One Month of Bullet Journaling — did it change my life?
It’s been around 30+ days since I started bullet journaling. Something that I started doing by reading an athlete’s blog thing website about stuff when I was bored one day (Colleen Quigley). And I did some more reading online about it, and it seemed like it was perfect for me. Simple, quick, and very customizable.
Over the last few years since university, I kept a ‘to do’ list. Basically a scrap piece of paper that I would just jot to-do’s. This can last for months since the list will keep growing, and I will keep crossing things out when completed. I have quite a few papers in my room that are just bullet points crossed out. Over this summer, especially with the many tasks I had to do, ranging from exercising goals, cooking, and miscellaneous stuff from the 7 courses I was taking, having a task list was pretty effective to use on the daily.
One small flaw was that when my day was unstructured, or a ‘rest day’ or something like that, I would not write anything at all for those note sheets. Same with the to-do for university. I would write tasks, but it would depend, and usually only school related.
Over this summer, with the ‘inkling’ note sheets shown above, I did something similar, except it was now planned daily. Sometimes its effective, sometimes not, since tasks have to carry over when I am lazy (unlike a nonstop flowing list where I just add as I please).
Basically sometimes I would take a few days off for those daily task jots. However, I discovered the bullet journaling system, and it seems very similar to what I was doing on those note sheets, except it was all in a structured notebook, and there were slight indicators of specific tasks (events/tasks/notes). I always wanted to keep tasks and goals and to-dos in a nice notebook, so this seemed like a system very similar to what I was currently doing. It had a few other nice additions, like the monthly view and task stuff, and future log, which also assists with long-term goals (something that I didn’t really care about in the past since it’s not too good to worry about too many things at once).
Also a bullet journal seems to be super duper customizable and free flowing; given my mediocre art skills, and my desire to be quick on everything (along with my trash penmanship), I decided to start doing it. First thing was to buy a journal which was suitable for it. And I got two on Amazon.
I tried out the Panda Natura (some random brand Amazon thing when I searched up ‘bullet journal’ or something like that haha), since it had pretty nice reviews. It was like around 20, and I got 2 of them for free shipping, and I wanted to commit myself to it, so it’s good to have a second one when I run out of space. I mainly wanted a good looking quality journal, with dotted sheets (since it was less restrictive as opposed to lined ones).
Overall, it’s quality is nice so far. Just a typical nice journal. I liked the green/cyan/mint colour, one of my favorites. Also the three ‘bookmark’ things that comes with it is very nice, as I can use those to help me flip to the current date, future log, etc, whatever I want.
Overall the sheets are very nice quality, I mainly use Muji pens, the casual ones that bleed sometimes on regular paper. These sheets are pretty nice, and writing on it is quite enjoyable and easy, and non messy. Everything as expected.
Overall, I set it up similarly to the tutorial found on the official bullet journal website along with some other templates and tutorial designs online. I wanted it to be as minimalistic as possible. I usually just use dark blue or black ink, and too lazy to stick to specific colour for formatting or whatever.
Basically, I wrote as I pleased. Tasks were just basically writing on random note sheets like before, except now everything is in order and in perspective. I was however lazy for a few of the days and wrote the tasks in the morning of the day (usually best to do right before I go to sleep!), but it still works. Overall, I really liked this system since it keeps track of everything nicely in order. I can always go back to whatever day and see my main goals and tasks, as well as nice things I did (or what I accomplished, if it was worthy enough to write down!).
Did I become 1000x more productive and accomplished every single thing I sought out to do on the daily because of using this? Probably not. But I would still like to say that this bullet journaling system has helped me keep track of tasks nicely, and keep me slightly more organized. It will help a lot in the future if I ever need to look back in these moments. Moving tasks to the next day repeatedly for like 5 days in a row will help me realize that some things have low priority, or that I have been really slacking. It’s a nice habit for me, and I know if I continue this for the rest of my life, it will have incremental marginal gains that will be cool to reminisce in the future.
So overall, this last month has been nice using the bullet journal. I don’t regret it, and it has helped me out with a lot of planning. The future log and monthly tracker keeps me peeled for long-term goals, but not that much. Hopefully I can see more of its benefits when I go out more, since I have been quite restricted in tasks and goals because I am stuck at home during these times.