Why didn’t bullet journaling work for me?

What the trendiest way to organise time taught me about life and the way we look at it

On 1st January 2019, I bid goodbye to my bullet journal. After a year of trying the trendiest way to organise time, the time had come for me to creep back into the open pages of a traditional planner — with a sigh of relief.

But I had this nagging sense of failure. Why hadn’t bullet journaling worked for me?

It’s one of the hundreds of social-media-driven lifestyle movements pouring into the vacuum once occupied by organised religion. Like mindfulness, clean eating and Jesus, bullet journaling is defined by passionate proponents promising to revolutionise your life — that is, give your life meaning.

The official website of bullet journalists states that the ‘practice’ allows you ‘to go from passenger to pilot of your life through intentional living.’

Wow, I thought when I first read this, it’s like they know exactly what I want to do.

(Duh! I think now. Of course they do. Lifestyle brands exist in dynamic equilibrium with our fundamental desire to have more control over our lives.)

When I became a bullet journalist, I was a 22-year-old recent graduate who’d fallen off the education treadmill into a pit of existential angst. I desperately missed the sense of purpose that studying had given me — and the rigid routine I’d maintained in order to ace that studying. But I was horribly burnt out. In place of the driven, organised student I’d been was a listless, unproductive assemblage of atoms.

I needed to tell myself a story about why this transformation had taken place. Like that viral Buzzfeed article about millennial burnout, I saw the structures I’d been part of as the guilty party:

Until now, my story went, you’ve been a passenger in your life, propelled by the irresistible jet stream of education. Now you’ve escaped, you can finally start piloting.

And that meant (I decided) thoroughly rejecting the routine, purpose and structures that had brought me success — and utterly repressed me. What you need, my story concluded, is a year of experimentation. Not in the Ottessa Moshfegh sense — I had neither the financial means nor the inclination to just check out of life. My aim was to check what I wanted out of life.

Up to that point, my life had been one long series of reactions — to deadlines, guidelines and expectations set by other people. Out in the big bad grown-up world, I realised, no one hands you your sense of purpose on a shiny platter. And that’s why the idea of ‘intentional living’ appealed: bullet journals, supposedly, allow you to become ‘proactive’ rather than ‘reactive’.

And so I rejected the printed structures of the traditional planners I’d been using to plot my predictable, inflexible life for ten years; and I picked up an empty notebook, which (I decided) would shield me from the overwhelming and unknowable future.

Winter

If you’re not au fait with the premise of bullet journaling, watch this short, aesthetically pleasing and undeniably soothing video. You’ll then be on the same page as my 22-year-old self, who started her experiment with a Google search: what is a bullet journal?

I liked the video. It’s a lot like an airline safety demonstration: the take-home message is, everything is under control. I didn’t feel like the pilot of my adult life, but it was ok, because an authoritative yet gentle voiceover was making me feel like a valued passenger. I imagine God would sound a bit like that voiceover.

Scroll an inch beneath the video and you’ll find — I found — an intriguing endorsement of bullet journaling. ‘It will not only help you get more organized,’ says an author named Cal, ‘but will also help you become a better person.’ Is that really all it takes? Any old pen and any old notebook? A minimal investment of time? And you’ll — I’d — be better? Cured of my existential angst? Healthy, ethical, successful?

I had my doubts.

Deep down I may have been hoping for a miracle, but my decision to start bullet journaling was more practical than I’ve made it sound. At the beginning of 2018, I didn’t actually need a traditional planner. In an attempt to do something as different as possible from studying, I’d spontaneously moved to the French Alps, where I was working in hospitality ten hours a day, six days a week — a practical job, for which I needed no to-do list. My colleagues were also my housemates and my only friends; in our down time, we went to a bar when we felt like it, headed up the mountain when the weather was good, and napped when we were tired. Our time was governed by whim, and I — even I, who had previously lived by list after timetabled list — became a person who didn’t make plans.

Having a traditional planner, with thirty square centimetres allotted per day, would have been a waste of paper; seeing my life in terms of page after page of empty weeks would have made me feel like a waste of space.

My bullet journal gave me permission to live in the moment — for the first time in my life. If I accomplished ‘nothing’ one week (beyond the demands of my very demanding job), there was no evidence of that ‘unproductive’ week between its pages. It was absent from the grand scheme of things, existing purely in my head — which is how I’ve come to see my entire winter in the Alps.

