One of the activities that has helped reduce the chaos in my day to day for the most part, but especially during the pandemic has been journaling. It has been a place of order and a scratchboard wherein I reimagined my life and planned it. I have used a variety of tools, from pen and paper to apps to help put a little more structure and perspective in my life.
For this particular entry I’m writing about my experience with bullet journaling, specifically during the pandemic.
I’ve noticed a trend where it’s really just a dumping ground for tasks.
I have used my bullet journal inconsistently over the course of the pandemic. The longest stretch for me was about a month wherein I consistently put in my tasks and thoughts and organized whatever needed organizing in my life, like projects and my belongings.
It’s difficult to make it a daily activity because most of the time it’s just a task list for work, and work is… boring.
And the more items I needed to manage the more discouraged I was to making the effort to complete tasks.
In addition, agonizing over how I organize my thoughts in the journal has been counter-productive; this is however not the fault of journaling, rather my obsession in making things ‘look’ organized.
How I adapted
I decided to not follow the suggested formats. I ditched the monthly and yearly views as well as all the collections (largely) and just organized it day by day. If I needed to work on larger ideas that cannot be contained within a day I give it a page and put it in the Index.
I try not to overthink it. Just dump what I need to dump in there and then move on to the next day. If there are certain things or if a collection deserved more focus I would then move these over to my web apps (like Workflowy and Notion) so that I can easily move items around and better organize them.
It can evolve into how you need it to be. I decided to organize and make entries by the day. Every task that is not finished can be written in as a duplicate entry in the new day, but I realized that it was just wasteful so I decided to just copy unfinished tasks when I turn over to the next page.
(article in progress.)
Thumbnail Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
