Bullet Journal review after two years

It has now been a year and a half since I first started using the Bullet Journal principles for task tracking and I am about to finish my first notebook. This is an incredible feat for which I must give credit to the system: I had been unable to use any single task management system for so long, and I had never completed any notebook. With the completion of the notebook, it’s time for a second reflection on the Bullet Journal.

What is the Bullet Journal?

The Bullet Journal is a task management system designed by Ryder Carrol. Nowadays, and thanks to a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the Bullet Journal is also a product of its own.

The key ideas behind the Bullet Journal are to log tasks sequentially, and to consolidate them on a monthly basis. I won’t go into further details, as the original video makes a great introduction to the concepts.

TODO: Embed Youtube video. Bullet Journal, 2015 Overview

The Bullet Journal is also extensible, if you wish to call it that way, because it is just a collection of basic ideas with which to organize your thoughts and tasks. You can, obviously, tweak such ideas at will and adapt your notebook to your needs. To that extent, a new community site has been created to host these ideas, and people have been posting such thoughts into the quite successful Google+ community around the Bullet Journal.

The good

The best thing in the Bullet Journal is its simplicity and lack of structure. Personally, and because I am very detail-oriented, I tend to get lost with the more complex systems because I feel the need to keep things “right” and properly tagged. The lack of structure in the Buller Journal is relieving because I no longer have to worry about things being in the right place.

The second best thing is the monthly migration process. At the beginning of each month, one has to consolidate all open tasks into the new month’s spread. This simple act forces oneself to reevaluate the pending tasks and to either quickly do the ones that are easy, to discard them as unnecessary, or to move them to the calendar so that they can be addressed at a specific point in time. The act of executing this sweep provides peace of mind, as you are forced each month to go throug this exercise in order to keep your journal clean. (You don’t want to keep open tasks spread through dozens of pages, so the consolidation helps in bringing those down to just a bunch.)

The bad

The worst thing in the Bullet Journal is the inability to deal with the future. The monthly calendar is of limited value–to me at least, because I rely much more on Google Calendar thanks to its sharing features. The new version of the Bullet Journal comes in with a future log, but that also seems kinda limiting.

That said, this does not make the Bullet Journal unsuitable. In fact, it is a great tool to manage “rolling tasks”: aka your day to day. It is a great place to act as the inbox for all things that need to be done, and from there they can be migrated elsewhere for better tracking if desired.

The ugly

Is there anything ugly? I don’t know. Some would say that using an analog system is archaic and prevents the system from being accessible at all times. I agree in theory, but in practice I have found this to not be a big deal. As a matter of fact, the mere act of writing things down and carrying the notebook around is what has made me stick to its use. All digital systems had previously failed me.