a magic bullet for 2024

how a notebook changed my life

I recently ordered a new notebook on the advice of my friend Caroline.

Caroline is a registered life coach with a full roster of clients. She lives in North London and on Fridays we meet for about an hour and a half, sometimes in person but usually on Zoom. For the first half of the session I update her on where I’m at with life, love, work, family, etc., then she “coaches” me by offering thoughtful advice on little ways I might tweak my routine in order avoid constantly forgetting everything and wandering the house looking for my wallet and/or my phone and berating myself, which I do a lot. After the coaching session, we switch roles and I hypnotise her for about 20-30 minutes, which just involves guiding her through a deep relaxation exercise tailored to alleviate whatever stressors she happens to be struggling with that week. It’s been a great experiment for both of us — a kind of girlfriendy-catch-up-meets-therapeutic-quid-pro-quo. For whatever reason, it works. Caroline helps me to stay focussed and on top of things and I, in turn, help her to relax and let go.

Within a few minutes of our first coaching session, Caroline figured out exactly what my problems was: I needed a better system for ordering and prioritising my daily tasks and long term goals. My old system involved a google calendar, random post it notes and pen scribbles on the back of my hand — I knew it wasn’t fit for purpose. That’s when she suggested I get a bullet journal. When I told I’d never heard of it and she looked surprised. She sent me a link to a very official-looking website in Germany and I ordered one immediately. It cost £27.50 plus shipping and took three and a half weeks to get to London by post. By the time it arrived, I was ludicrously excited — three and a half weeks is a long time to wait for any online purchase, let alone a notebook — and the anticipation combined with Caroline’s solemn endorsement convinced me the bullet journal was guaranteed to change my life. The problem was I still had no idea how it worked.

The journal itself is quite pleasing. It’s about the size of a paperback and bound in soft dark green leather. It has three silky ribbons for place markers in green white and black. Basically it looks like a large moleskin, but the pages are numbered and instead of being lined or blank, they’re covered in tiny mysterious little dots. The stationary is thick and creamy, which gives it air of European luxury. But otherwise it’s just a nice notebook. On the inside cover there were two cryptic diagrams. The first one is a kind of graph, with numbers and lines, which I still find incomprehensible (if you understand it please explain in the comments below) and on the opposite page was a Venn diagram with the words “what” and “why” interlocked by an embossed golden dot. It came with an instruction manual in teeny-tiny font that’s meant to be tucked into a little folder at the back of the journal. Reading it made my head swim. There was a lot of stuff about date stickers and logs and indexes and so on. I went back to the website and watched a couple of instructional videos by the “bullet journal founder,” an Austrian-American hipster guy called Ryder Carol, who according to his website lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. I sifted deeper online and discovered a series of online courses on bullet-journaling along with praising testimonials from the “graduates” raving about how “the system” had helped them to achieve their fondest dreams and cherished life goals.

But I still didn’t get it.

So I watched one of Carol’s old Ted talks on the subject of “intentionality.” He talked about focus, distractions, mindfulness, productivity, his childhood struggles with ADHD and how the bullet journal system (which he invented for himself as a way of honing his focus) had miraculously fixed his life, inspiring him to share his method with the wider world. As far as I could tell the system was just a notebook for writing things down, but somehow it was more than that. I googled on and realised why Caroline had been so surprised I’d never heard of “BuJo” as fans call it. BuJo is a massive Thing. A zeitgeisty minimalist analogue millennial panacea. There were endless reviews and press clippings from major media outlets and YouTube channels and Instagram accounts and communities you could join by becoming a member. It like an anodyne wellness cult. Stationary yoga for the sedentary. The system’s genius, apparently, was that it was so simple. So easy and intuitive! And yet also so very weirdly complicated. Many fans talked about it in quasi religious terms, calling it “a way of life,” but they all seemed to be talking around it, above it, adjacent to it. I wanted to actually DO IT. But how?

