Which way is the best, and how, to journal?
A brief history of journaling and quick user guide to the Bullet Journal Method for organising your life based on research and my personal experience.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
My life was a mess and I felt totally out of control. I narrowly averted financial disaster, when I almost missed an agreed mortgage repayment date, and felt a cold shiver of shock. The problem was I had bills landing on me like bombs, recorded on pieces of paper and in several spiral-bound notebooks, if I was lucky, but they were a fat lot of use because I couldn’t reference anything without trudging back through them to the start, and couldn’t remember which notebook details were in because they were sometimes months apart. And the problem only got worse, the longer time went on, compounding tragedy. And that was just the bills.
I know, I know, use your phone. But the built-in Calendar soon got swamped, and there are only so many details I could record using my thumbs, which sometimes didn’t even make sense, without referencing my original notes! So, I tried using Note-taking apps, but these were a veritable minefield of hit and miss, like a gun misfiring! Some synced with my pc, but only if you paid, and the most famous one charged an extortionate fee for the privilege, and even their cheapest tier was heavily restricted, for example, with maximum storage allowances. But even if I could afford their maximum tier, it wasn’t as effective without some way of referring to my manual notes.
After much frustration, I finally realised I needed a combined manual and digital system to organise my life properly, but how is that possible? This is the story of how I regained control of my life manually and digitally, and affordably, containing references to the best products and research, and, as always, based on my personal experience, to manage my budget, appointments, research, work and play.
When life gives you lemons, here’s how to make lemonade.
Imagine a note-book that you could record key details in codes, so each specific item was immediately identifiable by their code. Instead of traipsing back through your notes looking for the word ‘meeting’, among thousands of other words, you only look for codes for ‘events’. If the meeting was months ago, imagine you could easily find the correct notebook, and there was an index at the front so you could also easily look up the event. Imagine your note-book also contained your day, month, and year planners immediately referenced by tabs.
You might be thinking I am talking about a Filofax, what’s new? A Filofax hasn’t got a manually referrable Index, and pages are not numbered for reference.
Imagine something better than a Filofax because once you know the rules you can create every page yourself without spending a fortune, so this is an affordable analogue solution to taking back control of your life.
The best manual, or analogue, system I have found for note-taking was created by Ryder Carroll, originally to help him manage symptoms of ADHD[1], in his book, “The Bullet Journal Method; Track your Past, Order Your Present Plan Your Future”[2] and I will describe the system from the book as briefly as possible, before explaining how I actually use it to solve my problems.
But first, in order to consider the variety of different ways of manually journaling, it will be instructive to consider how it has been used in the past, to show how it has been developed for different purposes—introspective, intellectual, travel, personal, literary, war, psychological, online, digital and analogue journaling— and how the modern context requires a different method and technique, in the form of bullet journaling.
PART 1: A brief history of journaling
16th-17th Centuries: Early Modern Journaling
Early modern journaling began in the 16th and 17th Centuries and arguably the most famous and inspired example is from Leonardo de Vinci (1452-1519) who recorded on loose-leaf paper—later folded into leaflets, then bound into notebooks—filled with personal thoughts, scientific studies and sketches and diagrams annotated with notes in 16th-century Italian mirror writing, which reads in reverse and from right to left. Was Leonardo naturally left-handed or protecting them from prying eyes? Perhaps there’s a clue in his notes…
“The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies everything placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.”[3]
Journals were also used for spiritual reflection during this period, laying the foundation for introspective journaling, for example, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), who left the privilege of Spanish nobility to found the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits. His ‘Spiritual diary’ was not like a diary of today, but rather a collection of daily notes and reflections showing Ignatius in daily mystical contact with God during a personal struggle, and it wasn’t published until 400 years later in Rome, 1934.
“I felt within me that I approached, or was brought before, the Father, and with this my hair rose and I felt what seemed an intense warmth in every part of my body, followed by tears and the most intense devotion.”[4]
Samuel Pepys was also writing his diary around this time, vividly describing some of the horrors of London life (see below), although his famous Samuel Pepys' Diary (1660-1669) wasn’t published until 1825.
