Things

2023-07-10 Happy Life using a Bullet Journal

I have titled this as Happy Life using a Bullet Journal to be more attractive to potential readers than by calling it 'Time Management' or 'To-do Lists on steroids' or 'Managing your Life' etc. or just 'Bullet Journals'

This post is about how my life and in particular my previous five working years were absolutely made happier and easier by using a Bullet Journal.

There are plenty of tutorials about how to use Bullet Journals and I will not try to teach you how to use them here at this point, happy to later if you want!

This post contains some of my observations and I will list them here:

• They are paper journals, it is important that you do not try to computerise them as it will not work, the whole benefit comes from the fact that you are continually reviewing them.
• They are not calendars although they do contain dated entries that are relevant and you will often duplicate what's in your actual online calendar if you have one, don't worry about that.
• They are not To-Do lists although they may appear like them, they are more flexible and more structured.
• If you look at many online examples they are very visual, you do not have to be an artist to use one, its just text, as stated you will see examples on line where people have turned there journals into works of art, this is not necessary, you can if you want decorate them if it pleases you and draw symbols etc. but I just use text.

Why have they made me happier, well mostly because I have not missed a deadline, missed an appointment, forgotten to do something on time etc. The bullet journal works better than anything else for this, yes you can use an online calendar or physical diary, the online diary may fail as it generally only contains partial appointments i.e. your work commitments and a paper diary only contains personal appointments usually and combining all this together is a nightmare as well as reviewing everything to decide what you are doing today, what you did not do yesterday, what you would like to focus on today etc. Bullet journals manage this all fine.

Why not use an App? well experience has shown me that where such apps do exist, we tend to use them in a way that allows us easily to type things in and then forget them and rely on the App to remind us what/when to do something, whereas in my journal its me that reviews what needs to be done in my case every morning while I am eating breakfast, this works so better as no other person or 'thing' is involved!

Now I won't argue with those of you who say they do all this with Outlook or one of the many other Apps that exist such as Trello etc. I just know Bullet journals are better at controling all of these things in life and as someone who has been trained and has used Online Calendars, Time management solutions, various project management applications, I am Prince2 trained, Agile trained etc. and whereas Bullet journals do NOT replace all of these they do ensure that you do not miss key moments in your life, ensure that you focus on what you need to and allow you to re plan things you cannot do at this point, it really makes all aspects of your life easier and can take the stress out of chasing your tail in terms of trying to remember/do everything you think needs to be done.

Give a bullet journal a go, just get a simple dotted journal (I use a 13x21cm journal), watch a couple of online videos particularly the ones by Ryder Carroll and give it a try.