I have never had a healthy relationship with notebooks. I hoard them by the dozens, I spend hours filling them, I have them shipped across the Atlantic Ocean by the German company Fantasticpaper. I’ve even been known to lie to them: When I was in middle school, I checked off a box in my assignment notebook labeled “shovel snow out of the driveway.” It became a running joke in my family because not only had I never once shoveled any snow, but also we had no driveway.

If I am in a meeting, then I am listing things to do, buy, write, read, or look up (occasionally, I am also taking notes on the meeting itself). Just in the past five days I have made lists of: books I have read so far this summer, books I still want to read this summer, emails I should send this week, writing projects to finish in June, groceries to buy, food in my fridge that needs to be used up before I go on vacation, things to do before I go away, and things to pack for my trip. My real work—writing lectures or things I actually intend to publish—all happens on a computer, of course, but my whole life happens in notebooks. And strange to say, it turns out I’m not the only one.

With the growing popularity of the “bullet journal” system, a surprisingly large community of notebook to-do list devotees has emerged on Instagram, Facebook, and Kickstarter. They share photos of their favorite monthly, weekly, and daily layouts. They debut new handwriting styles or bullet symbols, and band together to fund a dedicated dot grid bullet journal notebook manufactured by German stationery company Leuchtturm (Moleskines are so 2010). A bullet journal is, essentially, a notebook in which you write down everything you do, or need to remember to do, or just need to remember, using a set of special bullet point symbols that correspond to different types of entries. For example, a dot can be used for an uncompleted task, an ‘x’ for a completed task, an open circle for an event, a dash for a note.

A photo posted by ursala (@honeyrozes) on May 22, 2016 at 8:54am PDT

If that doesn’t seem like a revolutionary concept, well, it’s not. But that hasn’t stopped the system from acquiring legions of devoted fans. Designer Ryder Carroll, who developed the system, posted a video explaining bullet journaling on YouTube in May 2015 that has since been viewed more than one million times. There are more than 100,000 photos on Instagram tagged with the #bulletjournal hashtag, and nearly 3,000 backers supported Carroll’s Kickstarter campaign in 2014 to revamp his bullet journal website and manufacture a customized bullet journal notebook (which is currently completely sold out). In recent months, media outlets including Buzzfeed, Quartz, Marie Claire, The Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg have featured the system and offered how-to guides to new users (sample headline: “WTF Is The Bullet Journal, And Will It Change My Life?”).



“I get a lot of email from people telling me how greatly it’s changed their lives,” said Carroll, who launched the initial bullet journal website and video in 2013. At that point, he had already spent roughly 20 years refining the note-taking system for his personal use. One day, when Carroll was having lunch with a colleague who was overwhelmed by the logistics of her upcoming wedding, he offered to show her how he used his notebook. “I spent 15 minutes walking her through it and when I was done I looked up and her mouth was hanging open,” Carroll said. “I thought, ‘Oh no, she thinks I’m completely crazy.’ But she was like, ‘This is amazing, this is incredible!’”