18th Century: Enlightenment and Travel Diaries
The Enlightenment saw the rise of intellectual journaling exploring insights into social life and the psyche. When James Boswell (born 18 October 1740, Edinburgh) was only twenty-two, he kept a daily diary of staying in London from 1762 to 1763, with quite raw honesty:
“At night I strolled into the Park and took the first whore I met, whom I without many words copulated with free from danger, being safely sheathed. She was ugly and lean and her breath smelt of spirits. I never asked her name. When it was done, she slunk off. I had a low opinion of this practice and resolved to do it no more.” [5]
Travel journaling was also popular with explorers like Captain James Cook (1728-1779) recording his voyage to New-Holland (Australia) in his journal:
“From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c., they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air. . . . In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.” [6]
19th Century: Romanticism and Personal Diaries
The Romantic movement emphasised personal journaling reflecting emotion and nature like Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who wrote, “Walden”[7], and his process was interesting:
“A basic flowchart of his writing would start with field notes, which were then recorded as journal entries, next transformed into a lecture, afterwards an essay, and eventually part of a book.”[8]
This was also when personal diaries became popular, like Samuel Pepys’s Diary (see above)
Early 20th Century: War and Literary Journals
I visited the home of Anne Franks in Amsterdam, now a museum, and it was heartbreaking to see her original war diary (1942-1944) with her neat hand-writing and pasted photos preserved in a glass cabinet.
“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”[9]
The literary journal is embodied in the diaries of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) who suffered from what is today called bipolar disorder—suffering mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement—but was unknown and untreatable at the time, and writing became her only way to cope.
“The only way I keep afloat is by working.…Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth.”[10]
‘Sinking down’ was her metaphor for descending into depression but also finding the truth on the sea bed. She committed suicide at 59 by walking into the River Ousesea with stones in her pockets.[11]
Late 20th Century: Psychological and Online Journals
In the 60s, Ira Progoff (1921-1998) developed therapeutic journaling in what he termed the ‘intensive journaling method’ which is a three-ringed binder workbook containing tabs for personal relationships, career and special interests, body and health, events, dreams, and meaning in life, with writing exercises which “mirror the subjective process of perceptions and thoughts taking place inside you”.[12] Progoff believed that journaling alone was not enough to bring about changes in personality:
“Diary writing usually involves the unstructured, chronological recording of the events of a person’s life....the mere fact of continuously writing entries...is not sufficient in itself to bring about deep changes in a person’s life. To achieve a significant transformation in a personality, strong forces of energy must be generated.”[13]
In the 90s, online journaling arrived in the form of publicly accessible blogs or diaries like LiveJournal (1999) four years ahead of Wordpress in 2003. Blogging transcended its roots as mere personal diaries, transforming into a vast, dynamic landscape with niches like technology, travel, fashion. [14]
21st Century: Digital and Analogue Journaling
Day One (2011) is a digital journaling app which modernized journaling further still, incorporating multimedia and cloud storage, on your pc and syncing with your phone.
And in 2013, Ryder Carroll revolutionized journaling by merging productivity and reflection in what he called an ‘analogue’ journaling system to cope with the overwhelming propensity of ever more information in the digital age.
“Bullet Journal® (aka Bujo) is a mindfulness practice designed as a productivity system. It will meet you wherever you are to help you process the past, organize the present, and author your future.”[15]
Carroll describes his groundbreaking method in ‘The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future’ and offers an online course ‘Bujo® Basics & Beyond Course’ for £196 here .
What follows is how I personally adapted the Bullet Journal method, after using it for years to transform my life, and the products I recommend to make it more affordable.
Key Findings
1) Equipment: Fineliner Pen & A5 Harbacked Journal
2) Setup new journal: Dates/Identity; Key/Signifiers, Index
3) Create a Future Log, Monthly Log, and Daily Log (Setup AM & PM)
4) Migrate activities/tasks/events ‘backwards’ to monthly log & ‘forwards’ to future log
5) Add Logs to Index and any Collections as you complete them.
PART 2: HOW DO YOU USE A BULLET JOURNAL?
Equipment: Pen & Notebook
The first thing you will need is a pen. This could be a whole article in itself because you create all the spreads in a Bujo yourself and you are constantly drawing ruled lines, so smudging and page bleed are serious issues.
The one I use is a Faber-Castell Art & Graphic Pitt Artist Pen Fineliner £3.90 on Amazon.
But, I have also used a Bic Fine Orange Original Black which works really well and you can get these much cheaper in a box of 20.
The second thing you will need is an A5 dotted-page hard-backed journal. You don’t need to spend a small fortune on the official Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal .
For half the price, I get two Rettacy hard-backed faux leather A5 journal from Amazon, which have the same dotted format 120gsm thick paper, Indexes in the first four pages, pre-printed with page numbers, sleeves in the back cover to keep any small papers, two ribbon bookmarks, pen loop and an elastic closure band. The main differences are each are only 160 pages rather than 206 pages, and they don’t include a pre-printed Future Log, quick Bullet journal guide or have stickers. But I only need 3 or 4 sticky tabs in a journal and you can easily improvise these by cutting up a sticky note; it’s the same difference. Don’t worry about the details, trust me, this one will work just as well.
