The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future

by Ryder Carroll

Intentionality is the power of the mind to direct itself toward that which it finds meaningful and take action toward that end.

Leading an intentional life is about keeping your actions aligned with your beliefs. It’s about penning a story that you believe in and that you can be proud of.

Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. —WILLIAM MORRIS

We need to reduce the number of decisions we burden ourselves with so we can focus on what matters.

We do this by writing them down. Why write them down? Each decision, until it’s been made and acted on, is simply a thought.

Writing things down allows us to capture our thoughts and examine them in the light of day.

Notebooks, in contrast, are beholden to their authors. Their function is limited only by the imagination of their owner.

The power of the Bullet Journal is that it becomes whatever you need it to be, no matter what season of life you’re in.

The Point of notebooks!

Kim Alvarez once put it, “Each Bullet Journal contributes another volume to a library of your life.”

Tiny Ray of Sunshine!

All tools, whether digital or analog, are only as valuable as their ability to help you accomplish the task at hand.

BuJoJitsu

How many meetings have you sat through that have little to no agenda? Generally, they’re not very productive. Pausing to define the agenda before you start allows you to focus, prioritize, and use your time far more effectively.

Priority: Represented by “*” asterisk. Used to mark a bullet as important and is most commonly paired with the Task Bullet. Use this sparingly. If everything is a priority, nothing is.

four core Collections: the Daily Log, the Monthly Log, the Future Log, and the one Collection to rule them all, the Index.

If you don’t fill a page, add the next date wherever you left off and you’re good to go. You should never feel like you’re running out of room. This is why I advise against setting up your Daily Logs way ahead of time. Either create them the day of or the night before.

It provides you with a bird’s-eye view of how you’re investing your time and energy. It’s a map of all the things you’re saying yes to. Remember, for everything you say yes to, you’re also saying no to something else. Yes means work, it means sacrifice, it means investing time into one thing that you can no longer invest into another.

said, organization can become a cleverly disguised form of distraction.

Hello ADHD

The significance of what we’re doing, or how we’re doing it, pales in comparison to why we’re doing it in the first place.

being

Be productive not busy

As the French film director Robert Bresson once said, “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

As you migrate each item, you give yourself a chance to identify unconventional relationships or opportunities by holding each item under the microscope of your attention. For everything we say yes to, we’re saying no to something else.

What can be bought can be owned.

no happiness store.

because happiness can’t be owned.