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

by Ryder Carroll

The Bullet Journal method will help you accomplish more by working on less. It helps you identify and focus on what is meaningful by stripping away what is meaningless.

It stands to reason, then, that to be more productive we need a way to stem the tide of digital distractions. Enter the Bullet Journal, an analog solution that provides the offline space needed to process, to think, and to focus. When you open your notebook, you automatically unplug. It momentarily pauses the influx of information so your mind can catch up. Things become less of a blur, and you can finally examine your life with greater clarity.

If the journey is the destination, then we must learn how to become better travelers. To become better travelers, we must first learn to orient ourselves. Where are you now? Do you want to be here? If not, why do you want to move on?

Knowing where you are begins with knowing who you are.

If intentionality means acting according to your beliefs, then the opposite would be operating on autopilot. In other words, do you know why you’re doing what you’re doing?

We don’t have time because we’re working on a lot of things, yet things aren’t working out a lot of the time. This phenomenon isn’t just a twenty-first-century problem, but it has been exponentially exacerbated by the countless number of choices technology has put at our fingertips.

As psychologist Roy F. Baumeister wrote in his book Willpower: “No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue—you’re not consciously aware of being tired—but you’re low on mental energy.”11 This state is known as decision fatigue.

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

Each decision, until it’s been made and acted on, is simply a thought. Holding on to thoughts is like trying to catch fish with your bare hands: They easily slip from your grasp and disappear back into the muddy depths of your mind. Writing things down allows us to capture our thoughts and examine them in the light of day. By externalizing our thoughts, we begin to declutter our minds. Entry by entry, we’re creating a mental inventory of all the choices consuming our attention. It’s the first step to taking back control over our lives.

By recording our lives, we’re simultaneously creating a rich archive of our choices and our actions for future reference. We can study our mistakes and learn from them. It’s equally instructive to note our successes, our breakthroughs. When something works professionally or personally, it helps to know what our circumstances were at the time and what choices we made. Studying our failures and our victories can provide tremendous insight, guidance, and motivation as we plot our way forward.

We breathe life into our thoughts by committing them to paper. Be they words, images, or notes, few tools facilitate the transition between the inner and outer worlds as seamlessly as the tip of a pen.

The complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level. As a result, we retain information longer than we would by tapping it into an app.

When we put pen to paper, we’re not just turning on the lights; we’re also turning up the heat. Writing by hand helps us think and feel simultaneously.

“The long way is the short way.” In a cut-and-paste world that celebrates speed, we often mistake convenience for efficiency. When we take shortcuts, we forfeit opportunities to slow down and think. Writing by hand, as nostalgic and antiquated as it may seem, allows us to reclaim that opportunity. As we craft our letters, we automatically start filtering the signal from the noise. True efficiency is not about speed; it’s about spending more time with what truly matters.

Our experiences—both sweet and sour—are lessons. We honor these lessons by writing them down so we can study them and see what they have to teach us. This is how we learn, this is how we grow. If we forfeit the opportunity to learn from our experiences, as the saying (sort of) goes, we condemn ourselves to repeat our mistakes.

Once you’ve set up your Topic and page number, you capture your thoughts as short, objective sentences known as Bullets. Each Bullet is paired with a specific symbol to categorize your entry. We use Bullets not only because it takes less time, but also because wrestling information into short sentences forces us to distill what’s most valuable.

We may finish our year feeling that not much of note really happened—maybe we didn’t take that big Hawaii trip or get the promotion we’d hoped for, or maybe we thought we’d be further along in our apartment hunt than we are. We’re all programmed with a negativity bias. Leafing through our Bullet Journal can help correct this perspective: There were celebrations, projects completed, fitness milestones achieved, clean bills of health conferred, children and pets doing adorable things, soulful talks with friends, kids, parents, or spouses, and on and on.

