What you can learn by keeping a bullet journal on how to use to-do list apps

On July 6th of this year, I officially ended my three-year experiment in using a physical bullet journal to organize my life. I’m looking at the discontinued notebook as I write this, so I know the exact date. Apparently, five months ago, I had to take a picture of her Corsair K70 keyboard to track the quote I received for my next review. took a picture. I didn’t end up insulating the roof.

Since then, I’ve used notepads to jot down notes here and there, but when it comes to keeping track of my daily tasks and chores, I’ve fallen back to another note-taking and the same jumble of To Do’s. . List the apps you used 3 years ago. These include Notion for long-form notes and lists, Apple Notes for when you need something right away, and Todoist for to-do lists and reminders. But while I ditched my physical notebook for apps, I don’t think bullet journaling is a waste of time. In fact, I think my experiment taught me an important lesson about how to stay digitally organized.

Bullet journals, which can be physical or virtual (like this Notion template), are best known as a way to organize blank notes into a personal planner. There’s a page format for yearly, monthly, and daily tasks, a methodology for weaving your to-do list between them, and a set of common symbols and notations to make sense of it all. Ultimately, it all serves to provide a format for designing your own planner and flexible rules for using it.

There are a lot of potential complications, and people like to lay them out in different ways, but my basic approach was to write out a list of my daily tasks. As the day progresses, tick off each task. Some people like copying tasks on a weekly or monthly basis, but every day worked for me.

Bullet journals are all about utility, but I was also drawn to their aesthetics. YouTube is full of videos where people painstakingly lay them out, and he slowly fills in the delicate illustrations and small visual elements over the course of a year. He dreamed of having a neat handwritten little notebook and perhaps a sketch or two, like the Naughty Dog protagonist carries around in the game. I imagined my bullet journal to be like a scrapbook and organizer of my daily life.

The reality of my really bad handwriting meant this never really came to pass, but that didn’t stop my notebook from being a decent planner. Written down rather than marked, upcoming articles were categorized by deadline and priority level, and apartment chores were assigned to me on a regular schedule rather than chaotic ad hoc.

But most importantly, I was doing it all manually instead of letting the app’s internal logic keep the tasks going back and forth. Every morning I was forced to spend a few minutes writing down my tasks for the day, prioritizing them, and reflecting on what I couldn’t do yesterday. After being forced to write every day for a week, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you get used to doing non-urgent tasks. Other times, things that seemed so urgent when you first wrote them down, you look back the next day and realize they aren’t worth redoing.

Having to manually write out each task turned to-dos from something I filed in an app and forgot about to something I had to manage on a daily basis. I had to proactively organize and prioritize the chores that past Johns were plaguing current Johns.Did I TRUE With a formal event just around the corner, do you need to buy a pair of replacement suit pants? And maybe it’s time to let go of that awful blog post idea? Forcing me to think about things inevitably made it more manageable.

It’s not that I’m tired of writing, but eventually I got sick of carrying around paper notebooks. A friend reminded me of a movie I wanted to see while I was in the pub, so I had to jot down notes in her app and then later transcribe them into a physical notebook. Or you pass the grocery store on your way home and don’t have a physical shopping list.

But it’s entirely possible to keep many of the things I loved about keeping a bullet journal without sacrificing the app’s convenience. Ultimately, what I loved about this notebook wasn’t its physicality, but the fact that I had to spend real-time time actively thinking and organizing my daily life. This is possible with apps as well as with notebooks. Avoid thinking that technology can organize it for you.

Now, instead of spending time writing out my tasks each day, I’m just rummaging through Todoist, deleting old tasks, changing the due dates of other tasks, and keeping things tidy in general. You don’t have to fight terrible handwriting. I always have my phone with me when I need to write something down for later. I still benefit from the streamlined interface, but I try to keep track of my tasks instead of filing them and forgetting about them.

And while I don’t think you’ll find an app as aesthetically pleasing as YouTuber’s Bullet Journal, that doesn’t mean you have to give up nice design entirely. I love Notion’s options for customizing pages with elements like cover photos and emojis. Suffice it to encourage you to think of this as an ever-evolving scrapbook rather than a collection of actionable documents.

It’s easy to think that an app or to-do list service can hold your hand and organize your life, but if you’re not careful, your notes can turn into a digital locker with an endless collection of cluttered notes underneath. It may end up. “forget.”

Especially after scanning some beautiful bullet journal illustrations in the process of writing this article. But for now, I’m happy enough to be back with the apps.