Last week, thanks to “Busy Woman” Rita (sorry, in Portuguese), I have become acquainted with the Bullet Journal. If you are into productivity and organization, you should take a look, although most of it is just common sense, at least for me — given how many people still use their email inbox as a container for 987 messages, of which 456 are unread (half of them in fact “marked as unread” because of “stuff”) and 210 are starred, I don’t know what’s common sense anymore. Anyway, this is not a post about Bullet Journal (or any particular journaling, organization or productivity technique, for that matter); for that, you can just read Cody Bromley’s post, for instance. This is a story about how important it is to keep a journal, even if you use no technique at all (or should I say “especially if you use no technique at all”?).

Choosing a Journal You’ll Really Use

The contact with the Bullet Journal happened at a time when I was considering going back to keeping a journal. Not just a work notebook, with meeting notes, ideas, and to-do items separated by a date header: a real bona fide record of (most of) my days. I am a fan of Moleskine notebooks (no, no Ernest Hemingway hocus-pocus, just sturdiness and good paper), and I definitely can’t live without a squared grid, so my only hesitation was regarding size. As Ryder Carroll perfectly puts it:

If it’s too big you’ll never take it with you.
If it’s too small it will be impractical .

To this, I would add three things that weighed on my decision for the small Moleskine notebook.

• If it’s too big and that doesn’t prevent from taking it with you (you carry a purse/backpack/messenger bag at every times, you drive your car everywhere, etc.), you’ll still refrain you from taking it out. Either because you’ll have it in your bag (instead of your pocket) or because you could use a surface that’s bigger than your hand and more comfortable than your lap, you’ll constanly think “I’ll just write it later” — and never do. (I’ve been there.)
• A least for me, if the notebook is not small enough it will be too practical. Confused? You might, since this one is a matter of personal choice and may not make sense to you in particular. This will become clear in a jiffy.
• The third thing, which reinforced both previous points, was historical evidence of my experience. And What is this?, you may ask. Old journals, I say. I knew I had a couple of old (attempts at) journals in the bottom of my desk’s drawer, and I thought it would be great idea to take a look at them after all these years.

Old Journals

The first one (in chronological order) is an A5 notebook, with entries dated August 22, 2005 through… September 8, 2005. Yep: 2½ weeks. Its value as a journal (by my terms)? Little. Since the notebook was too cumbersome to quickly capture spur-of-the-moment log entries (see first point above) and too practical for long-form writing (see second point above), its seven written pages contain notes about webdesign and web accessibility, the original manuscript draft of my first newspaper article (about the launch of Google Talk — you really go us thinking that interoperability chimera was true, Google…), and a two-page rant about waiting and people passing by (written while I waited for my prescription glasses to be ready).

The second journal is a small Moleskine. The first dated entry is from October 14, 2005 (but the couple of undated entries before that lead me to think I started this journal right after I ditched the larger one). The last dated entry is from August 6, 2006 (but the last three entries, undated, are clearly from, at least, November 2006 — the month my father died). Its value as a journal? Priceless. Examples of what I’ve found there:

• A log of my trip to Aveiro for a national programming contest, including some (but not too much) notes on the contest itself.
• A log of my trip to Paris for a regional (southwest Europe) programming contest. This is particularly noteworthy for me because it was my first trip abroad/first time on an airplane.
• Some rants.
• Pages pertaining to my participation in the Embodiment project. These include rants, log entries (things like “EEG day — God it’s so hard to hang with only one coffee until 6pm!”), and a collage about one day.
• Things I felt like saying to someone (but couldn’t/shouldn’t/wouldn’t).
• A selection of poems to celebrate World Poetry Day.
• Notes about the new specializations for the master degree, brought upon by the then-ongoing Bologna Process. What’s noteworthy about this is that there is a smiley next to a specialization that I did not choose, and in which domain I’m going to end up working anyway (software engineering).
• An erotic short story I wrote.
• Recipes for the first three dishes I learned how to cook: stroganoff, macaroni with sausages, and spaghetti alla bolognese.