My Electronic Bullet Journal
Ihave been thinking this last week about have a more productive new year. One of my favorite authors on Medium, Shaunta Grimes, has a long post on her tools for a “spectacularly productive…2020.” As a person who prefers analog, Shaunta talks about the various notebooks and planners she has combined into a workable system for her. She says “digital planners are too out-of-sight-out-of-mind for me.” I’m just the opposite, while I recognize the utility of Shaunta’s paper system, the idea of posting and reposting information over and over again gives me the willies. So, I’ve tried to contract a similar all-digital system for myself using a technique call the Bullet Journal.
My system uses three essential apps: the Apple calendar, a Getting-Things-Done productivity system using Toodledo, and, this year’s addition an electronic bullet journal in Evernote. In a perfect world, all three of these apps could be combined into a single piece of software but we do not yet live in a perfect world.
Calendar
The purpose of my calendar is to capture all of my appointments and meetings. As a retired person, instead of focusing my energy on a single company or business I am active in several volunteer organizations. I’ve given each of organization its own “calendar” with it’s own color coding. This makes it easy for me to see not only how busy I will be in the coming weeks and months, but also where I am putting my energies. I can track what I have committed to, also well as make certain events repeating. So committee meetings and other events that happen on a regular basis show up in my calendar far into the future. Because I can attach calendars for other organizations, I can see, for example, whether an event will conflict with something else or if space is available for a meeting.
The program will let me attach documents and websites to an appointment. I haven’t used that capability very much but may experiment more this year with adding other information, a meeting agenda, for example, attached to an appointment.
Since I live an Apple universe with a Macintosh laptop, iPad, iPhone, and iWatch, my calendar automatically syncs between devices. This is very convenient and discourages me trying a different calendar program. However, most or all of these capabilities are also available in other programs such as Google calendar.
In thinking about how I use my time, again this year I am experimenting with maintaining a “sabbath day” for myself. In general, I try not to plan “work” on my sabbath day, that is no meetings or other volunteer responsibilities. Because I often have responsibilities on Saturdays and Sundays, in the past I’ve tried to maintain Friday as my Sabbath day. However, since so much of my volunteer time is spent in work for my UU congregation and since our minister has chosen Monday as her own sabbath day. I’m going to try mirroring her this year. We’ll see how that goes.
To Do Software
I have had a Toodledo account for many years now. For a long time, I used the free version, but I now pay for a standard subscription that let me set up subtasks. Using GTD (Getting-Things-Done) methodology, I have set up folders for each of my responsibilities with tasks and in many cases subtasks. Tasks can be assigned contexts, so shopping lists are grouped together under “@Errands” and office work under “@Office.” The software also has other ways of categorizing tasks that I haven’t been using including, again, assigning files to tasks. This year I will try to exploit those capabilities.
Bullet Journal
New this year is my electronic bullet journal. According to Wikipedia, a “bullet journal is a method of personal organization developed by designer Ryder Carroll and described in his book, the Bullet Journal Method. The system organizes scheduling, reminders, to-do lists, brainstorming, and other organizational tasks into a single notebook. The name “Bullet Journal” comes from the use of abbreviated bullet points to log information, but it also partially comes from the use of dot journals, which are gridded using dots rather than lines.” As originally conceived a bullet journal only requires a pen or pencil and a notebook and many people have developed elaborate journals using colored pens, markers, stickers and their own creativity. The internet including Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest has a myriad of examples of beautiful designed journals. For many people, it appears, their bullet journal is not only their organizational method of choice but also their creative hobby.
The basic bullet journal has an index that make it easy to find information, a way to quickly post new information and track the status of tasks, logs of past and future event, and collections of information including lists and tools to track life activities such as habits, moods, fitness information and the like. Like Shaunta’s system the original bullet journal required looking at the information in several different ways and posting information from one page to another, weekly, monthly, and long-term, for example. That posting and re-posting would not work for me. I’m an electronic kind of gal and I want to be able to use the system, not constantly be updating it. So I tried to implement an electronic bullet journal using Evernote.
I will not try to expound on the benefits of using Evernote in general (see my blog post on Evernote instead) , but it appears to be a good candidate for an electronic bullet journal system.
I began by creating a new notebook titled “2020 Bullet Journal” and started populating it with common bullet journal elements. For the last several months I’ve been using a monthly Ta Da note to track my activities and achievements, using one of the free Evernote template, Monthly Calendar. I’ve uploaded the 2020 calendar and copied January into the bullet journal page. As you can see I’ve only populated the first partial week of January.
Instead of the drawings and stickers found in hand-written journals, I’ve set up a set of emojis to highlight my activities, including volunteer activities, time with family and friends, and other tasks. I will also track basic habits like water consumption and time in the gym.
Breaking my rule of not copying information from one place to another, I only enter my basic events for the month and as part of my planning for the upcoming week I post in the other meetings and events for that week. Doing this weekly helps me think about and prepare for the upcoming week. Below the calendar is space for notes about the month and room for a diary. As I go through each day I post what I have accomplished and make note of important events that happen.
I haven’t decided if I will put all my calendar entries in a single note, putting the current month at the top of the note page, or set up separate notes. I’ll have to see what works best. Evernote make it easy to split out previous months if a single note become ungainly.
I have set up a couple other calendars in my bullet journal notebook including one to plan my blogging for the year and one to track my workouts. I’ve set up pages for my goals for the year including list of books I want to read and other goals.
An important part of the bullet journal are reference pages and I’ve set up pages for information about my major volunteer groups as well as a list of birthdays and family anniversaries. Not everything is in the actually bullet journal notebook. The nice thing about Evernote is that it is easy to add more pages as things change and link to pages in other notebooks or elsewhere in my computer or online. I’ve gathered all those links together in note called ”Index” so I can quickly access my calendars, goals, and all of this reference material from a single location. The “*” before the word “Index” ensures this page is first when I sort the notebook alphabetically.
