Atlas Journaling: A Unified Approach for Seeing the Big Picture and Acting with Focus

How I bridge the divide between analog Bullet Journaling and digital project management in Obsidian with a little grace.

Geet Duggal
19 min readJan 25, 2025
Photo by pure julia on Unsplash

What am I doing this for again? I have often wrestled with this question after I have completed a meaningful project or a hard day's work.

Over a decade ago when I was in graduate school, I remember having this feeling after working particularly hard on writing a paper with a colleague and finally completing it. Even though I had a lot of fun doing it and knew it was meaningful work both personally and professionally, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of emptiness and, “what now?” My colleague mentioned feeling the same, underscoring the fact that this is a real and potentially common feeling regardless of what project I may work on.

That thought has stuck with me since. Time will pass, projects will come and go, and the question remains: how do I square the onslaught of day-to-day work with the desire to see what this work means in a broader context?

My bold attempt at the answer: the relentless pursuit of what is true, awe-inspiring, and stands the test of time.

I have faith that there are many such treasures discoverable in the course of my natural actions every day. Some of these truths are obviously universal, and some seemingly unique to just me. Atlas Journaling is a fun and in inviting method to help you hunt for the lot of them.

Atlas Journaling is a simple system for combining journaling, note-taking, and project management across the digital and physical worlds:

  1. Pick two-ish tools — one analog and one digital: an analog tool to keep you grounded and slow you down, and a digital tool to enrich your entire experience. For me, it’s the official Bullet Journal and Obsidian.
  2. Map out your big picture in two dimensions with few, well chosen words, symbols, territories, and borders. Preferably use your analog tool to create a clear, grounded view of what you want to work on in this season of your life — your personal atlas.
  3. Organize your thoughts in a way that works across both tools so your ideas and observations flow naturally between them.

That’s it. No lofty rules or rigid constraints — just a straightforward system that works for you from the ground up. Whether you’re jotting things down on paper, whiteboarding ideas, or organizing digitally, this method is about treating your life like an atlas you can consult at a glance.

Part I: Principles

Principle 1: Capture and consume in one dimension. Play in two. We often capture ideas and consume content linearly (eg. shopping lists, logs, timelines, and stories). This one-dimensional approach works for jotting down quick lists and understanding concepts sequentially, but it lacks the spatial context useful for higher-level reflection and play.

The term atlas reflects the idea of mapping your life visually, much like how an atlas represents the world. Just as a physical atlas shows the entire globe, your Atlas Journal contains maps of your priorities, projects, and values for a specific season of your life. It provides an overview at a glance, with simple pointers to more detailed areas, helping you orient yourself without overwhelming complexity or the need to keep it all in your head.

While I have always had tools to manage projects, tasks, and ideas in digital formats, I have struggled to find a system that allowed me to visualize everything at a higher level. Despite all the tools available to me, I still had the psychological pressure of keeping the bigger picture in my head. The Atlas method embraces the second dimension by advocating for the use of tools like Bullet Journals, whiteboards, stickie notes, and those in digital platforms (eg. Excalidraw, Freeform, Notion) for reflection and planning.

These two-dimensional spaces provide room to explore and, crucially, create visual relationships between your projects, their territories, and the journeys you take between them. For example, you could imagine grouping your projects by contexts. These contexts can be more fine-grained than ‘work’ or ‘personal’ (eg. at home, on the weekend, at my work desk, during lunch).

Example seasonal map in an Atlas Journal. Here, projects are spatially grouped in two dimensions by context (eg. at Desk, Living Room, Errands, etc). The names and descriptions are very simple, there are a few well-chosen symbols/arrows (eg. an important project or a daily journey). The overall method is very flexible. The idea is to organize your key projects spatially in a way that is fun and useful so you get the big picture at a glance.