A few months after I got back to the UK, I made some notes in my bullet journal while reading Willa Cather’s novel The Song of the Lark (which was published in 1915). Looking back on these notes recently, my eyes spied a quotation that I’d carefully copied out and then highlighted:

All her life she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up.

The story tracks an ambitious young singer named Thea Kronborg from obscurity in small-town Colorado to fame at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. About halfway through, after a few years’ hard training, Thea’s an exhausted twenty-year-old who believes that, ‘So far she had failed’. Behold: evidence that burnout has existed for over a century.

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, Thea is able to spend a summer relaxing in rural Arizona, ‘completely released from the enslaving desire to get on in the world’. This change in pace leads to a transformative change in perspective.

And this, more or less, is how I now feel about my time in the Alps. Not paying attention to clock time, I noticed the ebb and flow of natural time more. Without a traditional planner to structure my life, I never knew the date; but I clearly remember the first time it wasn’t pitch black when I left my flat for the morning shift, and the first time I heard birds singing on the way to work. My memories from that winter have a dreamy clarity; there was no need to record them.

Since giving up on my bullet journal, I’ve done some Googling to try and find others for whom the practice didn’t work. In a blog post I stumbled across called ’11 Reasons People Struggle With Bullet Journals’, I read that the #1 pitfall is: ‘You Don’t Use Your Bullet Journal’.

My response was an internal eye roll. Who’d pass judgement on the effectiveness of their bullet journal having not even used it?

And then I realised: that’s exactly what I’d done. While living in the mountains, I believed in the benefits of my bullet journal; but with nothing to schedule and no need to document anything, I wasn’t actually using it. What I liked wasn’t the presence of this new system but the absence of the old one: it was revelatory to learn that life went on without the lists I’d so compulsively made as a student.

But was I better?

Was I the pilot of my life rather than a passenger?

Not quite. Things were about to get turbulent.

Spring

The irony of my life choices may not escape you; but if it’s fugitive, here’s a hint:

· it’s true that the stated aim of my ‘experimental year’ was to gloriously break out of the restrictive structures that had governed my life as a student

· it’s also true that about two months into that year, I threw myself headfirst into a lifestyle that was so restrictive it didn’t allow me time to reflect, plan or think.

Turns out trying to completely deconstruct your life can backfire in a way that sends you sprinting in the other direction. Having no structure is scary.

That’s what I realised when the snow started dripping and I heard the clock ticking again and turned to my bullet journal to ask it: what next? Some people love it, but I hated seeing my future represented as an endless expanse of blank pages. What I craved were the names of Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays, printed at consistent intervals in a comfortingly simple font, reassuring me that life would go on.

‘When I got off the plane at Luton,’ I wrote in my bullet journal, a couple of days after moving home from France, ‘I was a little overwhelmed by the landscape — or lack of landscape. After almost five months of living in the mountains, I couldn’t believe how different it felt, being somewhere flat. People often comment on being able to see for miles [in East Anglia, my home], but in [the Alps], I could see things that were miles away, so had a greater sense of distance.’

Not that I noticed, but I was writing a perfect metaphor for what troubled me about the notebook I was writing it in: I like being able to see the shape of things that are far away.

At the beginning of a traditional planner, there’s usually an overview of the current year, and sometimes there’s an overview of the next. Looking at these grids, seeing today in the context of many days, I am soothed; looking at the future log of a bullet journal, in which all but the most important dates are unrepresented, I am at sea.

Bullet journals work when you don’t feel the need to construct a clear vision of what’s ahead.

I knew this, without understanding it, long before I started my experiment. When my first friend to try bullet journaling described it, I remember asking her something like: so how do you plan stuff happening in like seven months?

I don’t, she shrugged.

For her — and me, when I was living in the mountains — bullet journaling was about squeezing every last drop of life out of a hectic present.

The same seems to be true of Jennifer Chan, who wrote this popular article about how her bullet journal allows her to maximise her day-to-day productivity. She states that one of the few things that doesn’t work for her is the future log, which ‘doesn’t adapt well to how I plan or think about the future. The only events recorded in mine are upcoming vacations, but I really don’t even turn to it.’

