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productivity

Bullet Journalling

Just got exposed to the idea of a “Bullet Journal”, which is a method for organizing your tasks in a running analog notebook. http://bulletjournal.com  has the details of what is a fairly basic but effective system.

There’s a certain appeal to it — a lot of the examples that people have posted on YouTube incorporate the sort of creativity one sees with mind-mapping, and some complain that the journal is more like a scrapbook for some.  It’s analog, so not subject to battery life, hacking, theft, hardware failure, etc.

My immediate thoughts:

  1. You definitely need to always have a pen with you as well as the journal
  2. You don’t need a specific notebook to do it, but people have their favorites, like Moleskine or Leuchtturm 1917.
  3. It seems like you should also have a flat ruler or template rubber banded to the notebook as well, because you need to draw lines.
  4. The core system is pretty simple, but people seem to be extending it a lot, doing things like drawing a calendar grid,  a habit tracking grid,  making special lists.
  5. If you aren’t very organized, I could see this getting out of your control pretty quickly.
  6. It doesn’t have a backup, and it is subject to “hardware failure” of sorts (coffee spill, loss, etc.)
  7. At the end of the month, you have to migrate unfinished tasks, and set up your month plan, etc.  That seems time-consuming, especially if you are drawing stuff.

Of course, I’m immediately thinking that this would be much better automated as an app.  Big surprise there, I guess, but there seems to be a lot of time spent doing it, and it seems best for people who only have a few things to track.

Going to look into this further, because it seems like it would be a nice programming exercise.

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