The World's Ugliest Bullet Journal

 Have you seen the artistic miracles that people are passing off as Bullet Journals these days? 

              stolen from bulletjournal.com                                   wonderful work by boho berry 

...and then there's mine:

There's no art here. It's barely legible. But it's mine and it does what I need it to do. It keeps me on track with the things I need and/or want to do, and it gets things out of my brain so I can focus on useful stuff like writing this here blog post. Anyone who tries to tell you a planning or journaling system needs to be pretty, fancy and complicated is misguided at best. My BuJo looks nothing like any of the masterpieces on the internet. It's a dollar store notebook that's more than a little bit dog eared and highlighter has bled through the pages in places and I probably don't use it nearly enough but it works. That's the important part. It works for me. 

I love putting that little X beside tasks when they're done. Seriously. I have things on my daily list like Dishes, and it gets just as big a check mark as any of the other things on there. I have things I put on the list every day. Why would I put the same thing down every day? 

Well, so I can check it off. And because if I fall off my plan for a day, then I get to rewrite the task list the next day and put it right back on top to get myself back on track. And if there's something I'm looking forward to, I put that on the daily list exactly so I can rewrite it every day. 

Ryder Carroll, inventor of the BuJo, recommends drawing up a Future Log at the front of your journal that covers the next 3 months and putting those upcoming events there. Well, I tried. I don't ever look at my Future Log, so for me it makes more sense to carry those dates forward. That's what I do, because that's what works for me. 

Admittedly the version of the Bullet Journal system that I use is greatly simplified. I have an Index, which is the page at the beginning of the journal where you write down the page numbers of your collections so you can find them again, the collections themselves (Basically a list of tasks and notes related to a project, say My Novel or the Kitchen Reno) and your daily log, where you put immediate tasks and thoughts you need to get out of your head but want to consider later. The recommended version includes a Daily Reflection/gratitude entry and a few other things I found I didn't use, so I jettisoned them. That's really the beauty of the BuJo. It's yours, do what you want with it. 

Find a system that motivates you, and do that. I'd be impressed if I saw someone using a whole wall's worth of Post It notes so they could move things around but still get the full overview all at once. It wouldn't work for me- I basically develop attention blindness for anything on my walls more than two days. I do love seeing how other people approach a problem. 

I'm never going to win likes or shares for the aesthetics of my BuJo. That's not what matters. Getting on track and staying there, plus recovering when you have a moment of crisis/demotivation/drama/tiredness, that's the juice. 

I love my BuJo.