My theory is that bullet journaling is great if you’re focused on (1) the here and now, and (2) tweaking your established routine, which is all about (3) getting stuff done; whereas it’s less great if you’re focused on (1) the big scary future, and (2) establishing a new routine, after (3) escaping the mindset that you’re defined by how much stuff you get done.

Obviously, I fell into the second category of individuals.

So what did I do? What I’d always done, when in doubt: I made lists. ‘Things that have made me cry recently’, ‘Inspirational people’ and ‘Christmas present ideas’ stacked up and gathered dust in my bullet journal — incremental attempts to understand my relationship to the world. Previously, the limited amount of space per day, week and month in a structured planner would have curbed my boundless visions of time past, present and future; in my bullet journal, the possibilities were endless. In two months, I filled up the rest of the notebook with lists.

After a winter of freedom from this irresistible compulsion to plot my life, it was back with a vengeance — sucking up my energy, filling up my time, getting me nowhere. I wasn’t cured. In the words of that viral Buzzfeed article:

You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by […] starting a bullet journal.

The point of a bullet journal is basically to keep track of every moment of your life; as Chan explains, ‘It’s to know, on a fundamental level, how you’re spending your time’. That’s why it’s called ‘The Analogue Method for the Digital Age’ — an age in which we use apps to record everything from hours of sleep to countries visited, menstrual cycles to aesthetically pleasing breakfasts, and, strangest of all, how much time we’re spending on apps.

And therein lay the issue. When I started bullet journaling, I already had a tendency to spend far too much time tracking and planning my life and not enough time living and enjoying it. As an undergrad, I’d spend my Sunday evenings creating complicated, meticulously colour-coded timetables, to help me deal with the overwhelming freedom of organising my own time; as a postgrad, I’d pore over my planner when I was stressed, wasting hours in designating the hours in which I’d get this task, that work or those chores done.

Maybe, I realise in hindsight, the restrictive structures I was hoping to gloriously break out of were the ones inside my own head — rather than those imposed by the educational system. Maybe, after years of ascetic self-discipline, what I wanted was a break from plotting — from piloting — my own life. So maybe it’s not so ironic that I was drawn to the mountains, in search of work that went according to someone else’s plan, and leisure time governed by whim.

Mine’s the generation that lauds portfolio careers, self-determination and individualism — we’ve driven the bullet journal craze because it appeals to our desire to play by no one’s rules but our own. So for a long time I was ashamed of the fact that bullet journaling wasn’t working for me: my craving for conventional structure made me feel like I wasn’t creative enough, innovative enough, liberated enough to be in charge of my own time.

Lifestyle trends want us to feel like this. Have you ever noticed how many of them pit an enlightened us against a conformist them?

But lifestyle trends also want us to feel like they’re endlessly inclusive. One of the things that appears time and time again on the bullet journal website is the instruction to ‘do what works for you’, within the basic dictates — the assumption being that those basic dictates work for everyone.

And I was determined to make it work for me too. It didn’t occur to me that using someone else’s method in a blank notebook is no more the mark of a ‘creative’ than using your own method in a structured planner

Summer

Like digital devices, bullet journals can become chaotic hoards of information. Six months into my year of experimentation, I was left with 250 pages of badly organised notes on things I’d read, done and seen. (One thing I hadn’t done was use my bullet journal’s index.)

But the sun was shining and I was determined to do better — to be better, as bulletjournal.com had promised I could be. I bought another dotted notebook and decided to research the key to other bullet journalists’ success.

Prepare to be amazed — then type #bulletjournal into Instagram. You’ll find intricate mood trackers, elaborate spending logs, stunning illustrations and motivational quotes in perfect modern calligraphy. Other keyboards have written about how intimidating this is for the common or garden bullet journalist, but I wasn’t too bothered — it was 2018 and I’d absorbed the core message of second wave, layperson’s bullet journaling: Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be beautiful!

I still wondered, though: why were all these incredibly talented people channelling their skills into the layouts of their journals instead of actual works of art. Maybe, I thought, it’s a symptom of postmodern capitalism’s tendency to devalue everything that can’t be seen as productive: people can’t just draw something, they have to create something utilitarian.

Maybe, I think now, people just find it satisfying — like I find writing overwrought long reads satisfying.