I love unwrapping the cellophane from a brand-new journal, it feels almost like a fresh start at life, every quarter of the year, which is how long mine take to fill, and works for me with the quarterly business cycle, which I try to stick to (in the UK the annual financial year begins 1st April, so I use April-June, July-Sept, Oct-Dec, Jan-March).
Step 1. Dates & Identity
The first thing I do is write today’s date in the top-right of the opening page (for easy reference to when that journal starts, and the month and year in block capitals on the spine with a “—” to which I will add the finish month and year. When all my journals are lined up, I can easily see which periods they refer to.
If I should ever lose it, I add my name, full address and phone details in the centre of the opening page, with a “Recovery Reward £100”.
I also create a double-page “Contacts” collection in the last two pages of the journal and split this up into 8 quadrants labelled, ‘ABC’, ‘DEF’, ‘GHI’, etc., with the last, ‘VWXYZ’ because I doubt I’ll have many contacts with these surnames.
Step 2. Key
After my identification page, before the Index, I always write a ‘Key’ for Bullets & Signifiers because these are easy to forget and for ease of reference without using any tab.
N.B. This is my own adapted list, which expands on the original Bujo list, and feel free to create your own, as long as you use a Key, so you know what each code means! This is very important.
Step 3: Index
If you have followed my advice with the A5 hardbacked journal you will not need to do this, but it is easy to create your own. Use the first two double-page spreads after your Key, and title them Index I, Index II etc., with a column on the left titled ‘Page No.’ and the remaining column titled ‘Contents’. This is crucial for finding what you need later on without having to scan the whole journal.
Step 4: Future Log
In the next double-page spread use the first 3 lines for your title, “Future Log” and then divide the page into six quadrants, for each month of the year. In the top left corner of each quadrant, I write the month and draw a small calendar with columns labelled “M, T, W, T, F, S, S” and simply write the days underneath. I need to make the calendar as small as possible to leave room to annotate it. For example, I circle a date ‘12’ and then beside the calendar wrote ’12 – Pay Mortgage (P.32)’, or whatever the future event I need to remember, with a page reference. (If you have bought the A5-journal I recommended you will not have to number all your pages manually, but if not, it doesn’t take that long, and is essential for the system to work.) It is also useful to create a tab for this double-page spread, which is basically just a small sticker that sticks out from the other pages when your journal is closed, and label this ‘Future’ so you can easily access it. I cut it out from a post-it note and sellotape it in place.
Step 5: Monthly Log/ Tasks
In the next double-page spread use the first three lines to title the left page with the month, “JUNE LOG” and the right page with “Tasks” and then create a left column on the left page and simply list the dates vertically, eg., “M1, T2, W3, T4, F5, S6, S7, M8, T9’ etc., I draw a horizontal line after each week across the page, and can easily fit a month, if I keep each date within the 5mm dotted grid. If you can’t do an activity on a particular day, you add it to your monthly log for another date. You use the Tasks page to bullet point all the activities you want to complete that month, and you can obviously prioritise this list by numbering them and add them to your monthly log, or if they are not urgent, add them to your future log. When you start a new Monthly Log, it is critical that you migrate any events from your Future Log into it. It is also useful to tab this double-page spread, eg. JUNE, so you can quickly refer back to it during the month, and I will have three Monthly tabs in each journal, separated by all the Daily Logs.
Step 6: Daily Logs
A daily log is the “workhorse” of your Bullet Journey, and all it needs is a day/date and a page number, and Carroll suggests sitting down AM, to record all your thoughts overnight and plug in any events for the day, referencing your Monthly log, during the day you add notes to the journal as you go, and review it PM, to mark off events/activities completed.
This is where your Key comes in handy, because the way you record in a daily log is different to traditional journaling, and it’s calling rapid-logging. (I will base this explanation on using Carroll’s original codes, so you can compare with my Key later).
Rather than loosely structured and time-intensive full-sentence notes, Ryder Carroll explains, “Rapid Logging helps us capture and organize our thoughts as living lists” in quick bullet— thus the title—points, which record:
1. Things that you need to do (Tasks)
2. Your experiences (Events)
3. Information you don’t want to forget (Notes)
1. Tasks
The code for a task is the bullet point “•” and Tasks can have five different states according to their state of play (notice how the bullet point is changed in each case):
The use of the codes enables you to see the ‘state of play’ of tasks in an instant. But Carroll’s genius is in the idea of migrating tasks ‘forward’ to your Monthly log, if they can’t, or don’t need to be, actioned today, or ‘backward’ into your Future Log, if it lies outside your monthly log. This way you keep on top of all the activities happening during a day.
2. Events
3. Notes
Notes are “facts, ideas, thoughts, and observations” which you want to record but aren’t “immediately or necessarily actionable” and their code is “—”
4. Signifiers
Signifiers are separate codes that you place before a code to “highlight specific entries to give them additional context.”