Principle 2: Reflect and repeat. Your Atlas journal is not just a tool for laying out your projects in a two-dimensional space, it’s a place for reflection and reaction. It’s where you go to evaluate what you’ve done, consider what you need to do, and, most importantly, to reiterate and reinforce what truly matters. I believe deeply in the power of repetition. By recording and revisiting the same ideas, you naturally highlight what is important while allowing less critical tasks or thoughts to fade away. This process happens naturally from the ground up, and it’s one of the most impactful ways to stay connected to your priorities.

In the Atlas method, the process of reflection and repetition happens through seasons and migrations. Unlike many productivity systems, I’m not prescriptive about enforcing a rigid time frame for reviews. Whether you review roughly daily, weekly, or quarterly doesn’t matter as much to me as the consistency of reviewing at natural times and relatively frequently. I do believe that rigid time-based reviews are helpful. Systems like the Bullet Journal method and Getting Things Done emphasize regular reviews for a good reason, but my approach aims to remove some of the rigidity and complexity that can make these approaches feel overwhelming at times. Instead, I focus on the concept of seasons.

A season represents a meaningful period in your life, with a natural beginning and ending point. Seasons can last a few weeks or a few months depending on what’s happening in your life. For instance:

  • Holiday Season. This might span from Thanksgiving to early January and include projects like wrapping up work, planning travel, and preparing gifts.
  • Planning Season. This could represent a two-week phase of brainstorming in-between large projects. You are focused on reflecting and laying the groundwork for a new initiative, ending when the vision becomes clear, and action begins.

Seasons are therefore not meant to be rigid (eg. defined by a fiscal calendar or dictated by our position around the sun). They are personal. They may overlap with traditional schedules, but they exist in this context to help you structure your reflections and goals around what’s happening in your life. Within a season, you can manage both personal and professional projects, blending them together to see the full picture of where you are and where you’re headed.

This definition of season is particularly valuable because it allows you to reflect and repeat across different scales of time.

Another key part of this principle is migration, a concept borrowed from the Bullet Journal method. Migration involves rewriting tasks, ideas, or projects as you move them forward into a new day, month, or generally season. This process isn’t just about carrying information forward: it’s a form of repetition that helps you evaluate whether something is still important. If an idea isn’t worth rewriting, it likely isn’t worth pursuing.

Though migration has been criticized for its perceived tedium, I see it as a vital way to clarify priorities and reinforce focus. By repeatedly engaging with the ideas and goals that matter, you deepen your connection to them and naturally filter out distractions.

Finally, when I emphasize reflection, I don’t just mean looking back on your actions; it’s also about creating a system where your physical journal organization literally mirrors how you’re sorting things digitally down to the exact names of the folders and projects. Think of it as a reflection in multiple senses — different tools, different mediums, and different angles to view your one life using one organization system. This dual-layered system offers a depth of understanding that wouldn’t exist if you worked in only one medium.

This diagram briefly illustrates a few examples of how you could mirror the same organization system across analog and digital media using a Daily Log, Projects, and Longer-Term Notes.

At its core, this principle is about creating a unified system that allows you to navigate your life with intention. Reflection helps you see where you’ve been, while repetition ensures you stay connected to where you’re going. The flexibility of seasons makes the process adaptable, and the practice of migration keeps it grounded in what truly matters.

Ultimately, this principle ensures that your Atlas journal is not just a tool but a companion — a space for discovery, clarity, and focus as you move through the seasons of your life.

Principle 3: Truth. At its core, the Atlas method is a tool for uncovering and staying grounded in truth. We often seek a reason — a motivation — for why we do the things we do. Understanding this “why” is foundational to productivity, purpose, and personal growth. Your Atlas Journal becomes the space where these truths emerge, evolve, and solidify.

Truths can be represented in just a few words: an insight you’ve gained, a value you hold dear, or a realization about what drives you. These truths bubble up over time from steady reflection and deliberate action. Whether inspired by a powerful image, a compelling story, a meaningful project, or an accomplishment, moments of clarity often arise when we take time to process and document them.

