One year ago I started Bullet Journaling as a 30-day experiment and I haven’t missed a day since. It’s become a daily ritual that’s drastically altered my relationship with myself and the digital tools that I use every day.

Today I’m sharing my honest take on The Bullet Journal Method, what I think its greatest strengths are, and where it falls short in practice. If you've been thinking about starting a Bullet Journal then this newsletter will help you finally decide if it's right for you.

If you do decide you want to give it a go I have two set up videos that I made over the last year: First Bullet Journal & Second Bullet Journal/

Why did I start Bullet Journaling?

A little over a year ago I was feeling some form of digital burnout. Everything I did from note-taking and writing to time management was mediated through an app, mostly Notion. The creative process of writing my weekly newsletter and making YouTube videos started to feel stale and rigid. So I made a switch to old fashioned notebooks and bought myself a pocket planner. It worked for time-management purposes but didn’t really leave any room for me to explore more creative ideas. What I needed was a planner that could also double as a thinking tool for organizing my ideas.

That’s about when I decided to read The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carrol.

I had heard of Bullet Journaling over the years but all of my internet searches gave me the impression that the only people who bullet journaled were talented artists with immaculate calligraphy skills. I figured the book would allow me to find out straight from the source what exactly the method was.

I was surprised to find that the original system was very minimal and definitely didn’t require me to buy a sticker pack.

What is The Bullet Journal Method?

I’m going to keep this explanation simple and quick because I’ve made Bullet Journal set up videos in the past where I go into minute detail every step of the process.

Here is the gist. Every day, you date and log your activities with the Rapid Logging system: bullets for tasks, x’s for completed tasks, dashes for notes, and circles for events.

Every month you create a Monthly View to note any important dates coming up at a glance as well as a master task list for the month.

Next, you set up a Future Log to write down any future events that are coming up that aren't in the current month.

Finally, start your notebook by creating an Index so when you need to find something in the future you can check your index for its location.

So you might start the day by creating a bullet list of tasks to do and cross them out as you go about your day. You might check in with your monthly spread to see if you have any obligations that need attending. At the end of the day you would reflect on your progress, update your future log, and plan for your next day.

Then, at the end of the month, you would draw a new monthly spread and check your future log to see if there’s an event in the upcoming month you need to mark on your calendar. Any uncompleted tasks from your master list get Migrated over to the new month if you think they’re worth keeping on your radar.

That’s basically it. There’s no art skills or calligraphy expertise needed. It’s simple, it’s utilitarian, and it requires nothing more than a notebook and a pen.

Now that might all sound confusing and complex at first, but once you try it out for a week or so it all makes more sense.

First Impressions

For the first couple of weeks I stuck to the method as detailed in the book as closely as possible with only a few minor additions. I wanted to get a feel for the process before I started mixing things up to suit my personal preferences.

Making the return to paper after so many years of using digital tools felt like coming home. It was a return to simplicity in a way that relaxed my frantic and busy mind. There was no integrated AI or search, or some new update that required me to figure out a new interface. It was back to basics: pen and paper, dots and lines, wet ink and crisp pages.

The Bullet Journal Method gave me a new tool in the analog toolkit to organize my time and my ideas without having to rely on my phone or computer.

Some of the selling points of digital planning systems are ease of use, convenience, and frictionless task management. While this seems like a good thing at first, it turns out to lead to a lot of unexpected consequences.

For instance, take tasks repopulating automatically in a typical productivity app. This can lead to a to-do list that is impossibly loaded with no hope of ever completing. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down infinitely, our task lists can quickly start to suffocate us under their weight.

What I liked about The Bullet Journal Method is that the friction of hand-copying over your master task list each month forces you to consider if those tasks really deserve your time and attention. If you can’t even be bothered to take a second to write the task down on your new monthly spread, then you have a clear sign that the task doesn’t matter enough to waste your time on it. The friction creates a moment of intention where you have to actively choose what matters rather than let some app automate that decision.

I also liked the freedom of using a blank notebook as opposed to a traditional planner because it allowed me to use the blank pages for just about anything I could think of. I would write diary entries, explore ideas, take notes, and create lists in between my daily logs. This allowed me to use one notebook for both planning and thinking and usually sat by me at my desk while I worked or came with me in a bag.

I already had a habit of carrying a pocket notebook with me everywhere to capture ideas and notes on the go so the Bullet Journal acted as a more formal ledger to organize my life in and the pocket notebook as a quick capture system.

The Evolution of my Bullet Journal

After the initial 30-day experiment ended I started to adapt the Bullet Journal to my own unique needs even more as time went on.

At first the Bullet Journal was heavily used as a planner meaning I would start the day by listing tasks and drawing a time-block to plan when I would do said tasks. But as time went on I started using it more as a logbook to retroactively track activity throughout the day.

It started to become a hybrid of a planner and a record book where I might plan things ahead of time but also come back to the notebook just to record what I did throughout the day.

I started writing a daily diary entry under each day’s log and using a rating system to rate how I felt the day went. I started tracking minutes I spent reading, writing, or making things that aligned with my personal goals.

After a few months I developed a daily template that I now use for each day’s log. The page is divided into two halves: top and bottom. The top half is divided into two columns: The left is dated and underneath that is where I do all of my rapid logging for the day. The right column is dedicated to my visual time-block where I both plan and retroactively record my day by the hour.

