JOURNALS. BULLET. JOURNALS.
I have no idea when I first heard about bullet journaling. It's one of those things that I was MEH about, and then tried, and then tried again, and then... etc. I'm going to go ahead and say I've tried it at least ten times over the past five or six years.
And basically? It never worked for me. Typically I'd set up the journal, whichever one I was using, with the first few pages (if you're not familiar with the system, you typically put an index in the front and then maybe a calendar for the first month, and then you just go). I'd try to use it for 2-3 days, get depressed about rewriting the same fucking to-do list every day, and then drop it.
And then, because I'm me, the journal would end up mixed into my unnecessarily large pile of "empty" journals that I hoard, and forgotten about. I actually frequently pick up a journal or notebook EVEN TODAY, thinking "hey, this one looks fun to write in" and there will be a started and abandoned Bullet Journal inside of it. Yikes.
The thing that made me stop was that I have an intensely terrible sense of a) time and b) how long it's going to take me to accomplish any given task. For instance, this post. Can I write it in a couple minutes, just bang it out and hit post? Or is it going to be one of those situations where I write a sentence, get distracted, end up forgetting what I was doing and starting to read an academic paper or book or something, remember, write one more sentence, get frustrated that my writing isn't the most amazing blog writing in the world, rinse, repeat?
A terrible sense of both how much time I really have to do things combined with being unable to tell how long it'll take me to do them is an aggressively bad combination when it comes to making daily to-do lists.
I have no idea when I first heard about bullet journaling. It's one of those things that I was MEH about, and then tried, and then tried again, and then... etc. I'm going to go ahead and say I've tried it at least ten times over the past five or six years.
And basically? It never worked for me. Typically I'd set up the journal, whichever one I was using, with the first few pages (if you're not familiar with the system, you typically put an index in the front and then maybe a calendar for the first month, and then you just go). I'd try to use it for 2-3 days, get depressed about rewriting the same fucking to-do list every day, and then drop it.
And then, because I'm me, the journal would end up mixed into my unnecessarily large pile of "empty" journals that I hoard, and forgotten about. I actually frequently pick up a journal or notebook EVEN TODAY, thinking "hey, this one looks fun to write in" and there will be a started and abandoned Bullet Journal inside of it. Yikes.
The thing that made me stop was that I have an intensely terrible sense of a) time and b) how long it's going to take me to accomplish any given task. For instance, this post. Can I write it in a couple minutes, just bang it out and hit post? Or is it going to be one of those situations where I write a sentence, get distracted, end up forgetting what I was doing and starting to read an academic paper or book or something, remember, write one more sentence, get frustrated that my writing isn't the most amazing blog writing in the world, rinse, repeat?
A terrible sense of both how much time I really have to do things combined with being unable to tell how long it'll take me to do them is an aggressively bad combination when it comes to making daily to-do lists.
So here's how I would typically fail.
- Set up the bullet journal.
- Spend time at the beginning of the day (or the night before) writing down a massive to-do list that filled literally the entire page, of every single thing I could imagine trying to do the next day. Sometimes I'd break those things up into Single Very Small Tasks, or I'd have tasks that were like, "organize my entire room and hard drive, teehee."
- Start with the first thing on the list.
- Five hours later, discover that that task is going to take at least half of the entire day.
- Panic.
- Finish the day and only cross off 2/50 tasks.
- Arduously copy the 48 tasks over to the next day, cursing if some of the finished tasks were things I have to do every day, so really I still ended up with THE SAME full 50 tasks on day 2.
- Wake up the next morning and try again.
- Fail for all the reasons mentioned above.
- Eventually just decide to not rewrite the tasks from the previous day.
- Since I'm not rewriting the tasks, think that I know what I need to do for the day, since it's not changed.
- Lose the journal.
The other thing that I kept doing was writing reading lists, of here are the next 30 books on my shelf that I should read! But then I'd finish the first book and be like, do I really want to read that book next...?
However, this year, probably spurred by the fact that my PhD experience has been taking every single flaw in how I exist in the world and making them all glaringly obvious, I decided to try One More Time.
But, unlike all the failures of the past, I made a few changes in how I was trying to organize my life.
First: the list of things to do is more of a priority list rather than a complete list. And it's only for things that are important to do today. This means that the to-do list is more like ....5-10 items, depending, and the number of things that I need to rewrite end up being considerably fewer.
Second: I don't make advance lists for things like "what books I'm going to read" because those lists ended up getting abandoned. Instead, I just have a list of what books I DID read.
Third: I keep it on hand at all times, instead of tucking it away in my bag or desk so that I don't lose it or whatever. This means that I'm using it for almost any notes. If it's a note that goes for just today, I'll put it on the day of the note. If it's a type of note that's more detailed, I'll just start a new page for it.
None of this is particularly groundbreaking? In fact, you could make a decent argument that all of the things I'm doing differently for the past 2 months is just Actually Following the Bullet Journal guidelines. But it's finally... sort of working for me. I'm still a disorganized mess, but I'm slightly less disorganized. And, unlike every other time, I'm actually using multiple pages in the book! I'm like, 1/3 of the way through the journal! WHAT.
Evidence:
All of this is just to say that I, at 36, (well, I'm 37 now, because time means you just keep getting older...) discovered that yes, I, too, can suck it up and use the same journaling system that works for literally millions of people once I figured out why I was failing.
Hooray! Now I can cross "Write something for my HEY World blog" off of my 3/24 to-do list.