Bullet Journal

I’ve been getting frustrated with my system for tracking things I need to get done, both at work and at home as well as in my multiple alternate worlds (Davis Spinners’ Guild, Lambtown, FARM Davis, Meridian Jacobs, Yolo Audubon, Conflict Resolution training, Graphic Facilitation training, ham radio, etc.) in conjunction with a calendar. I’m now on a shared calendar at work, which means that I have to stick with an electronic calendar, but I’m a person who likes pens and writing things down on paper. I carry around a French Notor diary with a day-per-page, dutifully copying calendar events from Outlook^1^, but the Notor has no real room for notes; conversely, I have a lot of dated pages with next to nothing on them which is annoyingly wasteful.

I chanced upon a reference to the Bullet Journal the other day. I was intrigued. I can live with the duplication of a calendar – I’ve been doing that for a while already – but this seemed to amalgamate the best features of the Franklin Planner (index, prioritized task list) in a slim, flexible system, designed for people who prefer paper, without having to carry around a brick. (I also tried the Hipster PDA for a while as I tried to ditch the brick but got frustrated by the tiny size and multiple cards.)

I’m already sold on the Bullet Journal, I think. I bought a gridded Moleskine notebook on Saturday (not that Moleskine is my favorite, I’m a Clairefontaine girl with a lot of fountain pens, but I liked the size, flexible and washable cover, and pocket in the back). Calendar one side of a spread, tasks for that month on the right, subsequent days in the pages that follow, seven days to a page or three or only one – depends what’s going on. The best bit? I can include pages as and when I want to devoted only to books I want to read, or spinning projects current and planned, or classes I want to take, and always find those pages (and add to them) because they’re indexed. Tasks have a square checkbox, calendared events have a round one, notes are a black bullet. I’ll be able to sketch in this notebook too, which is really important to me.

Early days yet, but I’m hopeful this system will work. (Numenius independently bought almost the identical journal on Saturday, only his is hardbound. We’ll see how long we can go before we each end up with the wrong journal at work and I suddenly face a lot of tasks relating to analyzing geospatial data in R, which will give me nightmares. I have no doubt that a task called “Spin Tunis mohair batts” would trigger the same response in him, so we’ll have to work on keeping them separate…)

1. I know: I made it into my fifties without ever having to use a PC at work, but it finally caught up with me.