I turned to Google, in search of more relatable bullet journaling advice. Unsurprisingly, I found that the sheer volume of content didn’t soothe my analysis paralysis.

Which is ironic — because analysis paralysis was at the heart of my decision to start bullet journaling in the first place. December has always heralded my annual, anxious scroll through all the planners I could possibly use to plot my next twelve months; I’d deliberate extensively over which one to get. No shop-bought planner has ever been ideal, and I usually find myself wishing I could design my own dream diary — which would incorporate the best qualities of every system I’ve ever employed.

Clearly, I should have been more careful when it came to wishing

Bullet journaling perfectly fulfilled my desire — and turned out to be a nightmare. Instead of being an annual trial, choosing the right layout to maximise productivity and minimise procrastination had become a weekly, sometimes daily, struggle.

So despite my research, when it came to setting up a second bullet journal, I stencilled in the precise layout of a shop-bought, week-per-view planner I’d once owned — and once perceived as sub-ideal. The left hand side of each double spread was divided into seven parts; the right hand side was blank, for my to-do list. My year was represented in monthly grids at the beginning of the notebook.

Just as I’d fled from years of intense studying into the reassuring structure of an intense job, when I was free to experiment with any and every representation of time, I chose a variation on the theme that had shaped my life.

In short, my new bullet journal looked a lot like the traditional planners I’d spurned — except instead of the layout being neatly, consistently printed by a machine, I had to draw it out each week. While doing this, I usually found myself thinking, this is a colossal waste of time.

Like the author of this Medium article, my attempt at bullet journaling taught me that ‘I’m impatient. But I’m also wildly efficient. I don’t want to waste time on things that won’t feed my momentum.’

So, unsurprisingly, the nadir of my bullet journaling career was the time-consuming, utterly un-enriching process of transferring all the important information from my first bullet journal to my second. Distilling and reproducing my lengthy ‘Books To Read’ list reminded me — a diehard digital detractor — of everything that’s unappealing about analogue. Even the bullet journal website describes migrating information to a new notebook as ‘like moving homes’ — a process most people find intensely stressful.

‘I’m often asked,’ writes the father of bullet journaling Ryder Carroll, ‘“what do you migrate into a new notebook?” The short answer is: only what still matters.’

But how do you decide what matters? What will be important in the future? What you can leave behind in the past? These were the questions I was preoccupied with every day, as the mother of all questions — what should I do with my life — hung over me; and here they were confronting me, in the form of two notebooks that represented my reality as a chaotic, fragmented past and an empty, shapeless future.

Still, I wasn’t going to waste all that time spent setting up my new bullet journal; this time, I was going to make it work.

Autumn

During my summer of experimentation, I feverishly lived by the philosophy that I had to make the most of my time, before adult life kicked in. I travelled as much as I could, spending the tips I’d earned in the Alps, getting used to never being in one place for long.

Then autumn came, and it was time to settle down — a prospect I found unsettling. I’d been just as anxious in far-flung places as I was at home, but still: it isn’t easy to escape the narrative that travel is the key to living your best life. In my childhood bedroom, a massive Rough Guide called Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth is a fixture on the bedside table; when I was little, images of Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat were often the last thing I looked at before going to sleep. Far-off places formed the bases of my dreams. Years later, settling down felt like giving up.

Around this time, I read an article called ‘Travel Is No Cure for the Mind’. The notes I made on it in my bullet journal track the revelation it triggered. One quotation is highlighted in pink and underlined: ‘When we are obsessed with travel, we are intently focused on changing and revising our external venue while neglecting the one constant we all travel with: our minds.’

Like travelling, bullet journaling is billed as a way to make the most of your time on Earth, a way to give your life meaning, a way to get better. Most lifestyle trends are marketed in similar terms. And if you’re feeling a little bit lost, it’s easy to be bewitched by this rhetoric; if you’re feeling a little bit uncertain, it’s easy to allow such pastimes to become a distraction.

For me, a bullet journal was an ‘external venue’ that I could be perpetually ‘changing and revising’, ‘while neglecting’ what was happening inside my own head. Had I been more attentive to that internal venue, I might have noticed that a lot of the ideas preached by bullet journalists were making me feel worse, not better.