The Atlas Journaling Method provides a framework to capture these truths — briefly, yet meaningfully. This isn’t about crafting perfectly worded reflections. Atlas journaling is about jotting down the essence of what inspires or motivates you.

For example, you might find that through the course of working through various projects both in weekend contexts and at the office, that you enjoy physically walking from one workplace location to the next in the course of the day. This is a truth worth noting down. You may be able to remember a handful of truths, but as you collect them, they will accumulate in such magnitude you’ll appreciate having a more reliable medium to store them in. Your journal then serves as a sort-of ‘hard drive’ for these insights, providing you with the capability to glance at it and populate your working memory with reminders of what matters most.

Example annotation of seasonal map with truths based on experience in actual projects. Annotating map with truths helps to put concrete work in the context of a bigger picture and more meaningful scale.

By revisiting and reaffirming what’s important, you will have accumulated a repository of insights, values, and motivations that reflect the very best of who you are and who you aspire to be. These truths, viewed through your own lens, offer clarity and strength when you need it most.

Truth in the Atlas method isn’t just about self-reflection — it also enables sharing a distilled version of yourself with others. When your actions and decisions are rooted in clearly understood truths, they naturally communicate a sense of purpose to those around you, even if indirectly. This isn’t about broadcasting your inner world but about letting the clarity you’ve cultivated shine through in how you live and engage with others.

In the next section, I’ll share how I’ve put this principle into practice, showing that while the concept may seem expansive, its implementation is simple and adaptable. The beauty of the Atlas method is that it offers enough structure to guide you while remaining flexible enough to evolve with you.

Part II: Practice

My personal method for playing in two dimensions starts with simplicity. To begin, I handle capturing in one dimension: everything I want to capture — ideas, tasks, notes — initially goes into my daily digital log. I’m a strong believer in capturing everything in one place. This approach ensures that all my thoughts, whether digital or physical, are centralized and easily accessible.

Whenever I have an idea, I use a device to log it quickly. If I jot something down physically (e.g., on a piece of paper), I later take a photo and add it to my digital capture log. This system allows me to maintain a linear, chronological record of all types of media — text, images, and screenshots — organized in one dimension.

The second dimension is where things become more dynamic. Here, I use two primary tools: my Bullet Journal and Obsidian. These tools complement each other, creating spaces where I can organize and visualize my thoughts beyond a simple timeline.

My actual Bullet Journal with preferred Uniball Deluxe Micro pen.

The starting point for my two-dimensional work is what I call my seasonal spread in the Bullet Journal. As discussed in the principles section, a season represents a meaningful phase of my life, often spanning a few weeks to several months. My seasonal spread provides a bird’s-eye view of this period, divided into approximately six categories that have evolved over time.

Each category/space/territory in my seasonal spread represents a core area of my life. They reflect the essential areas where I aim to make progress each season. For example:

  • Self-care: Represented by an ASCII slash (/), focusing on physical and mental well-being. Basic things that bring joy.
  • Spirituality: Denoted by an asterisk (*), encompassing practices and reflections on values, matters of faith, and what brings meaning to life.
  • Content Creation: Marked with an equal sign (=), capturing creative projects and outputs.

Each category has its dedicated section on the seasonal spread, making it easy to track and visualize progress across all areas of life.

Within each category, I divide the space into two parts:

