Journaling vs. Bullet Journals vs. Write it Down, Damn it
I write for a living, which means that writing in order to figure my own thoughts out is a fairly common thing. But I’m finding that there’s a difference between the short-form list making that’s core to the BuJo process, and the kind of long-form “keep writing until it makes sense” stuff that I’ve done for the last while.
I’ve never kept a traditional “dear diary” kind of daily log. Screw that noise. I’ve tried it. Digitally, physically, in text messages to myself, on Tumblr, on Wordpress, on my own site. I even did a “letters to a stranger” project once, where I structured my journal entries as notes to someone I didn’t know. Couldn’t make it stick.
Currently, I’m alternating between a few different forms of productively-confessional page-vomit: to-do lists, reminders, and page-long brain dumps once a week or so. It seems to work well-ish, but it hasn’t had any direct impacts on my productivity because I’m still working from the deck of “what can I remember right now” instead of building out a more thorough and reliable task-structure.
But I think I have the solution.
Process Documentation
I’m a hard-ass for process documentation for fiction. You do something, you document how you did it, you break that down, improve it, and iterate. It’s a damn easy thing to do with creative writing, programming, and just about anything mechanical.
So why not apply that to scheduling?
The idea that I’m going to try here is to divide my day into task-groups, enumerate those tasks, do those tasks, and perform a postmortem on how it all worked out, in the journal. Rather than using it as a tracking tool, I’ll approach it as a system-diagnosis tool and see if better tracking and logging is a byproduct of that.
Because that’s totally sane, right?
I get it, I get it, that sounds totally crazy; why turn life into a technical manual? I’m not going to break things down as far, or as mechanically, as I do for my clients (at first) because there’s a limit to how process-oriented you can be with line items like “take a break” and “go cook something new.” We’re still in the exploratory phase, so everything’s going to be kinda fast and loose.
With that said, I really think that this is going to be the best way for me to use my journal in a semi-constructive way, as it’ll allow me to compare my expectations with my results and change the way I do things.
What I’ve Already Learned
If I want to be really productive in the morning I need to dive right into a project without hesitation. Like, before I get dressed immediately. I’ve mentioned this before, but I find that cutting myself too much slack leads to a wasted day.
On the journaling front, I’ve been mostly journaling at night. I use it to summarize my day, see what I’ve missed, and to line up that critically-important tasks for the next day. It hasn’t been effective.
I’m going to see if I can turn my mix of journaling, list-making, and process documentation into my first-thing task in the morning to help me wake up. But I’m pretty sure I’ll have to stick to building furniture to really get the most out of that brain hack.
I have started a kind of emergent habit, though, that I think I’m going to stick with: I’ve been walking to the library and reading for a few hours twice a week. It gives me a concrete ‘I need to have everything done before I leave at this time” line in the sand, and it gives me a chance to step outside of my usual environment to relax and explore new literature.
And they have free coffee.
The biggest benefit that comes with writing things down, at least as I’ve seen in the immediate, is that it allows you to figure out your headspace when you later critique each entry and list. It’s once again a more diagnostic benefit, but, hey, it helps.
