On July 6th of this year, I officially ended my three-year-long experiment with trying to organize my life using a physical bullet journal. I know the exact date because I\u2019m looking at my discontinued notebook as I write this. Apparently, five months ago, I needed to take photos of the Corsair K70 keyboard<\/a> for a then-forthcoming review and follow up with a quote I\u2019d received to insulate my roof. I took the photos. I did not end up insulating my roof.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Since then, I\u2019ve used the notebook for jotting down things to remember here and there, but when it comes to keeping track of daily tasks and chores, I\u2019ve switched back to the same hodgepodge of different note-taking and to-do list apps that I used three years ago. These include Notion for longform notes and lists, Apple Notes when I need something instantly, and Todoist for to-do lists and reminders. But although I\u2019ve ditched the physical notebook for apps, I don\u2019t think bullet journals are a waste of time. In fact, I think my experiment taught me an important lesson about how to stay organized digitally.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bullet journals can be either physical or virtual (such as with this Notion template<\/a>), but they\u2019re best known as a way to organize a blank notebook into a personal planner<\/a>. There are page formats for your yearly, monthly, and daily tasks, a methodology for weaving your to-do list between them, and a series of common symbols and notation to make sense of it all. Ultimately, it\u2019s all in service of giving you a format to design your own planner and flexible rules for how to use it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot of potential complexity, and people like to lay them out in different ways, but my basic approach each day was to write out my list of tasks, manually copy over anything incomplete from previous days (aka \u201cmigrate\u201d them), and tick each task off as the day progressed. Some people like to copy over tasks on a weekly or monthly<\/a> basis, but daily was what worked for me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The bullet journal\u2019s core is practical, but I was also drawn in by the aesthetics. YouTube<\/a> is<\/a> filled<\/a> with<\/a> videos<\/a> of people painstakingly laying them out, filling them with delicate illustrations and little visual elements they slowly fill up over the course of the year. I dreamed of having a small notebook filled with neat handwriting and maybe a sketch or two, like the ones Naughty Dog has its protagonists carry<\/a> in its games. I imagined my bullet journal as being as much of a scrapbook of my daily life as it was an organizer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The reality of my truly terrible handwriting meant this never really came to pass, but that didn\u2019t stop my notebook from becoming a half-decent planner. Important emails got jotted down rather than being marked as unread, upcoming articles got categorized with deadlines and priority levels, and I assigned apartment chores to myself on a regular schedule rather than a chaotic ad hoc basis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But most important was that all of this was being done manually, rather than having an app\u2019s internal logic whisk tasks to and fro. Every morning, I\u2019d be forced to spend a couple of minutes writing out and prioritizing the day\u2019s tasks \u2014 and reckoning with what I\u2019d failed to do yesterday. You\u2019d be amazed at how quickly you get around to doing a nonurgent task after forcing yourself to write it out every day for a week. Other times, I realized something that seemed super urgent when I first wrote it down wasn\u2019t worth going through with when I looked back at it the following day.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Having to write each task out manually turned a to-do from something I could just file away in an app and forget about into something that I had to manage on a daily basis. I had to actively prune and prioritize and think about those chores that past Jon had lumbered present Jon with. Did I really<\/em> need to buy a replacement pair of suit trousers with no formal events on the immediate horizon? And isn\u2019t it time I let that terrible blog post idea go? In each case, forcing myself to just think about what was on my list inevitably kept it more manageable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Having to carry around a physical notebook sucks<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It wasn\u2019t that I grew tired of the writing, but eventually, I got sick of having to carry around a physical notebook. A friend would remind me about a film I wanted to watch while we were in the pub, and I\u2019d have to note it down in a notes app before transcribing it into my physical notebook later. Or I\u2019d be passing a grocery store on the way home and not have my physical shopping list with me. Eventually, the allure of keeping things digital on my phone and with me at all times grew too strong.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What I\u2019ve since realized, however, is that it\u2019s perfectly possible to keep lots of the things I liked about keeping a bullet journal without sacrificing the convenience of apps. Ultimately, what I liked about the notebook was less about its physicality and more about the fact that it forced me to spend real time actively thinking about and organizing my life on a daily basis. And that\u2019s something that\u2019s just as possible to do with an app as it is with a notebook. You just have to avoid thinking the technology can organize it for you.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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