Bullet Journal — extended

You have probably heard or read about a Bullet Journal. If you haven’t, I recommend having a look at their website. It’s a great organisation method created (or popularised) by Ryder Carroll, a designer from Brooklyn.

For those of us with confused feelings about technology who prefer the soft touch of a pen on paper, the Bullet Journal method is very neat. It was transformational for me, who have always struggled to keep a diary or a calendar. It’s not that I haven’t tried, it’s just that I tend to lack the discipline and eventually they all get messy.

You see, I love making notes. My mom used to get quite mad at me, with all the paper I would generate. If only it was organised maybe she wouldn’t have much of an issue, but normally it was all over the place.

Late last year I started a new job which demanded a lot of focus and attention to many moving parts. I started to suffer from what I called cognitive overload, or foggy brain syndrome. After looking for organisation solutions on the web, I stumbled on the idea of the Bullet Journal.

It started OK: I created an Index, a Future Log, and then added a calendar entry for the month of December. In theory then, every day I was supposed to create one entry, with the tasks for that day, and any subsequent notes are filled in between.

Soon I ran intro trouble though. Because I write a lot, my day entries started to get lost in the middle of the noise of the random daily notes. Instead of having a straightforward index for December, it became very patchy, with calendar entries on the 7th, 8th, then jumping to 21st, then 29th…

Not ideal… Not only it looks untidy, but I was also missing some entries, and one of the big advantages of the Bullet Journal method, the retrospective, was not intuitive, as I needed to hunt the days scattered through the pages.

So I decided to start again. New notebook, and I will only use if for the bullet journal, not for other notes.

But I still want to make notes! And I want the notes that I take to be somehow linked to the daily log, so that I can build a chronology of ideas.

Here’s where one of the innovations come in: I continued using the old notebook, gave it a name (NA: Notebook A. I know, not very imaginative), and every time I made a note about something related to an activity on my daily log, I would put a little reference back on that entry.

This was a game changer for me. Yes, I needed to carry two notebooks with me everywhere, but the flexibility, organisation and fast recall that this allowed me was well worth it. And if for some reason I could not carry two notebooks, I would carry only the daily log, but write any extra notes at the end, then putting a reference to those notes on a negative index.

And that’s it. Please feel free to get in touch if you want to learn more about this method, or if you want to share your experiences with analog organisation techniques.