What I’m about to tell you will probably make you think I have lost my mind. I know, I know—I’m the “tech guy.” But there are times that an app or gadget actually causes problems for my productivity. Sometimes paper is the best solution.What I want to share with you today is a “low-tech” tip that I have been using for the last several months which has helped my productivity and creativity more than any other method or tool I’ve used to date.[1]
It’s called the Bullet Journal. It is described as, “…an analog system for the digital age that will help you organize the present, record the past, and plan for the future.”
I won’t go into great amounts of detail as to how the system itself works in this post, but you can certainly get all the details you want by visiting bulletjournal.com, the official website of the Bullet Journal.
The following are a few of the reasons that I’ve adopted this system.
Rapid Logging
The main goal of the Bullet Journal is to get the information out of your brain and into an actionable list or saved idea as soon as possible. You don’t have to worry about filing away the information as you record it, alleviating the anxiety of recording some task or snippet of information in the wrong place. The journal is basically a running task list and idea list from your day—you don’t worry about organizing things until a later date.
Organization
A few of the key features of the Bullet Journal are its tagging system (bullet points, checkboxes, and any other symbols you want to use), it’s “collections,” and the index pages that you set up at the beginning of your journal. Each of these help with easily and quickly finding and reviewing tasks, ideas, thoughts, and other notes you might have made.
Reviewability
One of the things that bothered me most about using electronic apps was that I felt like I could never really see an overview of what I was thinking. Even Evernote makes me feel like my thinking is being compartmentalized. What I love about the Bullet Journal is that I can see an entire day’s tasks, notes, ideas, and any other thoughts I might have had laid out in a running roll.
Because of this, the review part of GTD (Getting Things Done) is much easier to do. I have found that I forget fewer things because all of the thoughts I deemed important enough to write down are neatly listed in chronological flow. Likewise, every time I look at my task list my eyes can’t help but wander over the other things written on the page. I personally tend to find this more helpful than distracting.
Bullet Journal Resources
The following are a few other resources that I found helpful as I began implementing this system:
- The Bullet Journal website
- The Moleskine journal I use
- A YouTube video explaining how the journal works
- Another blogger’s use of the journal
- A Google+ community about the Bullet Journal
I plan on doing a bit more writing in the future about my own personal use of the journal. For now though, if you are struggling with finding the right app or calendar to fit with your brain’s desire for task listing and idea collection, the Bullet Journal might just be what you are looking for.
—Daniel
- I have used apps like Remember the Milk, Todoist, and even Taskpaper. I even tried implementing the Getting Things Done workflow with Evernote, but it was just too heavy of a system. I find that using the Bullet Journal lets me also easily integrate many of the ↩
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