At the start of April, I unwrapped my new fox red Leuchturrm to begin filming a Bullet Journal setup video.

It was to be my third and final Bullet Journal tutorial. I had grown tired of remaking the same video just for the sake of "content" but I felt like I needed to make one more before moving on.

I still felt like there wasn't a good, all-in-one comprehensive guide on YouTube to set up and customize an individually tailored Bullet Journal for complete beginners and advanced users alike.

My first attempt was filmed after reading The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carrol and it followed the book's instructions step-by-step.

The second video came after six months of diligent daily logging and personal experience with the method, flaws and all. It was my attempt to share how I had started to customize the BuJo method to suit my own goals and needs.

But my research into notebooks as a tool didn't stop with the Bullet Journal Method.

I also read Best Laid Plans by Sarah Hart - Unger, The Notebook by Roland Allen, and The Sketchnote Handbook by Mike Rohde among many others titles.

While reading these books I would extract quotes and take notes in a pocket notebook dedicated to all things notebook related. Over the year this pocket notebook became a trusted field guide that I kept in my bag so I could always reference it when needed.

When it was time to make my final Bullet Journal setup video I had a masterclass of material in the palm of my hand. All I had to do was repurpose those notes into a coherent guide that combined everything I had learned over the past year.

After a few hours I had the finished guide in hand and filmed what I called the BuJo Masterclass.

Odds are you're familiar with that video because more than half of my newsletter subscribers have come from this one guide.

If I had sat down to make a guide that comprehensive from scratch I would have felt completely overhwhelmed. But because I had slowly been adding related notes to a single notebook, the material was all there. The only thing I had to do was restructure those notes.

I like to think of it as the gardening approach to note keeping. Like a raised bed, you have a single space dedicated to a particular subject. You water it regularly by adding notes as you learn and experiment. Over time, those notes produce enough fruit that you can combine them into a single idea pie ready for consumption.

I keep these single-purpose notebooks for a variety of subjects. I have one dedicated to ideas about digital minimalism, one for ideas about mastery, another for storytelling and writing, and one where I dump all of my ideas for a fiction story that I may or may not write some day.

If I ever use these notes remains to be seen, but I tend to agree with the 3rd-century poet Lu Ji when he writes,

Prompt:

How are you currently tending to your idea garden?