By keeping your Notes short, you’re forced to distill information down to the essential. The more content you try to capture during a lecture or a meeting, the less you’re thinking about what’s being said. You burn through most of your attention parroting the source. Being both strategic and economical with your word choices forces you to engage your mind. By asking yourself what’s important and why, you go from passively listening to actively hearing what’s being said. It’s when we begin to hear that information can transform into understanding.

Productivity is about getting more done by working on fewer things.

We pick up a lot of stowaways during the daily hustle. It’s easier to just accept tasks than it is to carefully evaluate them in the moment. This is how empty responsibilities quickly accumulate, leaching your mental resources for as long as you let them. By rewriting your tasks, you have the opportunity to vet your responsibilities and throw the useless ones overboard. Simply put, Migration keeps you from operating on autopilot, wasting tremendous amounts of time working on things that don’t add value to your life.

In order to become truly productive, we must first break this cycle. We need to wedge a space between the things that happen to us and the way that we react to them. In this space, we’re granted an opportunity to examine our experience. Here we can learn what’s in our control, what’s meaningful, what’s worth our attention, and why. It’s how we begin to define who we are and what we believe in.

This is the difference between being busy and being productive.

You can’t make time, you can only take time.

The only thing you can control is the way you respond. Focusing on things you can’t control allows them to control you. Focus on what you can control.

There never has been, nor will there ever be, another like you. Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity. Uniqueness alone, however, does not make you valuable. If you don’t do, if you don’t dare, then you rob the world—and yourself—of the chance to contribute something meaningful. As the French film director Robert Bresson once said, “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”21 If you don’t try something, it will assuredly never exist.

Like a block of marble, our lives are finite. They start out rough and formless. Each choice we make places a chisel to the stone. Each action irreversibly chips away time. No action is so insignificant that it can’t benefit from our attention. It’s the lack of attention that’s often responsible for the rubble of cringeworthy decisions weighing on our conscience.

For everything we say yes to, we’re saying no to something else. Migration gives you an opportunity to recommit to what matters and let go of what does not. As Bruce Lee once said, “It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away the unessential.”

“the so-called ‘real world’ will not discourage you from operating on your own default settings, because the so-called ‘real world’ of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.”

You might be thinking that getting fit and taking night classes are totally worthwhile goals. Maybe, but the impact of what you’re doing is contingent on why you’re doing it. The key is understanding the motivation underlying your hard work.

We’re built to adapt to heat, to cold, to hardship, and this is partially a result of our ability to experience pleasure. Pleasure allowed us to quickly discern good from bad, harmful from helpful. We like things that feel good, and we’ll go out of our way for more of the good stuff, like shelter, sustenance, water. In the bad old days, when we spent most of our time, you know, trying not to die, pleasure was limited and practical. Nowadays it’s a commodity, marketed as a substitute for happiness, and it’s on demand.

What can be bought can be owned. That is the social contract. You buy shoes at the shoe store, clothes at the clothing store, cars at the dealership, and so on. Notice that there is no happiness store. It’s not because it can’t be bought; it’s because happiness can’t be owned.

If happiness is the result of our actions, then we need to stop asking ourselves how to be happy. Rather, we should be asking ourselves how to be.

What does feeling have to do with meaning? Arguably everything. There is no intellectualizing what resonates with you, and that’s why it’s so hard to define. When it reveals itself, you feel it.

In an “all-or-nothing” world, we tend to forget the power of something. The mightiest tree sprouts from a vulnerable seed. The seed of passion is curiosity. The seed of perseverance is patience. By designing your goals strategically, you can begin to cultivate your opportunities by seeding both your patience and curiosity.

If you’re an ambitious person, a list of potential projects can be very distracting. The thought of beginning something new can be alluring, especially if what you’re currently working on is dragging out. Resist! Living intentionally is about focusing on what’s most important now. Keep this in mind when picking your goals: What do you want to put into your life now—and, more importantly, why?

