You have probably heard or read about a Bullet Journal. If you haven’t, I recommend having a look at their website. It’s a great organisation method created (or popularised) by Ryder Carroll, a designer from Brooklyn.

For those of us with confused feelings about technology who prefer the soft touch of a pen on paper, the Bullet Journal method is very neat. It was transformational for me, who have always struggled to keep a diary or a calendar. It’s not that I haven’t tried, it’s just that I tend to lack the discipline and eventually they all get messy.

You see, I love making notes. My mom used to get quite mad at me, with all the paper I would generate. If only it was organised maybe she wouldn’t have much of an issue, but normally it was all over the place.

My notebooks

Late last year I started a new job which demanded a lot of focus and attention to many moving parts. I started to suffer from what I called cognitive overload, or foggy brain syndrome. After looking for organisation solutions on the web, I stumbled on the idea of the Bullet Journal.

It started OK: I created an Index, a Future Log, and then added a calendar entry for the month of December. In theory then, every day I was supposed to create one entry, with the tasks for that day, and any subsequent notes are filled in between.

Soon I ran intro trouble though. Because I write a lot, my day entries started to get lost in the middle of the noise of the random daily notes. Instead of having a straightforward index for December, it became very patchy, with calendar entries on the 7th, 8th, then jumping to 21st, then 29th…