You can invent your own signifiers, like I did, but here are his:
* Priority: “Used to mark a bullet as important and is most commonly paired with the Task Bullet. Use this sparingly. If everything is a priority, nothing is.”
! Inspiration: “Most commonly paired with a Note. Great ideas, personal mantras, and genius insights will never be misplaced again!”
5. Custom Collections
When you have a problem or activity that you want to specifically focus on you can assign a specific custom page to it with simply a title, date and page number, so you can reference it in your index. The easiest thing is to build your Index as you go along, although, tbh, I started by completing the index at the end of the journal, transferring all the key topics, I thought I might need in the future.
If you return to the topic again on another day, a useful tip is to use ‘Threading’, which is placing the page number of the previous page on the right of the current page number Eg. 50/10 (50 is the current page number, and 10 is the previous page number.) And if you got back to page 10, you can mark it 50 beside the original number Eg. 10/50 to indicate where the thread continues.
One Collection that I have found particularly useful, and use regularly, is a ‘Brain Dump’ where you literally create a page which is just ‘—’ Notes of everything on your mind without any ordering or priority, like a shopping list. It’s great for de-cluttering your mind.
Another Collection that I started using was ‘Quarterly Goals’ divided into sections:
1. Personal / Spiritual
2. Family
3. Professional
4. Financial
5. Reading
6. Writing
7. Music
8. Health
9. Training
10. Domestic
But I had mixed results with this because I didn’t track them.
I have created a ‘Tracking’ Collection for other goals, like meditation, and recorded minutes on a bar graph, which was more effective. And I’ve seen this idea used for tracking ‘Mood’ on a line graph. Because you create your Bujo, the sky is the limit on what collections you want to create.
Conclusion
We have considered a brief history of journaling from 18th to 21st Century, including introspective, intellectual, travel, personal, literary, war, psychological, online, digital and analogue journaling, and seen how these have changed according to the needs of the time.
With the overwhelming amount of data we are having to manage in the 21st Century, it is perhaps slightly ironic that pen and paper manual, or analogue, journaling has risen as a response to this challenge.
There are many online and digital journaling apps, which I do use, but they will never replace my Bujo. I use Diarium, for example, for long-form full-sentence journaling, for reflection and pleasure, but not to organise my life. I also use Google Calendar, Google Keep and One Note to complete my combined digital and analogue system, but the heart of the system will always be my Bullet Journal.
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References
[1] ‘Inside ADHD’ by Ryder Caroll. Accessed @09:42 on 20August 2024 https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/bulletjournalist/inside-adhd?srsltid=AfmBOopSVhAwAwPHymBhvCqJvMgJvBsVI4reMAHB3GBEadxCZK4x-vUI
[2] The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future
Front Cover. Ryder Carroll. 4th Estate, 2018
[3] Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519. (1970). The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. New York :Dover Publications
[4] Inigo: Discernment Log-Book The Spiritual Diary Of Saint Ignatius Loyola
Edited and Translated by JOSEPH A. MUNITIZ, S.J. Published byINIGO ENTERPRISES, LONDON, 1987
[5] London Journal 1762-1763, James Boswell, Penguin Classics, 2010.
[6] The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. Ed. by J. C. Beaglehole. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
[7] Thoreau, Henry David. “I: 1837, Oct. 22.” The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal I, edited by Bradford Torrey. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906.
[8] ‘Thoreau’s Writing’ on The Walden Woods Project. Accessed at 13:39 on 22nd August 2024. https://www.walden.org/education/for-students/thoreaus-writing/
[9] Frank, Anne, 1929-1945 author. (1995). The diary of a young girl : the definitive edition. New York :Doubleday,
[10] vol. 3, p. 235. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, vols 1–5. Edited by Bell AO. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–1984
[11] Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) Katherine Dalsimer, Ph.D.Authors Info & Affiliations, American Journal of Psychiatry, Volume 161, Number 5, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.161.5.809
[12] https://www.intensivejournal.org/AboutMethod_IntensiveWorkbook.php#workbook Accessed at 08:33 on 23rd August 2024
[13] https://intensivejournal.org/AboutMethod_JournalFeedback.php Accessed at 08:20 on 23rd August 2024
[14] https://wpdeveloper.com/a-brief-history-of-blogging/#:~:text=Early%202000s%3A%20Blogging%20Platform%20Proliferation,travel%2C%20fashion%2C%20and%20more. Accessed at 08:59 on 23rd August 2024
https://bulletjournal.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoojin5qp8eB5hPWy3w6GK6PewnHC05fs-fauCGIPYkiLbhhkGWn
Accessed at 09:37 on 23rd August 2024.