A Reluctant Bullet Journaller

Bullet Journalling (or Bu-Jo for short) is the latest craze sweeping the stationery obsessed world of today.  Just a quick Google image search on Bu-Jo will show how much obsession there is over this relatively straight forward, notebook-oriented, organisational system.   For those not in the know, Bullet Journalling is the brain child of New Yorker Ryder Carroll and claims to be "The Analogue System for the Digital Age" .  The system itself involves sorting all the tasks, events and appointments in your life, past, present and future, into one, easy-to-navigate location. And the attraction of it all? All you need is a notebook and a pen.

I first heard of Bullet Journalling in Designist where it seemed everyone apart from me was an avid fan.  Having used a simple Leuchturm Weekly diary and notebook combination to get me through work and college for the past 5 or 6 years, I had no desire to change my ways.  However, there were things about my previous system that did get to me on occasion, like when you run out of space in the section of a page dedicated to a particularly busy day or the fact that some of the things I needed to do were in one notebook and some were in another.  Could Bullet Journalling solve these problems? Could I become more organised than I already was?

So I gave it a go. The first thing was to get a notebook that would work.  Ryder Carroll recommends his own brand of specific Bullet Journal notebooks designed by Leuchtrum1917 that has dotted paper, headed pages for certain sections and handy tips and tricks for novice bullet journallers.  I spent hours humming and hawing over what kind of the notebook to get but in the end settled on the Special Edition Red Dots Notebook by Leuchtrum1917. I like the dotted notebooks for drawing boxes and nice straight lines, and the red dots appeal to me as I like to write in red and blue ink. That being said, literally any notebook will work, and we have all kinds of notebooks available here, from funky badly made books to left-hand specific Immorable Notebooks, and these super-fancy, German made, Nuuna notebooks.

  

So how did I get on? I'm about three weeks in now and I have to say so far so good!  I was hesitant at first about how long it would take me to set up each week and month, and at first it did take some time, but you quickly learn that the way you do everything is completely up to you. I started off trying to copy Carroll's simple beginner method, but soon found that I preferred setting up my weeks differently.  I prefer drawing a grid at the start of the week so I can plan things for the whole week. And hey presto, no more running out of space as I control the size of the box for each day.  Things to do no longer seem to get forgotten, as the clever migration system of Bullet Journalling means I remember to move undone tasks to a new list. My journal is by no means immaculately decorated, or even extremely neat like some of the images you see on Instagram, its messy and all over the place, but it works for me and that's whats important.

And that's my advice for anyone like myself who is reluctantly deciding whether or not to get on the Bu-Jo train, do things your way, don't pay too much attention to anyone else's.  It can look intimidating at first if you do. Just learn the fundamentals of the system and you'll see its benefits. At the end of the day if there's something you don't like in there don't do it! In my opinion, the real attraction to Bullet Journalling is that its your own, custom organisation system and there's no app, program or guru that's going to tell you what to do.

Check out the full collection of bujo notebooks and accessories at designist here.