Productivity, if it’s anything, is the art of doing a thing, doing it well, but spending as little time doing it as possible.
If we’re not careful, all those things that insist on being done just become noise, and we can end up like zombies, somnambulating through a sea of tasks without really thinking too much about whether they’re really worth our time.
That thought is behind much of the philosophy of the Bullet Journal method – or BuJo as its devotees would have it – a stratospherically popular method of note-taking that peaked in the early 2010s, and has now settled into becoming almost a religion.
Whenever something reaches that kind of status, I find my spidey senses tingling. That is to say, my bullshit detector starts going off. So I wanted to invite you to join me in an investigation of the Bullet Journal method, so maybe you and I can reach a conclusion about whether it’s a beneficial productivity boost, or an attractive nuisance.
To do that, we must begin at the beginning.
Ryder Carroll is a university student. He has ADD – it’s the late 90s so they hadn’t yet added the H – and he’s struggling with focus. Not that he can’t focus, but that he’s focused on too many things at the same time. Preach on, brother.
He started coming up with this system for keeping track of the things he needed to do, and as he shared it with his friends, they persuaded him to share it more widely.
On August 9th, 2013, Ryder published “Bullet Journal”, a YouTube video illustrating his analogue method for managing his calendar and todo list. It was a sort-of stop motion piece, with Carroll reading his script and walking through it a little like how Martin from IT walks through the latest updates to Microsoft Outlook, and why you must always remember to never click links in attachments, guys. No-one wants a repeat of the pole dancing hamster virus, do we Janet?
😷
So, he came up with this system before the smartphone, but he took a systematic and ordered approach that I think tweaked a nerve in the digitally-minded masses who needed structure, but didn’t want to delegate that structure to their electronic pocket rectangles.
And so yes, there is an inevitable hipster element to bullet journaling, as there is with any pen-and-paper productivity method. It’s objectively easier to do this stuff on a computer or a smartphone – but that’s not the point, and we’ll get to that later.
By December of 2013, just six months after the release of his YouTube video, there were over 3 million Instagram posts about the Bullet Journal method. That original video and an updated one from two years later have amassed over 18 million views.
There are books, products, courses, apps, and all manner of doodads and gewgaws, some of which are officially licensed, but many, like the slightly-off Disney characters painted on ice cream vans, are skirting trademark legislation.
How it works
You start with a blank notebook, ideally one with dotted paper, rather than lined. Of course you can buy custom Bullet Journal notebooks, but any book that’ll lie flat with its pages open will do.
Create an index page that’ll help you keep track of all your subsequent pages. Then start a new page, headed with the current month. Write all the days of the month, from 1 to 31 or whatever, down the left-hand side of the page. Then write the first letter of the corresponding day of the week.
At this point you’ll probably need to shake out the cramp in your writing hand. If you’re anything like me, this is probably already the most writing you’ll have done all year.
Number that page, then go back to your index and write the name of the month, and the page number you just started. You’ll be doing this a lot – going back and forth between pages, so get used to it.
After your month page, start a new one with today’s date as the heading. Now you can start writing down the stuff you’ve got on for the day.
Write down any tasks you need to do, and put a simple bullet to the left. Just a little dot is all.
If there’s something on your calendar, write it down and draw a little circle to the left, instead of a bullet.
You can make arbitrary notes too. Just write them down, and mark them with a dash instead of a dot.
Every time you complete a task, turn the little dot into an X.
This is called your daily log, and tomorrow you’ll do this all again.
Where the Bullet Journal method begins moving from productivity system into mindfulness is when you start assessing your open tasks.
Scan your previous days and look for any tasks you haven’t done. Now ask yourself “Is this task still worth my time?” If it isn’t, you draw a line through it. If it is worth your time, you write it down again in today’s daily log.
There are a few other bits Carroll recommends you do in your notebook, but they’re pretty visual and rather tedious to explain. Also, a lot of them involve repetition, which is just one of the issues that make me question whether the method actually makes you more productive, or just gives you more shit to post on Instagram.
See, there’s a fine line between being mindful of how you spend your time, and ruminating… which is something cows do. Did you know that? Rumination is the process of regurgitating your food, re-chewing it, and then re-ungurgitating it back down again.
There’s value in the manual labour of rewriting every open task to help you consider whether it’ll really get done… but there’s only so much copying tasks into monthly spreads and daily logs – or “migration” as the BuJo people have it – before you’re essentially just chewing days-old chewing gum.
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So, productive or performative?
By no means should you share my concerns, but I want to take a brief diversion and talk about coaching. Don’t worry, I won’t keep us for long.
Coaching is a pyramid scheme. And by that, I don’t mean that it’s a scam, but that it seems to sustain itself by finding a new base of people to sell to. If you start out as a coach and are lucky enough to happen upon a method that works, you run out of time to facilitate one-to-one calls so you hire more people.