One of the questions asked over and over again on evangelical ‘bujo’ blogs is: are you actually productive or are you just busy? Now that my year of experimentation was drawing to a close, I was busy — all the time. I was moving to London, trying to get a foot in the door of the journalism industry, pitching articles and asking for work experience, catching up with friends I hadn’t seen for ages, reading anything and everything I thought might be useful. But so far nothing had come of it. I was not productive.

Like so many ambitious grads leaving educational institutions that are run like businesses, I was in the habit of watching the clock, counting the seconds, revelling in efficiency and keeping track of outcomes. This had ‘worked’ while I had clear aims in sight; but I’d developed zero strategies for coping with the more — and necessarily — reflective phases of life.

And bullet journaling, with its philosophy that every second counts, only made things worse. The underlying ideology of ‘intentional living’ is that, if you’re conscious of the ways you spend your time and if you’re constantly proactive, you can create the life you want for yourself. And if your life isn’t what you want it to be, it’s because you haven’t yet optimised your routine, your mindset, your week-per-view spread.

But the process of figuring out how to start your career — like life in general — can’t be optimised. It takes as long as it takes, feeding off mistakes and, often, the kind of serendipity you can’t plan for. You just have to try stuff, see what happens, and silence the little voice in your head telling you that you’re disorganised, unproductive, failing.

Bullet journaling muffles some people’s little voice; mine was amplified by the practice, with all its talk of setting goals, following through and eliminating dead time.

Either way, it’s worth remembering that sometimes life requires you to be reactive rather than proactive; sometimes it requires you to ignore your to-do list for an evening and do whatever you want; sometimes it requires you to just persist, blindly, not knowing what’s going to work and what isn’t. Bullet journaling, in my experience anyway, devalues these unquantifiable exercises.

The more I think about the metaphor that bullet journaling allows you to ‘go from passenger to pilot’ of your life, the more ironic it seems. The implication is that pilots are free to fly wherever they like, while passengers just sit there, passive.

But that’s not how it works — not on the commercial flights we’re all most familiar with, anyway.

In his delightful memoir Skyfaring, the British Airways pilot Mark Vanhoenacker explains how our apparently empty sky is actually full of invisible structures, which shape the routes of our apparently uninhibited planes. Pilots make very few choices about the altitude, direction and destination of the crafts they operate; elaborate geographical, historical and political collaborations define their actions — as do meteorological events.

Most passengers, on the other hand, have chosen their destinations. Willing to put their lives in the hands of a stranger for a few hours, we’re free to do whatever we like — to work, perhaps, or nap; or write a lengthy personal essay about life and the way we look at it.

I’m about as scared of flying as I am of making big life decisions. These states of suspension, though not unsafe by any measure, accentuate a fact that we humans live with, but usually try to forget: solid ground can so easily vanish from beneath us.

That’s why I love Vanhoenacker’s memoir — and why I like using a regular planner rather than a bullet journal: I find it reassuring to be reminded of the invisible frameworks that exist as guidelines, particularly when I feel as though I’m suspended in the middle of an unforgiving abyss (which is semi-often.)

The words of another memoir — the author Annie Dillard’s — come to mind. She wrote in The Writing Life that, ‘A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.’

That is how I feel about the diary I bought last December, as my year of experimentation drew to a close. It’s neither as beautifully whimsical nor as distressingly chaotic as my bullet journal; it’s just a bog-standard, reliable ‘scaffolding’ — a vehicle that keeps me on course, while I’m doing something that’s more important to me than ‘migrating’ lists or drawing out yet another weekly spread.

Of course, some people find traditional shop-bought planners restrictive — I did too, remember? Once upon a time, I complained that no shop-bought planner had ever been ideal. But doing away with restrictions altogether made me realise that it wasn’t my planner preventing me from getting everything done — it was my own absurdly ambitious conception of what I had time to do.

So bullet journaling did teach me something (it taught me a lot of things, truth be told.) Breaking my days down into tiny units of time showed me how little you can get done in a day. And this, eventually, made me realise: firstly, that if I wanted to be happy with my days, I had to start accepting their frameworks, instead of pushing against them in an attempt to find more time where there is none; and secondly, that there are better things to do with precious time than agonise over how to structure it. I’m okay with delegating that task.

When it came to looking for a 2019 diary, I spent ten minutes — rather than ten hours — looking for an adequate one — rather than a perfect one. So far, I’ve been perfectly happy with it.