I am a notebook philanderer.
For my birthday, my cousin recently got me a really nice notebook. I love new notebooks, and this can be seen when I spend 20 minutes in Indigo/Chapters gawking at the beautiful notebooks on display. Problem is, once I get my hands on these, I don’t know how I can use them to their full potential. I have used several notebooks as journals/diaries, agendas, and sketchbooks, but I always lose interest a few pages in, and I end up never cracking up the book again. Once they’re no longer “new”, I lose interest and move on to the next new notebook (call me the player of notebooks ;))
Since I want to find a useful way that will engage me to use my new notebook, I decided I should do some research first. My notebook is medium sized, and the vague vision that I have with the notebook is for it to be versatile enough to incorporate in my everyday life. Suggestions like a budget tracker, food/exercise tracker intrigued me, but I didn’t want to dedicate a notebook of this size just for a single, specific purpose.
Then, I came across the words “bullet journal”. They were buzz words that intrigued me, and from further research, they promise to effectively increase productivity. As a studying engineer is actively trying various productivity methods such as the Pomodoro method, to-do lists, Google calendars, distraction-minimizing apps like Noisli ; I am open to trying this method.
In short, the Bullet journal is a product and a framework introduced in 2015 that can be applied to any blank notebook. The idea is to create daily entries with tasks written in bullet points, create monthly logs and future logs with the relevant tasks and events written. A key of symbols to mark the tasks was even established by the creator to mark each task as completed, scheduled, and migrated to the future. The point of this analog system is that manually writing down your tasks reminds you of pending tasks and upcoming events, and if you don’t have the time to write down a task repeatedly over an extended period of time, chances are this task was not worth doing. You can even customize the framework by adding other pages of topics that are meaningful to you. In other words, the Bullet Journal is like a journal/diary, agenda, and anything else you want it to be, compressed into one book. You create an index referencing sections of your notebook with page numbers, so you don’t spend countless time flipping through your book to find an important detail that you have written.
I have set up my journal for the upcoming month of April, so I am pretty excited to test drive this not-so-new method and perhaps document my experience on this in the future. Perhaps this is the method that I can finally settle down with, and put my days of notebook philandering to an end. :)