Unlike in the West, where “disruption” is a buzzword for our favorite flavor of progress, kaizen focuses on surfacing opportunities for incremental improvement. It’s an approach to problem-solving that takes the form of small questions like: What little thing can we change to improve the situation? What could be done better the next time?

Whatever obstacles or challenges you may encounter along the way, meet them with curiosity. Embrace them and examine them by asking small questions. Don’t let fear, pride, or impatience deprive you of the opportunity to ask. As Carl Sagan once said, “There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

Life is so subtle that sometimes you barely notice yourself walking through the doors you once prayed would open. —BRIANNA WIEST

It’s when we exhaust our stock answers that we begin to dig into our daily experience for material. It helps us become more present. As you actively examine your experience to find the good, you become better at locating it and appreciating it. You learn that—to paraphrase the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast—you can’t be grateful for everything, but you can be grateful in every moment.

Self-compassion can start by asking yourself a simple question: What would I tell a friend in this situation?

Sam Cawthorn, founder of Speakers Tribe, once said, “The happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything, but they make the most of everything.”54 A powerful way to begin this process is to reframe the mundane in our mind. Many Tasks may not inspire much joy at first blush: Do the laundry, finish project, buy groceries, etc. Rather than focusing on the drudgery of the action, spend a moment focusing on the experiences they enable. Doing the laundry gives you fluffy towels after your shower, fresh shirts for your workday, and crisp sheets to slip between at night.

Now when things are not going my way, or when I need to work on something that doesn’t inspire me to do backflips, I think back to my Tiamat. I look around and see all the things that I was able to make from that experience. It forced me to learn how to code, which led to a fulfilling career as a digital product designer, which provided the hands-on education I needed to launch Bulletjournal .com, which ultimately resulted in the privilege to write this book and share the Bullet Journal with you.

Tiamat is a mythical dragon who was defeated and deconstructed.

Failing to be perfect is one of our biggest sources of self-loathing. It’s intentionality gone bad, where we spend time and energy undoing our progress. We tear up our plans, recommit to counterproductive behaviors, and empower our inner critic.

Are you the type of person who strives to have a perfect notebook? Maybe you don’t have great handwriting, or you lack the artistic ability to make your notebook pretty. Does that matter? Only if you want it to. You could look at your notebook as the evidence of your imperfections, or you could look at it as a testament to your courage. Those crooked lines and rough letters paint a picture of someone striving to learn and make a positive change in their life. It may not be perfect, but it’s unquestionably beautiful.

To fully appreciate wabi-sabi as a model for personal growth, it helps to look a little closer at the culture it originated in. The Japanese have a long history of elevating craftsmanship to mystifying levels, be it carpentry, metalsmithing, even product packaging. Great emphasis was placed on mastery rather than on perfection. Mastery, unlike perfection, embraces both transience and imperfection, because it is a process, a state of being, not an end goal. It is the continued result of improvement and learning.

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration. —JEFFREY ZELDMAN

Writing down this mission statement is also a great way to “wake the page.” That’s the term I use to describe the act of marking the page for the first time. It’s the moment when thought transcends the distance between our inner and outer world, and we breathe life into our ideas. Beginning can be the hardest part. What better way to wake the page than by stating what you want? Don’t overthink it; just write down what you feel. It’s not a contract. It’s just a benevolent way to nudge yourself over the starting line.

Professional cooks have all their ingredients prepped and laid out well before they start to assemble their plates. The vegetables are chopped, garnishes minced, the surfaces are cleaned. This is known as the mise en place, or mise (rhymes with “cheese”), which is French for “putting in place.” This practice allows the cook to focus on what’s important: assembling the meal. In your Bullet Journal, you’re the chef.

The wizard symbolizes our misguided notion that the “cure” to whatever ails us, the missing piece, exists outside of us. We live in a commoditized culture that convinces us that our solutions must be acquired; that something or someone will finally make us whole. Our search takes us ever farther away from ourselves. Though we can greatly benefit by keeping our minds and hearts open, ultimately we remain our own responsibility.