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

by Ryder Carroll

Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s account every day. . . . One who daily puts the finishing touches to his life is never in want of time.

My attention would always dart off to the next bright thing. As I cycled through distractions, my responsibilities steadily piled up until they became overwhelming.

I had always thought my ADD made me different from others. One thing this community helped me realize is that my condition simply forced me to address something early on that has since become a common malady of the digital age: the lack of self-awareness.

The Bullet Journal method’s mission is to help us become mindful about how we spend our two most valuable resources in life: our time and our energy.

You hate disappointing other people as much as you hate disappointing yourself.

To get more done, you’ve even hacked your sleep, whittling it down to the bare minimum—except now you’re a zombie because . . . you’ve hacked your sleep down to the bare minimum.

As Daniel Levitin writes in The Organized Mind, information overload is worse for our focus than exhaustion or smoking marijuana.3

You waste time deliberating where information should go and trying to locate it later: Did you write something down in your notes app or on a Post-it? And where did that Post-it go, anyway?

to read a book every two weeks.

Took me to make myself to get back to that book - around 8 weeks. After figuring I am again loosing my track

What’s the next step to improving your GPA this semester? Acing all your classes? No. Get more granular. In which class are you falling behind? What’s the next assignment in that class? Writing a paper. Okay, what book do you need to read before writing that paper? Getting that book from the library—that’s the most important thing you have to do now. What about doing the extra-credit assignment for the class you’re already acing? Waste of time.

We live in an age where technology promises us near-limitless options to occupy ourselves, yet we’re left feeling more distracted and disconnected than ever before.

Think back to a book, a speech, or a quotation that deeply touched you or changed the way you thought about life. It was wisdom that inspired you, that held so much promise. All you had to do was act on this newfound knowledge and things would get easier, better, clearer, more empowering.

We tend to follow the path of least resistance, even when it leads away from the things we care about.

you’ll begin to define what’s important, why it’s important, and then figure out how to best pursue those things.

My indifference quickly stained every aspect of running the company. Deep confusion and frustration set in. On paper, I had accomplished everything I was told would make me happy. I sacrificed a lot getting to this

point, but now that I was here, it just didn’t seem to matter. I wasn’t alone.

How often do we find ourselves in this position? You’ve worked incredibly hard on something, only to discover that it leaves you feeling empty. You compensate by working even harder. You reason that maybe if you put in more hours, you’ll finally be able to appreciate the fruits of your labor. Why does this happen?

What is your true motivation for lifting that weight, being on that diet, working so late?

The number one regret was that people wished they had stayed true to themselves. When people realize that their life is almost

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?

Cultivating this self-awareness is a lifelong process, but it starts by simply checking in with yourself.

Inevitably we find ourselves tackling too many things at the same time, spreading our focus so thin that nothing gets the attention it deserves. This is commonly referred to as “being busy.” Being busy, however, is not the same thing as being productive.

Should we type, text, call, email, swipe, pin, tweet, Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, Message, or yell at our digital assistant to get it done, whatever it is? And in what order should all of that happen? (Oh, and before we can get started, we’ll have to upgrade, update, reboot, log in, authenticate, reset our password, clear cookies, empty our cache, and sacrifice our firstborn before we can get where we’re going . . . where was that again?)

“No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top five.”9

The idea to build 25 top priorities and than to select 5- is simply amazing. Not because of the 5 - but because of the clearing your ming out of the rest 20

“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.”

Left unchecked, decision fatigue can lead to decision avoidance. This is especially true for big life choices,

By the time you’re finally forced to make a decision, at the tail end of all the other decisions you’ve been making to avoid having to make this big one, chances are you don’t have a lot of focus left to spare. No wonder we often feel stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed.

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

The first step to recovering from decision fatigue, to get out from under the pile of choices weighing on you, is to get some distance from them. You need some perspective to both clearly identify and corral your choices. We do this by writing them down.

Keep your entries short and in list form. If one task sparks a stream of others, go with it.

Go ahead, ask why for each item on your list. You don’t need to dive down an existential rabbit hole. Simply ask yourself two questions: Does this matter? (To you or to someone you love) Is this vital? (Think rent, taxes, student loans, your job, etc.)

Being intentional about what you let into your life is a practice that shouldn’t be limited to the pages of your notebook.

technology has flooded our lives with more content than we can possibly absorb,

As soon as you put pen to paper, you establish a direct link to your mind and often your heart. This experience has yet to be properly replicated in the digital space. It’s why, to this day, so many ideas are born on scraps of paper.

Another reason we use notebooks? Flexibility. Software tends to be either so powerful that its wealth of features is buried to all but the most intrepid explorers (think Excel) or so specific that it sacrifices features for increased usability, essentially doing few things very well (think mobile apps). In both cases, they force you to operate within a framework of their choosing.

Toward our latter days, writing can help preserve our most cherished memories. Studies suggest that the act of writing keeps our minds sharper for longer.

“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.

Each method and technique is effective on its own, but the true power of the Bullet Journal is found in the sum of its parts.

Also functions as your monthly mental inventory.

If we forfeit the opportunity to learn from our experiences, as the saying (sort of) goes, we condemn ourselves to repeat our mistakes.

There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.

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

What tiny thing could I do tomorrow that would make my life a little bit better?

Though we can’t make more, we can increase the quality of the time we take. Measuring the quality of time is not an exact science, but a key indicator is impact. How often have you sat at your desk all day, yet felt like you accomplished very little? Conversely, sometimes you sit down for a few hours and crank out a few days’ worth of work.

Seth Godin once wrote, “You’re either the person who creates energy. Or you’re the one who destroys it.”

We sat down and she went on about how amazing everything was, but I was too busy brooding over all the mistakes I had made preparing the meal. This was undercooked, that was too cold . . . I was comparing what was with what I had hoped would be: that perfect image in my mind. The only thing I failed to see was how enchanted she was by the gesture and how that joy slowly drained as I kept harping on about what I could have done better. I managed to spoil the most important ingredient of the dinner: our time together. All because I wanted everything to be perfect.

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

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail! —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

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.”