I learned some interesting facts in my research. For instance, that any old note book could be transformed into a “bullet journal” — I hadn’t actually needed to order an official one from Germany — it was just a system for writing things down. The system wasn’t rigid, it was meant to be flexible and personalised. I googled on and discovered that 2021 Ryder Carol had written a New York Times bestselling book, The Bullet Journal Method. I downloaded it (for free on Kindle Unlimited) went to bed and read the introduction before falling into an agitated sleep. I still couldn't get my head around my bullet journal and I’d spent most of a day trying to figure out how it worked. What was wrong with me?

The next morning, Caroline randomly texted to ask if my bullet journal had arrived and I said that it had but I didn’t get it. It was unfathomable, impossible, a time suck! What even was it? She texted me back a link to one of Carol’s instructional videos, which I’d already watched.

Then she sent me another text. “Just set it up any way you want, with pages for everything and anything — days of the week, months, writing projects, future goals — and an index at the front so you can keep track of where everything is.”

And suddenly I got it. Just like that.

The bullet journal was just like all my other notebooks except it had page numbers and an index. That’s all it is really. A notebook for recording and logging tasks and goals and random thoughts, but a slightly more organised version that allows you to actually keep track of stuff. I’d been keeping notebooks ever since I learned to write but the difference with the bullet journal was that I could actually find where things were and track them because — duh— I jotted them down in the index.

I’ve been using the bullet journal for a couple of weeks now and in spite of my initial confusion, I have to say it’s been a revelation. I’m a reporter by training which means that even though I work on a laptop and use a digital calendar, I have to have a pen and paper notebook open on my desk or I can’t think properly. I use a notebook to jot down tasks and random thoughts. With the bullet journal, it was the same but different. I started with the aforementioned index, then wrote down all my goals and tasks and lists in a series of logs (future, monthly and daily). In the daily log, I recorded not only the tasks I meant to accomplish in a given day, but the tasks which I actually had accomplished — sort of like a cross between a diary and a ‘to do’ list. This tiny alteration in the way I wrote things down made all the difference. Almost immediately I made two crucial discoveries:

The first was something I already knew. That I have a chronic tendency to massively under-estimate the time that it takes to get almost anything done, whether it’s pruning a hedge, finishing a novel or “dashing off” a short post for this newsletter. Instead of being realistic in my ‘to do’ lists, I tend to bite off far more than I can chew, and I do this almost every single day. The result is that the end of the day, I look at my ‘to do’ list and see maybe two or three out of twenty-seven items crossed off which invariably makes me annoyed at myself for being so disorganised. My intentions were good but overly ambitious. I repeatedly overwhelm myself and I do so out of habit. On bad days, my frustration at this state of affairs leads to self-sabotage and avoidance. I set unrealistic goals, fail to meet them, then berate myself which makes me give up and put things off. Once I recognised this vicious cycle it was easy to fix — I started wilfully slowing down and giving myself more time. It was like a gift.

The second realisation was that I’m not as hopeless and unproductive as I thought I was. I actually get quite a lot done! I just hadn’t been bothering to record it. Once I started logging what I actually did in a given day, instead of just writing down what I intended to do (and in most cases never got round to), I was able to acknowledge these tasks and give myself credit accomplishing them. It sounds so obvious but I swear to god, just writing down all the stuff I did do made me feel so much more confident and accomplished. Tasks I’d been performing almost everyday, like doing the dishes, going for a run, delivering and fetching the kids from school and helping them with homework were never accounted for — which gave me a constant feeling of confusion over where the time went. I didn’t bother to include these tasks on my ‘to do’ list because they just seemed so obvious and quotidian. But by simply recording them I understood where my time was going and what I’d actually done with it. I gave myself credit and in turn stopped berating myself. This lessened my frustration which turn meant I procrastinated less and accomplished more. I felt better about myself basically. Plus my desk wasn’t littered with sticky notes and at the end of the day there was no ink to scrub off on the back of my hand.

So I guess you could say I’m a bullet journal convert. It’s amazing how a tiny habit change can shift your perspective and even change your life. I guess that’s what all those BuJo-ers mean by “intentionality.” For the record I still dislike that word, it sounds made up. But hopefully you see what I’m getting at.

So that’s my tip for the new year. Get a new notebook— put an index at the front. Stop berating yourself. Your phone will turn up. Happy 2024.