#76: The Bullet Journal
How can one single notebook contain a whole life?
I am a firm believer that organisation is the key to a freer, happier mind. Or perhaps it is my key: some prefer a little creative chaos. I like to claim I have ‘organisational skills’ on CVs, but I don’t think I am naturally organised. Things fall out of my brain while it wanders along the most meandering of paths. But I have learnt how to stop them falling out, or, when they do, where to keep them so they don’t get lost. I have learnt how to rely on objects as second brains.
At school, we had planners emblazoned with the school crest. They were very specifically tailored to the work we had to do, and fulfilled their role in flying colours. I would tick off each piece of homework as I did it, enjoying the satisfaction of a page filling with affirmative swishes of biro.
During revision periods I would make my own timetables, segmenting the day into coloured blocks, making sure I didn’t get overwhelmed and buried in one subject. The best hours or days were the purple ones: these were my break times.
But then I reached university, and I wasn’t just planning essays and revision. There were social activities to plan, societies to run, irregular tutorials to remember, bills to pay, trips home to organise, house viewings, shopping, and more and more and more.
The rigidity of a diary or planner could not cope with the variety of modes in my life. I could not look at a list of everything I had to do and make sense of it. I tried apps, I scrawled list after list, I had posters handed out from the university, but I would never settle on a method. The flexibility I needed was never there.
Then I discovered bullet journaling:
‘The analog system for a digital age’
The best way to understand bullet journaling is to watch the video on this website by Ryder, the man who figured out a way of organising his life in a single notebook and felt the need to tell the world.
The Bullet Journal is just a system, a way of noting down things in a notebook. It works via a variety of modules, different lists for every part of your life, keeping track of everything you do and postponing the things you don’t. I make a longer list every week — my ‘Weekly Log’ — and then a shorter list for each day — my adventurously named ‘Daily Log’ — a selection of items and events from the Weekly Log to achieve that day. I also have specific lists for academic work, shopping, ideas for Object, New Year’s resolutions (that I have thoroughly broken), a year planner with everyone’s birthdays on, and basically anything else I spontaneously require. The Bullet Journal is whatever you make it. It is whatever you need.
Some people love digital calendars and to do lists, connected to your laptop and your phone, offering a similar flexibility and accessibility, but I love the physicality of my Bullet Journal, the reassurance of an object I can hold. It does not need charging. It always has a pen with it. I can draw and make any kind of table I need. I can flick its pages. I can archive its predecessors on a shelf. I can scribble in frustration.
Admittedly, if I lost this notebook, I myself would be lost.
But this will not prevent me from bullet journaling any time soon. It clears my head, offering the fine details when necessary, and the overall plan to prevent myself from losing the bigger picture. With just one object in my hand, I know I am prepared. You might call it my comfort blanket. I like to think of it as my brain away from brain. And it is the one object I could never part from.
