The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future. Ryder Carroll
present. We’re not only working harder, but smarter because both our hearts and minds are genuinely engaged by the endeavor.
Cultivating this self-awareness is a lifelong process, but it starts by simply checking in with yourself. That’s where the Bullet Journal method comes in. You can view your Bullet Journal as a living autobiography. It allows you to clearly see what the rush of life tends to obscure. You can track the decisions you’ve made, and the actions you’ve taken that led you to where you are. It encourages you to learn from your experiences. What worked, what did not, how did it make you feel, what’s the next move? Day by day, you’re deepening your self-awareness by becoming a steady witness to your story. With each page, you improve your ability to discern the meaningful from the meaningless. If you don’t like how life is unfolding, you’ll have developed the skill and determination required to change the narrative, as Rachael M. and her husband did:
I work full time as a graphic designer, run my own freelance business, and serve several days a week as a youth leader, all while helping my husband with his ministry. My husband and I met two years ago. We love being married, but almost from day one, there were so many needs and things to remember and events to schedule—we were both going crazy.
My husband and I were struggling to communicate and keep up-to-date with each other’s schedule. I went to work, bought groceries on the way home, made food, cleaned house, and tried to remember everything else I had to get done. By then it was time for bed, and the next day we started all over again. In addition to all this, we learned that I had a thyroid condition, as well as gluten and lactose sensitivities. Now food prep was even harder. I was completely overwhelmed.
We also struggled to spend quality time together. That’s obviously something that everyone knows is crucial to a happy, healthy marriage. However, since my husband is a pastor, a big part of his workweek happens on evenings and weekends and he takes time off during the typical workweek. I work a traditional nine-to-five Monday through Friday. It was extremely difficult to figure out how to carve out time together. I’m the extrovert of the relationship and I ended up feeling lonely a lot of the time because of how much his work needed him during my weekends.
We knew we had to do something, so we started scheduling everything in our Bullet Journals. We used the Weekly and Monthly Logs to get ahead of our schedule and figure out what was coming. This gave us a visual cue for how busy we were going to be and helped us know ahead of time when we probably needed to block off some time for just the two of us. It also helped me figure out that the key to feeling like I had enough time with him was having Saturdays together so we actually adjusted our schedules to ensure that both of us are protecting as many Saturdays as possible to spend time together.
Bullet Journaling helped us refocus on our personal goals as well. My husband and I were both single and established in careers we loved for some time before we got together. Both of us loving what we did meant we were used to giving our jobs a huge chunk of our attention, and that was important to us. We had to learn how to prioritize our marriage instead of just our work. We could have used digital calendars to sync up, but the discipline of analog and the experience of sitting down with our Bullet Journals to physically mark in events helped us have the conversations we needed to have and to look further ahead so we weren’t always blindsided by the next thing. It also helped us express concerns if we were starting to schedule too many things outside the home and made us feel like a unit, planning our life together, instead of trying to slam two busy calendars together. Now, we love our marriage and our jobs and want to help one another succeed professionally.
Now, almost eight months later, we are accomplishing more than ever in every area of our lives, all before 8:00 p.m. each night! Thanks to Bullet Journaling, I have a handle on my life. I know what’s coming. I have built in moments to reflect and make sure I’m actually focusing on the right things. And I have new confidence in my marriage and ministry because I know my husband and I are on the same page and are working toward defined goals that we share—we’ve written them right in the front of our journals.
—Rachael M.
This is what it means to live an intentional life. It’s not about living a perfect life, an easy life, or getting things right all the time. It’s not even about being happy, though joy often greets you along this path. Leading an intentional life is about keeping your actions aligned with your beliefs. It’s about penning a story that you believe in and that you can be proud of.
Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
—WILLIAM MORRIS
Studies have suggested that we have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day.8 For context, if each thought were a word, that means our minds are generating enough content to produce a book Every. Single. Day. Unlike a book, our thoughts are not neatly composed. On a good day they’re vaguely coherent. This leaves our minds perpetually struggling to sort this gray matter gallimaufry. Where do you even begin? What comes first? Inevitably we find ourselves tackling too many things at the same time, spreading our focus so thin that nothing gets the attention it deserves. This is commonly referred to as “being busy.” Being busy, however, is not the same thing as being productive.
For most of us, “being busy” is code for being functionally overwhelmed.
What do I mean by that? We don’t have time because we’re working on a lot of things, yet things aren’t working out a lot of the time. This phenomenon isn’t just a twenty-first-century problem, but it has been exponentially exacerbated by the countless number of choices technology has put at our fingertips. Should we type, text, call, email, swipe, pin, tweet, Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, Message, or yell at our digital assistant to get it done, whatever it is? And in what order should all of that happen? (Oh, and before we can get started, we’ll have to upgrade, update, reboot, log in, authenticate, reset our password, clear cookies, empty our cache, and sacrifice our firstborn before we can get where we’re going . . . where was that again?)
This freedom of choice is a double-edged privilege. Every decision requires you to focus, and focus is an investment of your time and energy. Both are limited—and therefore exceptionally valuable—resources.
Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, gave the following advice to his trusty pilot Mike Flint. They had been discussing Flint’s long-term plans. Buffett asked Flint to draft a list of his top 25 career goals. When he was done, Buffett asked Flint to circle his top five. When asked about the ones he circled, Flint replied, “Well, the top five are my primary focus, but the other twenty come in a close second. They are still important, so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”
To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top five.”9
In an interview published in Vanity Fair, President Barack Obama said, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”10 The same is true of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with his gray hoodies, or Apple founder Steve Jobs and his famous black-turtleneck-and-jeans uniform. Acutely aware of how taxing deliberating over options can be, they sought every opportunity to limit choice in their lives.
As psychologist Roy F. Baumeister wrote in his book Willpower: “No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue—you’re not consciously aware of being tired—but you’re