I love bullet journals. I love all the clever and creative ways people artistically keep track of what they are doing. But no matter how much I love it there are two reasons I don’t keep one myself.
1. It takes a lot of time before each day/week/month/year starts
2. It doesn’t work with how I plan my days.
My big problem I’ve found with any planner that comes in a book format is that I don’t have all the things together that I need to be effective. I move things around and need inserts from time to time. A book keeps things in the order you made them. And on one day it may work, on another day it might be annoying flipping back and forth.
And as much as I want my planner to be beautiful, spending the time drawing and planning out my planner pages every time I open it isn’t my top priority for time.
So I use the concepts of bullet journaling, but I use pretty printable pages and an A5 binder so I can easily move pages around and throw away pages when I’m done. Here’s what my daily layout looks like:
On the right, I can quickly write any prayer requests that come up (common when you’re a minister) and those weird to-dos that come out of the “you got a second” conversations. At the end of the week, they either are done or go into my electronic planner and I start fresh for the next week. For the day viewer, I prefer the small schedule section and a larger note section. I’m still trying to remember to track my water. For some reason, nothing is working to get me to drink more water. I just get so lost in my work. But I have high hopes I’ll get their one day. Then a simple checkbox for doing my morning and evening routines, which I’m still working out to get the right timings, whether I worked out and my meditation/quiet time/Devos. Meal planning is at the bottom and a long space for to-dos. The boxes are for prioritizing. I try to us an ABC 123 priority system. Meaning top priorities are A’s and numbered, then B’s and numbered, and C’s then numbered. I don’t know why I even bother with C. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that far down the list, but you know, high hopes.
This layout gives me my day at a glance, and at the end of the day, I transfer and move on. I also use Asana for things that repeat or to-dos that are a couple of months down the road that I don’t want to forget about, which I’ll talk about some other time. And Family organization is going to be a whole nother ball game.
But this works for me. I know people who do true bullet journalling and it works for them. The goal of productivity is to find what works and use it. That’s it.
So how do you keep things organized?
If you want to try some printable layouts. Check out my planner printables by clicking here.
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