  1. Key Projects: On the right-hand side, I list significant projects or tasks for the season. These are typically larger in scope, spanning anywhere from a week to a few months. While the list is not exhaustive, it highlights the most important items that require focus during the season.
  2. Daily Highlights: On the left side, I include a few words representing the highlight of any given day. This is an idea inspired by Make Time. It is also a concept similar to one-sentence journaling. This practice has become a cornerstone of my method. Each day, I set a simple intention: What is the one thing I want to accomplish or focus on today? At the end of the day, I reflect for just 30 seconds to a few minutes on my highlight of the day, noting what stood out (whether or not it matched with my intention). This could be a small achievement, a meaningful moment, or simply something that felt good. Often, it’s a single highlight tied to one of my categories, and I jot it down in just a few words — no full sentences, no overthinking.
My actual Bullet Journal seasonal spread. It shows that it doesn’t have to be as fancy as an actual map but the use of 2 dimensions is still there. This covers about 1/2 of a month. If one of the spaces/territories fills up with Daily Highlights in a short period of time, the season may naturally end. Other seasonal spreads of mine had more doodles and dawings and journeys, but this one hasn’t accumulated so many yet. This illustrates how the seasonal spreads are about flexibility and utility.

This practice is powerful because it’s a subtle form of gratitude journaling without feeling forced or cheesy. It affirms what’s important while helping me maintain a sense of purpose across the season. Over time, the highlights create a record of meaningful moments that I can revisit to reflect on progress or find inspiration.

Believe in your Highlight: It is worth prioritizing over random disruption. — Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky, Make Time

The physical nature of my Bullet Journal adds a layer of warmth and reliability to this practice. The journal itself is a joy to use, with durable pages and a grid layout that makes organization easy. This tactile experience is as important as the content — it makes the act of journaling feel cozy and inviting, creating a sense of attachment to the process.

While I primarily use the official Bullet Journal, I acknowledge there are many excellent alternatives that can serve the same purpose. The key is having a beautiful, durable analog canvas that feels like a trustworthy companion. It becomes more than a tool; it’s a repository for the chapter of life you’re currently navigating.

In addition to my seasonal spread and daily highlights, my Bullet Journal also contains collections for projects and spaces.

  • Projects: These are time-bound efforts lasting anywhere from a week to a few months. Each project gets its own indexed section in the journal, so I can quickly find and continue notes as needed. Rather than blocking off too much space upfront, I dedicate pages incrementally.
  • Spaces: These represent broader areas of life or work (eg. self-care, spirituality, content creation I mentioned above) and function as ongoing collections of ideas, notes, and plans. When something feels more relevant to a space than a project, I capture it here.

This structure ensures I have a consistent and unified way to organize my thoughts, regardless of whether I’m working physically in my Bullet Journal or digitally in Obsidian.

In the digital realm, Obsidian serves as my primary tool. Its simplicity, flexibility, and interoperability make it ideal for note-taking, project management, and task tracking. While digital files often feel one-dimensional, Obsidian’s plugins and visual tools allow for powerful two-dimensional thinking:

  • Excalidraw: A tool for sketching and diagramming that mirrors the playfulness of physical drawings. Unlike more tools focused on polished output, Excalidraw encourages creativity and quick ideation without getting bogged down in perfection.
  • Kanban Boards: Obsidian’s Kanban plugin provides a straightforward way to manage projects, track statuses, and prioritize tasks. This digital tool complements the physical organization in my Bullet Journal, with both systems using the same project names for consistency.
My Log, Projects, Spaces all have analogous representations across physical and digital. There is no need to precisely duplicate what’s in one space or another, though they may overlap a little.

The interplay between physical and digital tools is central to my method. While my Bullet Journal provides an intimate and tactile way to organize and reflect, my digital tools offer scalability, flexibility, and the ability to iterate on ideas quickly. The repetition of moving between these two worlds reinforces what matters.

For instance, if I capture an idea digitally, I often revisit it physically in my journal and vice versa. This repetition isn’t redundant — it strengthens focus and keeps important projects and thoughts alive in my working memory. It feels natural and intuitive, creating a seamless connection between my analog and digital workflows.

For me, one the most valuable aspects of Bullet Journaling is how it encourages me to slow down. This might be a personal preference, but it’s also a core highlight of the Bullet Journal method itself. Slowing down to physically write something — just a few words — is a powerful act. It doesn’t need to be perfect or detailed; the act of writing imprints the thought in your memory, especially when working in a two-dimensional, spatial format.

