I started keeping a journal in my early teens. I’d write diary entries, fill pages with stories, and when my friends spent the night, some of them would write little notes into my journal for me: reflections on our friendship, the lives we were living, the drama at school. I kept my journal going in college, though the format changed as I migrated to a planner: short sentences each day, little annotations on the monthly calendars, taped in ticket stubs. No stories, minimal diary entries, no notes from friends.

When I started working, balancing jobs at two and then three different hospitals, I grew frustrated with the limitations inherent in the structure of my prefabricated monthly/daily planner and started looking for a better solution. I had an Erin Condren Lifeplanner in my shopping cart, ready for purchase, when I found out about bullet journals.

Never ended up buying it.

Almost four years have passed, using a bullet journal, and I don’t see that changing. Probably ever.

Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal method suits my needs perfectly because of it maintains its inherent flexibility while still acting as an effective organizational and planning tool for the short and long term. If you aren’t sure how a bullet journal works, check out the bullet journal website and intro video; like the original method, they’re clear and succinct and effective teaching tools. (I have another post forthcoming walking through the structure and function of my bujo system.)

I say “original method” because it’s so incredibly easy to fall down the Internet rabbit hole of “#bujo”, and end up steeped in illustrated monthly pages with changing monthly themes and watercolors and washi tape and suddenly you’re browsing aesthetic class notes and study prep even though you’re a working adult and you find you now own a 99-pen Tombow brush tip marker set you don’t know how to use and you wonder how did you even wind up here in the first place?

For the majority of us, the kinds of planners that do well on social media either aren’t functional for real life (due to time involved in setup, or usability, etc.), or we’re not artistic enough to pull them off. This doesn’t take anything from the entertainment value of the youtube plan-with-me community. I still watch these videos. They’re oddly soothing. And if they work for the people that use them, that’s great! I dabbled in jazzing up my monthly cover pages for a while, but quickly found it didn’t suit me. I couldn’t maintain that level of effort; I just wanted something functional and organized. I’d spice things up with pretty handwriting but eventually I dropped adding intentional color schemes altogether.

The other logical internet rabbit hole to fall down when bujo-ing is that of productivity: how can you get the most out of your time every day? Through time trackers and social media planners and productivity worksheets! This type of content tended to resonate with me the most. I’m a sucker for efficiency. Financial efficiency, time efficiency, space efficiency. Unfortunately, though, this turned my bullet journal turned into a vehicle for self-castigation; if I didn’t hit all the habits I was tracking, or complete all the tasks I planned at the start of the day, then why even bother?

Suddenly, I didn’t want to open my journal anymore. I skipped months at a time. I filled last year’s journal, yes. One Leuchtterm 1917 full almost to the end in one year. This year, I hadn’t even hit the twenty-five page mark by the time I started on July.

It took a conversation with a friend I hadn’t talked to in years to help me figure out why. I started using a bullet journal because it gave me a place to organize myself and my life, while also chronicling the things that really mattered. I’d plan trips and then later write all about them. Paste in concert tickets and movie tickets with little notes about how I liked them and why. By the time I left it languishing in a drawer for weeks on end, I had nixed all of that, and all in the name of productivity and efficiency.

But talking to my friend, one who wrote in my high school journals on many an occasion, reminded me what about keeping a journal made it so important to me. He showed me one of his own journal—keeping one being a habit he learned from me and keeps to this day—and a few of the pages his friends have written in for him, and told me how special those notes have been.

In obsessing over productivity, I lost the emotional connection to my little notebook. And I wanted it back.

So I decided to change my approach. It still serves its original purpose. I have my index pages, my future log, my monthly pages and dailies. I use signifiers. I make my lists and migrate my tasks.

Some things are different from the original method, now, though. And a lot of things are different from what it had devolved into before this epiphany.

Here’s what’s changed: