I’ve made it a personal interest to find better ways to do things, and I’m constantly experimenting with various tools and methods to help me organize my time and to stay on top of my projects and my life and such.
I’m pretty much a whore for productivity, okay. Fight me.
One of the tools that really stood out to me (and managed to worm its way into my daily life) is Ryder Carroll’s bullet journaling system.
I fell in love with its simplicity and its emphasis on rapid logging (which allows its users to quickly capture and parse data)–perfect for the average person who has a lot on their plate and needs a quick and efficient way to remember things.
Why I Can’t Do Mainstream Studyblr
Most of the journals I’ve seen in the studyblr community are kawaii as hell, complete with a rainbow of Sharpie/Staedtler/Stabilo/Muji/Pilot fineliners, washi tapes, pastel-colored highlighters, and sticky notes of various shapes and sizes.
Inspired by this creativity, I tested it out myself, foolishly thinking that the ‘kawaii pages’ will be enough to motivate me. Long story short, the experiment ended a failure. Why? I realized that I put more time making my planner cute than getting actual productive work done. (I like art, okay? If I treat something as art, you can bet your entire hoo-ha that I’ll put time and effort into it.)
It completely defeated the purpose for me, so I quit it with the kawaii schtick and moved on.
Note: I am not admonishing people who use this system, especially if it’s something that works for them. If you’re like me and aforementioned system doesn’t do it for you, maybe you can pick up some inspiration from this post.
I cannot completely forego aesthetics, though. Perhaps it’s my shameless vanity as an artist, but I am dead set on making sure my journal is simultaneously visually hella whilst being completely practical.
Hence, I went for the minimalist route, because there’s a certain thing about neatness and simplicity that makes stuff something special. I’ve talked about my brand of minimalism in this post if you’re interested. Essentially, I’ve pared down all of my tools and accessories to the meaningful things I actually need and use on a daily basis.
Here’s how I go about it.
One Notebook to Rule them All
Just one, so that every single note or task list or idea I should never for get is in one damn place–one that I check often–so ‘forgetting where I put it’ or ‘losing it in the void’ is no longer a valid excuse. No tedious/fancy organizational thing going on here, soldier.
To be honest, any notebook will do the job, but I’m as picky with notebooks as I am with sketchbooks and nothing quite fit my needs and tastes better than a hardcover pocket Moleskine with squared pages. (My local bookstore didn’t carry a LEUCHTTURM1917 with the same specs. Boo. D:)
I got this specific notebook for the following reasons:
Simple hardcovers are super sexy and sleek.
Squared pages give me a really strong ‘engineering vibe’ because they’re often used for field notes. They make it unbelievably easy to keep your straight lines relatively straight (which is super helpful when I’m drawing out ideas that involve diagrams). I just love squared pages, okay. Nothing else can compare.
Since it’s pocket-sized, it’s super portable and the pages are very easy to fill up; and in my opinion, a full page instantly looks pretty. Its small size makes it a little harder to fish out of your purse, though.
Moleskines are definitely one of those items that scream rich and upperclass, but hear me out–the last time I bought a cheap squared notebook (from my previous bullet journal posts here and here–and at this point, you guys should have an idea about how much I love squared notebooks), the shitty binding and cover stressed me out on so many levels. The damn thing was literally falling apart two months into the semester.
After which, I saved a pretty penny for this dumb notebook (which I affectionately named Fuzzy), and the rest is history.
(I’ll talk about the nature of things I write in a minute.)
These are essentially all the writing tools in my pencil pouch. It’s not practical for me to carry rainbows of fineliners and sticky notes because the large amount of color options overwhelm me. (Plus, my pages usually become a convoluted mess of colors, and those irk me to no end.)
5mm Joy Environmental Protection Correction Tape for obvious purposes.
0.5mm Muji Gel Pen (Orange) for extra notes and a nice pop of color.
0.4mm Pilot G-Tec (Blue) for regular notes.
0.2mm Mitsubishi Uni Pin (Black) for headings.
As you can see, I adhere to a very strict color scheme. I use a pair of complementary colors for visual interest and one neutral color to balance things out.
This ensures that my journal pages look relatively dapper without additional embellishments.
If I were to go by the absolute essential though (because I’m attempting to be a minimalist here), I’d only bring the blue pen–but the lack of color and styling options will make me absolutely miserable, so I’d rather not.
I use a very simple system to identify between data–checkboxes for tasks and bullets for notes–and that’s it. Otherwise, I’ve found that the simple work becomes too complex and tedious and it completely defeats the purpose of rapid logging.
I don’t have an index so far, and I didn’t put a strict legend for my identifiers. Here’s what I do, though:
If I complete a task, I (diagonally) hatch the checkbox completely.
If there’s progress but it’s not quite done yet, I hatch half of the checkbox.
Migrated items have orange arrows protruding from them.
I strike out irrelevant tasks.
Apart from daily to-do lists, I also pen in reflections and ideas. Since it’s very small and lightweight, I carry this notebook everywhere and it’s become my compact ‘inbox-and-sort-and-tackle’ tool.
In above picture, you can see my little sketch of my idea of a general layout for my blog posts. I also have an idea on how I want my tumblr theme to look like–and I actually managed to achieve it, hehe.
As you can see, I curse a lot. I also doodle sometimes.
I keep fancy letterings and doodles to a minimum, though. I always remind myself that my bullet journal is not my sketchbook, and my pages don’t have to look like a masterpiece of typographic awesome. I end up slipping up sometimes because drawing makes me feel awesome, but I try not to make it a habit.
I keep a simple monthly calendar (the exact same thing Ryder Carroll does) because it gives me a good enough overview of the things I need to keep on top of.
I hope you picked up something useful from this post. Drop me a line if you’ve got any questions/ideas/comments for me. Also, feel free to show me how you do your bullet journal by mentioning/tagging me in your post–I’d love to see!
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