Do you use paper for your productivity system? Do you use a digital system? Or, a hybrid productivity system? In this episode of ProductivityCast, we highlight the Bullet Journal, an all-paper productivity system developed by a productivity enthusiast, Ryder Carroll. It doesn't matter what you use, you can learn a thing or two about your own productivity system when you look at how others "on the other side" use their systems to get more done.

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In this Cast | What is the Bullet Journal?

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | What is the Bullet Journal?

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Bullet Journal

Bullet Journal - Getting Started

Example of a Bullet Journal - Ryder Carroll - Image

More artistic version - Image

Dash Plus

Bullet Journal Companion (iOS)

Evernote

MSFT OneNote

MSFT Office Lens (iOS) (Android)

Bullet Journal Resource Center

WTF is a Bullet Journal

Robert’s Rules of Order, 11th Edition

Raw Text Transcript | What is the Bullet Journal?

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast's audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00

Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Welcome

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

everybody to productivity cast episode number 35. And I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. I'm joined here today with my co-host, Augusto Pinaud. Good morning, everybody. And I'm also joined by Francis Wade, how's it going, Francis? Good. And I'm joined by Art Gelwicks. How's it going? It's going well. How about you, it's going really well. I'm excited for this episode, because we're going to let you kind of take the lead here and talk about something that you know quite a lot more about them than the rest of us here on the productivity cast team. And that is the bullet journal so I'll give you my couch bullet journaling expertise definition and and then I'm hoping that you can educate listeners on and us about more about what the bullet journal really isn't how it works. So as I understand it, the bullet journal is a complete handwriting paper and pen productivity system. The mechanism allows you to create a kind of an index at the beginning of an of a journal. And then you have your your monthly calendar and then monthly task list and you track your items that are calendar events and your task items you perpetuate v existing items forward in your journal throughout the course of the journal itself. And obviously throughout the course of time with a monthly review that allows you to transfer things from one month to the next and then from one week to the next as well is that the basics

Art Gelwicks 1:55

it's it's part of the basics. Yeah, that's that's what some of the core functionality thinks about.

But it's bullet journal is is become or has become its own, I almost want to say metaphor for productivity, I would put it almost analogous now with getting things done. And the reason why I say that is because it has developed a very rabid following around the benefits of it. Now, let me backtrack a little bit and explain you are absolutely right on target. The bullet journal process was created for all intents and purposes as it stands by a product designer in New York named writer, Carol. And if you have an opportunity, I highly recommend you go up to his website, bullet journal. com has some great background on it. And the great baseline understanding of the principles of what bullet journaling is about. But in a nutshell, it starts off has an analog Well, that's how it was originally designed paper and pen,

the idea is to capture everything that's going on. And we all know, with all the different systems that we utilize, whether it's GTD, whether it's to do us whether it's paper, whether whatever, that one of the core principles of productivity is capture

the

bullet journaling system encourages you to do that. And it mitigates one of the biggest weaknesses of analog systems, which is not only capturing things, but tracking things to execution, being able to follow them through and act on them and know what's been addressed, what hasn't and what state it's at.

So if you think about something at the most basic, if you want to understand how a bullet journal works, you can do this little exercise, take a piece of paper, take a pen,

write a note down on the on the paper, just one line about something that needs to be done

in front of that line draw small circle, you have now created the first step of your bullet journal. Because that little circle now indicates to you that that is a thing that you need to do. It's like the classic to do checkbox.

But this is where we start to scale it up.

Now, you start to collect lots of those things. If we think about just going through the course of a day, and we're capturing all these different things we have rattling through our head. Well, some of those lines, we write down our actionable items, they would get circles next to them. Other items aren't actionable, but we have to remember them. So in those cases, maybe we put a dot next to it indicates it's a note. But there's nothing we really need to do with it.

Maybe it's an actionable item that we don't get to. So we're going to maybe draw a little arrow in front of it, that indicates that it carries forward to another day. So you can see, instead of just writing stuff down on our legal pads, like we do during meetings, we can apply this bullet journal concept to start to capture what we're supposed to do with these items. Now, this is where we continue to scale this up. Because now instead of having just this massive list of everything going on in the day, now, we start to create pages within our journal to deal with different topic areas could be home activities, could be work activities could be a particular project. But the technique is always the same. That consistency of notation, and even writer Carol says it himself flat out on his website, there is no correct way to do this. There is no standard structure that you must follow you design this the way work that works best for you. I have a variant that I use, because I use graph paper a lot. That's completely different to the structures. But it works great for me.

So as we start to build these lists and structures together, you can immediately see again, another place where analog falls down. How do I know what's where if I have them on separate sheets of paper, I have a list here, I have a list there. I have a list there. But if it's all in one bound journal, which is one of the operating pieces of this, how do I know what page it's on? How do I know what list is where. And that's where you introduce a table of contents, either at the beginning or at the end. So as you add new lists into your bullet journal, you add those pages into your table of contents. And you can then quickly reference from one section to the other. Now, that being said, it sounds fairly basic, and it is very basic. I honestly, anybody can sit down in about a half hour start to do bullet journaling. If they do it that way. I would say they probably have about two weeks of effective time and bullet journaling before they start to run square into all the limitations of things like, hey, this thing does remind me what to do, how do I remember what has to be done. And that's one of the I have to say is one of the limitations of it, you have to look at it all the time. It is analog, it's up to you to provide the smarts in the interactivity.

Augusto Pinaud 7:07

There is a writer called Patrick grown and he began talking about something he called a Dodge plus system that I understood when I moved to the wall, the journal that the bullet journal was, in a way, a better way to do that dodge PA system it is it allows to grow more My problem was delivered. There's two big limitations for me in particular one is my handwriting I have an awful when writing my handwriting is so poorly that while I was in college, I had more than one class where teachers preferred to bring their personal laptop for me to type their my test done for me to hand write test, that's how great my hand right and he's so that that's where my first problem was a bullet journal comes my character rated, but I can read it ever again. So, you know, ways like a mystery productivity. And let's hope web gets done. Not great. By the way. My second problem comes exactly on what art was coming. That was a part of the reminders, you know, one i'm a i'm an omni focus guy. And I love the fact that I can set reminders by location by time at by many other thing Plus, I can look at the things depending but I don't want to go and look into a folder of things and try to find the stuff that I need to be remember of. The other thing is, I think this is for a person who requires dot attention, who, you know, basically what he's out of mind is out of sight out of mine, I think it may be even better than than a different system. That said, My experience was really short with Ebola journal prett