On the bottom half of the page I rate my day between 1-5 stars and write a diary entry. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s just whatever random craziness is on my mind. I've been using this template for the last six months and love looking back at the added context to each day's log.

Even the monthly spread started to become more of a record book than a planner. Instead of listing important events next to dates, I started writing a one-sentence moment from the day to act as a memory bank at a glance. This meant that over time I could open my notebook to any month and see exactly what date memorable moments took place. This came in handy in some surprising ways.

For instance, I was able to catch a health problem early and trace its origin back to the exact date I first noticed it thanks to these micro summaries. In another instance a negative performance review at work had both my boss and I questioning if something was going on in my personal life. One look at the month of poor performance revealed that was the month that I was cutting weight at a rapid pace. Turns out, I was just hangry.

I stopped creating monthly master task lists and started doing them on a weekly basis instead because I found that is the timeframe I work best in. I also started using the monthly view to track habits and metrics relevant to my goals so I could see an entire month of progress all on one page.

Honestly, this double feature of planning, and in that process recording, has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. There is nothing cooler than pulling out an old Bullet Journal and being able to see a chunk of your life detailed at a glance and then being able to zoom into the specific days and see what you were thinking about, how you felt, and where you were spending your time down to the hour. It’s incredible and extremely informative. I’ve learned a ton about myself in reviewing these entries. My only wish is that I started doing something like this sooner.

The Bad and The Ugly of Bullet Journaling.

Alright let’s get real here for a minute. Analog planning and the Bullet Journal Method isn’t all roses. There are some truly frustrating aspects that digital tools can make less annoying. For me this was most apparent when it came to my master calendar.

The Future Log didn't seem like the Future for me.

I tried using the Future Log section for those first few weeks and kept getting annoyed when appointments or events had to be rescheduled. This happens often enough to be a pain in the ass. You make plans with a friend and put it on your calendar only for them to flake last minute and reschedule. Or a doctor's appointment gets moved around or work asks you to come in on a day you thought you were going to have off. Having to manually write down and cross off all of these adjustments isn’t a deal breaker but let’s be honest, it’s tedious.

The flip side is you use something like Google calendar and then all of these things are substantially less frustrating to move around with the added benefit that you can set up reminders to ping you when something is coming up. I can also set recurring tasks for monthly bills and subscription payments with one click of a button as well as share my schedule with someone who is trying to coordinate with me.

But the downside to using something like Google calendar is now I need my phone around to do anything to my schedule which is why I turned to notebooks in the first place.

The reality is there are tradeoffs. I’ve fallen into a hybrid system where I do just about everything possible in a notebook or on paper with the exception of my calendar. I’m still looking for ways to make an analog calendar system work for me but as much as I hate to admit it, Google calendar works great.

Yes, physical notebooks are subject to physical risks.

There are other concerns people have about analog life-planning like losing all of their notebooks to a house fire or something but at that point you have bigger problems than a couple of lost notebooks.

There is the potential that you forget a notebook somewhere or lose it to some unexpected event but digital storage isn’t as foolproof as we often think.

Walter Isaacson tells an interesting story about the power of paper in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci. Isaacson also wrote a biography about Steve Jobs who never kept a diary of any kind. Jobs did all of his writing and thinking in email exchanges between peers and employees at Apple. Frustratingly, Jobs couldn’t recover access to the email address with all of those correspondences from the early days of Apple and it had only been a few years since. Without access to the emails there was little primary source material to work from. Meanwhile, Isaacson was able to mine the infinite depths of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks five-hundred years after his death because he wrote his ideas down on paper.

There’s no telling whether an app you rely on will be around in a decade or that you won’t have to pay money to access the cloud you store your files on. Paper does its job well and has so for thousands of years. I feel like I can trust it.

Analog planning is inefficient.

One final critique of the Bullet Journal Method, and analog planning more generally, is it’s not efficient. But, that’s kind of the whole point.

By going old-school you are trading speed and efficiency to engage with your planning system with deliberation and intention. If you’re obsessed with checking boxes off as fast as possible then maybe the slow-downed approach isn’t for you. But if you feel like you’ve been frantically trying to catch up and still feel behind, then maybe it’s time you try slowing down to focus on what truly matters.

I found that once I gave the full-analong approach a real shot I ended up doing less bullshit to stay busy and started doing a lot more of the activities that bring meaning into my life.

I found the tradeoff to be worth it.

Is Bullet Journaling Going to Stay?

I can confidently say after a full year of Bullet Journaling I will definitely continue to keep up this daily practice. I believe The Bullet Journaling Method is a fantastic framework for people to get into and learn how to use a notebook effectively to organize their life. It empowers users to be less dependent on technology and more capable of taking life into their own hands.

While my system has evolved to the point where it may not be technically classified as Bullet Journaling anymore, the basics of Rapid Logging each day with bullets and dashes has become a time- tested staple in my journals. I think this is the reason it’s such a popular method because once you have the framework for starting, you can adapt it to become your own system over time that works with your unique preferences and needs.

In the end, everyone develops the system that is right for them and The Bullet Journal Method is a great foundation to build upon.

Again, if you want to give The Bullet Journal Method a shot I have two set up videos that I made over the last year: First Bullet Journal & Second Bullet Journal​
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Prompt:

What do you love about anaolog planning methods and what do you hate? Do you feel like the system you currently have is working for you?