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The main culprit was my inability to rein in my focus. It wasn’t that I couldn’t focus; I just had a hard time concentrating on the right thing at the right time, on being present. 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 often found myself coming up short or trailing behind. Facing those feelings day in, day out led to deep self-doubt. Few things are more distracting than the cruel stories we tell ourselves.
In the most connected time in history, we’re quickly losing touch with ourselves. Overwhelmed by a never-ending flood of information, we’re left feeling overstimulated yet restless, overworked yet discontented, tuned in yet burned out.
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.
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.
If the journey is the destination, then we must learn how to become better travelers.
Mindfulness is the process of waking up to see what’s right in front of us. It helps you become more aware of where you are, who you are, and what you want.
We weren’t passionate about the product—we’d just fallen in love with the entrepreneurial challenge.
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. In other words, the more decisions you have to make, the harder it becomes to make them well. This is why you’re more likely to eat an unhealthy dinner at the end of the day than an unhealthy breakfast at the beginning of the day, when you
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BuJoJitsu
Often all it takes to live intentionally is to pause before you proceed.
organization can become a cleverly disguised form of distraction.
You can’t improve the world around you if you can’t improve the world within. Choose your friends wisely, and be a friend to yourself.
failure in a life of compromise can be twice as devastating.
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.
Many poor decisions are born in the vacuum of self-awareness. We get so caught up in the doing of things that we forget to ask why we’re doing them in the first place. Asking why is the first small but deliberate step we can take in the search for meaning.
David Foster Wallace talked about the day-to-day and how “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.”22
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.
Of all the challenges you’ll face along the way, endurance often proves to be the most cunning and lethal adversary.
Studies suggest that only around 2 percent of the population is psychologically able to multitask.37 The rest of us aren’t multitasking; we’re simply juggling.
Sprints are independent, self-contained projects—thus the outcome is, let’s hope, a source of satisfaction, information, and motivation to keep going (or, as happened with my stop-motion animation project, a helpful cue to let this particular goal go).
Large changes trigger our fear response. The more afraid we are, the more we need to calm ourselves.
Create your Tasks through the lens of curiosity rather than by giving yourself commands or ultimatums. It’s the difference between “Lose weight!” and “What one unhealthy thing could I remove from my diet?”
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.
Let’s say you have to file your taxes in a month. Rather than waiting until the last minute and realizing that there’s all sorts of stuff that you didn’t take into account and then stressing out about it, break it down into time-boxing sessions. For example: Sessions 1–2: Sun., 8:30–9:00 p.m.—Gather materials. Sessions 3–6: Mon., Wed., Sun., 8:30–9:00 p.m.—Compile materials into spreadsheet. Session 7: Tues., 8:30–9:00 p.m.—Wrap up and submit files. Session 8: Thurs. (last day), 8:30–9:00 p.m.—Provide any additional info.
If there’s something you find yourself putting off, then you’ve identified your chore. Procrastination indicates that it may be the most challenging Task on your list, because it worries you or doesn’t interest you. Put it first.
Steadily reminding yourself that you, your insufferable colleague, your pet, your lover, your sibling, your parent will die can fundamentally improve the nature of your interactions with all. It can make you more empathetic, forgiving, patient, kind, and grateful. Most of all, it can improve the quality of your time by helping you to become more present.
According to them, we can’t control the world around us, nor the people in it. It’s our futile resistance to this truth that can leave us frustrated, devastated, or at a total loss.
The more we try to control others, the more draining life becomes.
We can control how we respond to what happens to us.
No matter what happens in your life, no matter how bad things get, you’re never entirely at the mercy of your experience. There is always opportunity and freedom to be found in how we choose to act. It’s our obligation, then, to make the most of this freedom.
Our reactions are often more instinctual than intentional, especially when a situation or a person is doing their best to bring out our worst.
Worry has a way of holding our attention hostage.
Like a pebble dropped into a lake, our actions ripple out into the world around us.
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. —LEONARD COHEN
Perfection is an unnatural and damaging concept.
Motivation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It results from our pain, frustration, or desire.
In other words, understanding why you feel compelled to do something will help you better define how to do something.
Claude Debussy once said that music is the space between notes.
Just as the moves of the capoeira instructors I mentioned earlier made little sense without context, so, too, will taking action without planning. Without a plan, action tends to result in wasted motion, energy, and time, often culminating in the disappointment of failure.