For me, I remember which side of the page it’s on. — Eminem

Reflection, for me, happens more in the physical realm, while the digital side is primarily for execution. The physical act of journaling provides space for planning and reflection, which are closely tied. Once I’ve created a seasonal spread, my daily highlights feed naturally into this reflection process.

A seasonal spread can span weeks or months, depending on the intensity of the period. For example:

  • Short seasons: If one category is fully filled in (representing intense focus in one area), it may signal the natural end of that season.
  • Longer, balanced seasons: When progress is spread across categories, the season might last a full quarter.

At the end of each season, I look back at the highlights for each territory and summarize the main takeaway for that space. This practice helps me understand where I’ve made progress and where I might need to course-correct. What’s powerful about this method is its simplicity: the highlights are drawn from daily reflections, not from lofty or abstract goals. Every day starts with an intention, and at the end of the season, I can trace how those small, intentional actions and highlights have contributed to meaningful progress.

Over the years I have discovered, through my own experience as well as being intimately involved with scores of people in their day-to-day worlds, that getting ultimately grounded and in control of the mundane aspects of life produces a rich field of natural inspiration about our higher-level stuff. — David Allen, Getting Things Done

This approach takes the pressure off working toward big, predefined goals. Instead, it emphasizes organic growth and consistent action, building up projects and goals from the ground-up rather than imposing top-down expectations. For me, this has made the process of reflection both effective and enjoyable.

When a season ends, I create a small summary box for each category, capturing the key highlight from that period. From there, I close out the season and start a new one, migrating any unfinished tasks or projects into the next phase. This migration process is simple yet profound: it allows me to filter out what no longer matters and reinforce what does.

Reflection at the seasonal level often reveals deeper truths about how I operate and what motivates me. It’s not just about tracking tasks — it’s about uncovering what genuinely inspires me. Throughout the process, as I define projects or focus on interests, patterns begin to emerge. I see more clearly what mental imagery or ideas resonate on a spiritual level.

For this reason, I reserve one or two spaces in my system specifically for encoding these truths. For me, this is the Spirituality (*) space. This space isn’t limited to organized religion or faith; it also encompasses the deeply personal aspects of inspiration, meaning, and what matters most in life. It could be drawn from philosophy, art, or even moments of clarity in daily work or entertainment.

This space serves as a target — a place where the deeply resonant aspects of life can inform my future work. It’s not about daily or rigid updates but about letting these truths surface naturally over time. After a few seasons, what was once abstract begins to take shape, grounded in the data and insights collected through the journaling process.

To illustrate the subtle yet impactful way the Atlas method has influenced me, here’s a recent example from my journal. As the weekend approached, I jotted down a brief note about what felt like the highlight of the day. I noticed that, for the past few days, many of these highlights had centered around my “Software Craftsmanship” space (#). While these moments were meaningful, I realized they differed from my original intentions for the week due to circumstances beyond my control. With that in mind, I decided to intentionally shift focus, aiming to journey into the “Self Care” space (/).

At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what this shift would look like. During the 30 seconds it took to capture my highlight, I didn’t feel pressured to plan out the journey in detail. The idea was planted, and as the next day approached, the thought of visiting a bookstore or library naturally came to mind.

The next morning, while getting ready, I briefly noted this intention in my Bullet Journal Daily Log. Since the day was more flexible than usual, this wasn’t something I needed to rigidly schedule — it was simply a guiding intention.

When the opportunity arose to visit a bookstore, I embraced it. On the way, I reminded myself that the purpose of this outing was self-care. I made a conscious effort to avoid rushing or letting anxious thoughts distract me. By giving myself plenty of time and approaching the experience with an open mind, I allowed myself to enjoy the journey fully.

