Friday, April 22, 2016

A New Endeavor

[Maybe?]

While messaging with Mia Sorella this morning, she introduced me to bullet journaling.

Now, I realize it's everywhere. How had I not already heard of this?

This is a rather old picture. I do not miss that coffee table at all.
For the similarly uninitiated, bullet journals are an analog, entirely customizable journal-mixed-with-day-planner-mixed-with-goal-list-mixed-with-anything that is apparently quite popular. This is a distilled version of journaling, taking what could be long entries (and to-do lists, and notes) and turning them into easily written and referenced points day by day. And while there are so many examples out there of additions and extra-fancy alterations (this idea was made for Pinterest), the basics include:

- Page numbers.
- An index at the beginning that you add to as you go.
- Some form of daily logging.
- Some form of monthly planning.
- A method for setting aside "collections," or specific lists or groups of things.

[Well, that's the least clear explanation I've made of a thing in awhile.]

The bottom line is that you take what may otherwise end up in a journal -- to-do lists, daily highlights, class or meeting notes, reading lists -- and you give them a system. An organized, bulleted system that actually makes sense and can be adapted to your own uses.

The appeal to me? While I have been a journaler for a lot of years (that stack above is about three notebooks larger now) I go through stages where I lose steam. I'll have weeks-long gaps in a journal. I'll get bored with a notebook and just plain quit. A lot of the time, what I really need to do is push through and commit to writing out a few lines each day and I'd keep going -- but the pressure is there to write "enough" each time, even after actual decades of knowing better.

Even more to the point, I have up to three things in my purse (day planner, list notebook, normal journal) that could be combined into one Super Book if I just had a system.

I think perhaps now I might. It won't be pretty. I still intend for a good chunk of it to be classic journaling (which kind of opposes the major tenets of the idea, but I'm going to take the "Do what works for you" one very seriously). I'm not extra creative and I have the handwriting of a serial killer. However, given some of my trip journals and my excessive list-making, this seems like the kind of thing that could really work for me and my lifestyle.

My question to you guys is -- have you ever tried this? Any discoveries you've made along the way you'd be willing to share?


Also, does anyone know where this picture was taken? Because I'm in it and I don't remember. At all.


1 comment:

Nathaniel and Sarah said...

It is the Buffalo statue at falls park by the visitors center.