Interruption Tracker", this helped me keep track of all my interruptions that occurred when someone would swing by my cubicle, message me in Teams chat, etc.

In one 40 hour work week, I was interrupted 96 times. That meant that 19 times a day on average I had a person(s) stop by my cubicle to ask me a question, pull me into something that had a problem I needed to solve, or to just stop by and shoot the breeze. That’s an average of 2.4 times per hour or about once every 30 minutes.

With this new tracker, it allowed me to keep tabs on both what I was currently working on what was coming up. I never felt like I was missing an assignment, task, To Do etc. because I had a system that allowed me to keep up with them effectively.

I also started forwarding events to my work calendar if it showed up in a customer calendar or in my personal calendar. If someone was booking time with me, they could see if I had availability on my work calendar thus helping reduce overlapping meetings and allowing me to hit my personal obligations like concerts for my kids without someone scheduling over that time period.

After work hours, If I wanted to check email, calendars, or do some follow up work, I was more purposeful when I did it. As a result, my quality of after hours work, when done on my own terms, continued to improve significantly. No longer did I accidentally read an email and miss a detail that was important, or forget about it all together because it I had an email marked as read when I really hadn’t read it at all.

Personal Life

There’s so many improvements into my personal life I can’t put them all into this blog or it might as well be a short story. That said, here’s some ways it helped with my personal life.

Recommendations from friends happen all the time. Whether it’s a book, a tv show, movie, restaurant etc. Now instead of trying to commit it to my “memory warehouse”, I wrote them down, either into my Journal if it was out, or to a note that’s on my phone and part of my workflow. Now I remember the conversations better when recommendations are involved and it gives me a list of new things to try or do when I’m looking for something to do or planning my weeks.

It’s been great for keeping track of my habits, sleep, feelings and pointing out where I need to make changes.

Am I slipping on exercise? How has my stress been, how am I sleeping? What’s my mood been like? All these things allow me to look back at a year, month, or several weeks and see how everything is tracking. If there’s too many stressed days, or I don’t sleep well for long periods, then I need to go back and look at why this is happening. With my journals, since I hold onto them, I can go back and actually look at multiple years.

When I need to make major decisions about my work, my personal life, education and so on, I am able to do that with information that may not be readily available.

Now some people are probably saying that wouldn’t it be better to do this digitally, and have the ability to search on this information? Maybe it is. Search is certainly a powerful tool. But at least for me, there’s something to be said about how different writing things down feels than something typed on a digital page.

My journal has helped in other ways too. Such as keeping better track of birthdays and gatherings, upcoming events, or events that were planned multiple months ago that I forgot about.

Unexpected Benefits of Bullet Journaling

The most glaring impact that Bullet Journaling had for me was the changes in my handwriting. Digitally and on paper. My handwriting improved because I wanted things to be legible. I learned more about font spacing, font types, and sizes. I tried to write in Calligraphy as an example for some of my headers. I changed the way I write my 4’s and 7’s. I’ve gotten much better at not inserting RANDoM capital letters in the middle of a word. This was a surprise but a welcome one.

Another benefit was the way I felt when I didn’t use it. I had more worries about did I or didn’t I do this or that. Did I forget something and then accidentally schedule another event over it? That’s happened a few times actually.

My level of happiness overall increased. I had this amazing creative outlet, that I’ve not had since Art class in High School. Don’t get me wrong, I have other outlets but those interests are typically digital or involve screens. Aside from working on cars, Bullet Journaling gave me a way to really expand my creative thinking on paper. In turn, it helped change the way I think when I’m problem solving. I feel this effect in my brain in a strange way. Like it’s sharper. I’m remembering and recalling more things over longer periods than I used to remember.

All that said, I would highly recommend to anyone looking for a different way to keep track of things you need to do in your work or personal life, to give bullet journaling a try. It’s a way of organizing your life so that it fits “How you think, feel, and work.” And it doesn’t require an investment other than what you’ve probably got around the house today if you’re not sure it will work for you. Notebook and a Pen.

How are you keeping track of your To Do's today?