At the bookstore, I found the visit both engaging and restorative. I discovered new topics and books, capturing a few with my quick-capture system — just photos of covers and short notes — while staying present in the moment. That evening, when I reflected on my highlight, I took an extra 30 seconds (a total of one minute overall) to create two small seasonal projects inspired by the experience. These projects fall in my spirituality and discipline spaces, which are spatially adjacent to Self Care on my seasonal map. This adjacency helped nudge me to cultivate these related territories, reminding me that my focus on self-care could naturally extend into other meaningful areas of growth.

And that was it! Just a few words and a few minutes of reflection allowed me to shift from a focus on my craft to self-care while planting seeds for future journeys. I also uncovered a meaningful truth: I’m happiest at a library or bookstore when I have no agenda and my mind is clear to fully enjoy discovery.

Before Atlas journaling, I might have vaguely relied on intuition, noticing that some experiences felt better than others without fully internalizing or appreciating them. This time, I noted the truth about bookstores and self-care in a few words on my seasonal map and moved on. Weeks later, I still see that reminder on my map, allowing me to revisit and appreciate the insight. This small moment will likely influence my future intentions and decisions in ways that feel more meaningful.

Cultivating this self-awareness is a lifelong process, but it starts by simply checking in with yourself. — Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method

For me, Atlas Journaling completes a picture. It fills a significant gap in my ability to organize my thoughts, connect them to a sense of meaning, and reflect on the bigger picture of my life. At its core, Atlas Journaling is built on a simple foundation: it’s easy to implement, adaptable to personal preferences, and scalable to whatever level of complexity you choose. In this way, it spiritually builds on the flexibility and philosophy of Bullet Journaling.

The greatest value I’ve gained from this method is the ability to harmonize my physical and digital worlds in ways I never could before. In the past, I often tried to partition their roles or leaned heavily toward keeping everything digital, leaving my physical world to scraps of paper and disorganized notes. But Atlas Journaling has transformed this imbalance. Now, I see the physical and digital realms as complementary, each enriching the other in a seamless flow.

One of the ideas from the Bullet Journal Method that resonates deeply with me is how a journal can represent chapters of your life. It’s not about having one system to rule them all — it’s about letting your journal evolve as a living record of your journeys.

Middle Earth on Fandom

By grounding my journaling in a consistent format and focusing on spatially motivated, big-picture views, Atlas Journaling has become both practical and enjoyable. Its simplicity and low time commitment make it sustainable. For me, it’s as effortless as spending 30 seconds to a few minutes each evening — often after my nightly shower — writing down a daily highlight. This small ritual centers me. It doesn’t demand complex reflection but provides enough to populate my memory, spark meaningful thoughts, and allow me to reflect on what’s true and important.

See Also

Capture to Do describes my approach to one-dimensional capture (not quite everything) in a Daily Log. How I started bullet journaling and how that relates to my log were covered later.

Discipline Absorbs Chaos describes my approach to time management. Notably, the Atlas method does not cover how I handle a lot of mundane tasks and reminders. I include this because it is such an important part of daily life that it is necessary to complement the Atlas method.

Satisfy the Beast describes in a bit more detail the importance of being able to play in working memory. I believe this is why two-dimensional layouts in groups of around 3–6 items tend to work so well, especially in a seasonal spread or hierarchy.

My article on keeping a Personal Knowledge Encyclopedia describes how I think about Spaces in the context of Daily Logs and and I also go in more depth on how I use Obsidian Kanban for Projects in a small post.

Generally, the Atlas method is a part of how I define my overall workflows for productivity using what I like to call ‘Weather Resistant Productivity”.

The Bullet Journal Method, Make Time, and Getting Things Done are invaluable — perhaps even underrated — texts that deeply inspire this article. Deep Questions is an excellent podcast by Cal Newport that also spiritually inspires this work.

--

--

Geet Duggal
Geet Duggal

Written by Geet Duggal

Providing simple tips on how to use tech and productivity tools to streamline your setup and workflow for maximal enjoyment and creativity.

Responses (2)