After a while, finding the right individuals takes too long, so you develop a training programme that stops being a recruitment practice, and becomes its own product. Now you’re coaching the coaches, and making bank.
That’s not the case for every coach, but it seems to be the natural evolution.
And bullet journaling is no different. If you’re so inclined, you can pay three and a half thousand dollars to become a “certified Bullet Journal trainer”. Now, bear in mind I’ve already shared with you the core tenets of the method, so what else is there to teach? Not much, so what you’re paying for is the stamp of approval that certification gives you.
I don’t think there’s any malice involved here; I don’t think anyone’s being encouraged to part with their money and getting nothing in return. But I do know from my own experience and from chatting with others, that there are a lot of people feeling pretty lost right now, not sure where their careers should be headed or how they’re going to feed themselves when they retire, so the promise of a course that’ll help you generate income for something you love? Well, it sounds pretty appealing… I just don’t think the people who win are those at the bottom of the pyramid, that’s all.
OK, that aside, I’m not the only one with questions around the Bullet Journal method.
Elizabeth Greer Turnbull is a self-described “bullet journalist” 🤔, who wanted to know why so many people gave the method up. She hit on something I’ve noticed myself out in the wild, that what started as an elegant system, as efficient as pen-and-paper could be, has moved from being about personal productivity to public performance.
If you search Instagram for the words “bullet journal”, you’d be forgiven for thinking you mistyped and accidentally searched for “children’s book illustration”. The grid shows photo after photo of beautifully hand-illustrated, colourful images… but not a single task or calendar item.
Call me Officer McNulty but this all looks a little culty.
Social media is the antidote to both productivity and creativity. When you’re creating with the intent to share, the creative process can morph from authentic expression into hollow performance.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
OK, so I’m talking a bunch of smack about this but honestly, if you find beautiful illustration to be a relaxing or satisfying task, you don’t need my permission to have at it. But when we start sharing this stuff online, it becomes easy for us to think “oh so that’s what a bullet journal should be. Oh man, I’m not doing it right; I just had a list of stuff I needed to do; I don’t have a single butterfly or bumble bee on mine”.
The most frequently repeated reason for quitting bullet journaling that I saw in my research was that it was too time consuming. And listen, I get it. We are busy. We don’t have time to set up elaborate spreads every day of the week. Again, this is my full-time job and I still don’t have time to set up a new spread every day.
And this here is, I think, the biggest issue. There’s so much flipping back and forth between pages, so much hunting around for the right page, so much scanning of items, so much rewriting and rewriting and rewriting that, although it lends itself to a more mindful approach where you’re really thinking about every task you give yourself, it can never be more than a short-time hobby.
That said, there’s a lot from the original idea of bullet journalling that we can take and make use of, whether digitally or analoguily.
Writing stuff down, it turns out, is good for us. It helps us remember things better than typing, and it boosts different areas of the brain.
There’s also real thought and wisdom in the structure Carroll developed. Marking off tasks is easy and clean, and it really doesn’t need anything more than a notebook and pen.
So I’m not out here suggesting we never write by hand, nor am I saying you should throw away those beautiful notebooks. In fact, I’ve just got my hands on a new daily planner. What I am saying is we need to be aware of the line between mindful productivity and beautiful distractions.
“Hey Mark”, I hear you say. “Why can’t nice people just have nice things? Why have you got to take a dump all over everything?”
OK, well that’s a little bit harsh, made-up surrogate voice for the skeptical listener, but I take your point. If you enjoy spending an afternoon or more planning your year ahead and manifesting your goals and reflecting back on your previous year and colouring in lots of little squares to indicate… whatever the hell your Year in Pixels indicates… then have at it m’pal… YOLO etc. And I’m sorry you can hear the eyes rolling in my head as I say those words.
There’s an argument to suggest my gender bias is showing here. The shift towards the more illustrative style is – at least, on the face of it – a feminine-led endeavour. And while I’m no Nick Offerman, I do have a moustache and my reproductive organs point outwards. Or, mostly downwards… and a little to the side. Anyway, I did become aware of a potential bias as I was doing my investigatory thing, so make of that what you will.
All of this to say, we need beauty in our lives, and we need to slow down and think, especially about what we spend the majority of our waking lives doing. Writing and drawing helps with that. But what we don’t need is to find ourselves drowning in a system that takes more time to maintain than it does to do the work it’s supposed to support. And we can’t judge our productivity – or worse still, our system for productivity – based on a bunch of seductive Instagram reels that are, in some ways, upheld by a pyramid scheme.
Be mindful; take your time, and enjoy the pleasure of planning. Just, don’t forget to do the actual doing, too.
