I’m trying to turn this thing back into a proper blog and not just a newsletter archive, so I’m going to try and write shorter, more frequent posts. (This one’s not short, because it’s basically four blog posts I couldn’t be bothered to separate.)
I’ve decided that I’m going to use a Bullet Journal to organise my work and life starting today, i.e. May 1.
I tried the Bullet Journal system once before, a long time ago – I think back when Ryder Carroll posted the original video1, and tasks were still marked with squares.
This was when I’d just started freelancing. At the job before that, I’d used David Allen’s GTD method to manage things, but it hadn’t worked out for me, since GTD requires a lot of active maintenance, and I needed a system that maintained me rather than the other way around.
I liked the Bullet Journal system back then, but I realised quickly that I needed a much more sprawling organisational structure, and a digital one at that, because all of my work was in front of the computer, and I needed to do a whole lot of rescheduling, calculations for how many pages I was going to letter any month or year, and the flexibility of looking at a calendar and moving books around based on when I expected them to come in for lettering.
So I gave up on Bullet Journal at the time. In my busiest period in comics, I was using two worksheets, one calendar and one Trello board to make sure that nothing fell through the cracks.2
But the Bullet Journal video (here’s the updated version) led me to Interstitial Journaling, which was very useful in finding out what exactly was taking up my time at any moment, and how much time I was spending doing useless work, so I could cut down on that.
Here’s a sample interstitial journal from 2019 (2018-2019 was my heaviest period of using Interstitial Journaling, since I was building my work efficiency at this point) with the identifying features taken out:
14:50
Starting today with organising stuff for the day. On the plate are revisions and finishes for Title A, lettering for Title B, and Short Comic C.15:00
That’s mostly done. I’m gonna start with Title A because I think that should be the least amount of work.15:36
Finished that. Will send it in another half an hour because I don’t want them to realise how quickly I did this. Now will do basic setup for Title B.16:06
Paused for a coffee. Continuing Title B setup now.16:23
Done with the setup. Will probably take a short break and then do the actual lettering.18:30
Took a break, had coffee with [a friend who came over]. Now getting back to work, starting with Title B.21:30
Just finished lettering and rendering Title B. Will upload now. I don’t think I’ll work anymore tonight. Title C moved to tomorrow. Will probably watch The Favourite instead.
On the other hand, towards the end of my busy period, when I was trying to be more diligent about taking rest, Cal Newport’s Time-Blocking System (which I still highly recommend to anyone who finds themselves wondering where their day went) was quite useful in making sure I stopped working at some point in the day.
I’m noting down all of these, because a) some of you might find one of these useful, and b) what you tend to realise is that different systems are useful at different points in time, based on your priorities.
Interstitial Journaling made me more aware of where my time was going within work. Time-Blocking helped me cut down on work filling the time available. And most importantly, at a time I most needed it, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks reminded me that I have a finite amount of time available, and I didn’t want to spend it all working – I had to be very selective with what I could do with my remaining time on earth.
These days, though, I have a different problem. I do a lot less work than I used to, which means that I’m not in front of the computer a lot of the time. Instead of my day beginning with firing up the computer and loading up my Trello board, I now have to choose to sit at my work desk. So I find that tasks fall between the cracks even if I’ve added them to my system, because I’m not looking at my system. Thankfully, I haven’t actually missed any deadlines &c., but it’s been close a couple of times.
The solution, of course, isn’t to change my life to be in front of the computer more – I much prefer to be away from it, thankyouverymuch – it is to move my system somewhere I can see it even if I’m not at a computer.
And now, I don’t need a system that just covers work, but one that covers everything else I want to be doing at any point, so I will be sure to look at it every day.
Enter, redux, the Bullet Journal.
I find myself now at a very different place in my life than a few years ago. Back then, I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing, but I was far too busy and quite overwhelmed, so I needed something to make sure I didn’t miss anything I needed to do.
But then I suffered a severe case of physical and mental burnout, and spent the last few years cutting down on work to make sure that I was only doing the kind of work I felt fully compelled to do.3
I needed rest, but I also needed my time to be unstructured, to allow myself to simply be. I used my existing system as far it was needed, but outside of that, I had no system – I wanted no system.
Now I find the burnout receding, and I’m contemplating what I want the next tranche of my life to look like. I don’t want to simply jump back into more lettering – I’m excited about my work, but I like the balance I’ve found, and I don’t want to simply do the easiest thing available if I have the luxury not to.
I want to, instead, observe how I’m spending my time, what I find pleasure in, what makes my life feel more meaningful. I want to build good habits re: food, exercise, writing, drawing – I’ve been doing these things with some regularity the last few years, but I’ve also cut myself a lot of slack when I didn’t manage to, because I needed kindness above all else. Now I can be a little tougher on myself again.
I also want to see if there’s a drastic change I need to be making that I haven’t made yet out of sheer inertia. I have several different interests at the moment – lettering, writing, drawing, photography. Does one of these deserve special attention? Do I need to drop something for the health of everything else? Do I want to do take a break from work and do a six-month course on something? That sort of thing.
The Bullet Journal method seems to be great for reflection of this kind. It includes the best pat of Interstitial Journaling – seeing what you’re spending your time on – but a lot of it is about setting intentions and seeing how well you’ve done with them, how connected you are to them in practice. As a productivity system, the Bullet Journal is as much about what you decide not to do as it is about what you want to do.
Ryder Carroll himself seems to have gone through a period of “Okay, I did what I supposed to do – now what?”, which I rather relate to. And I’m hoping that it’ll help me the way it helped him.
The Bullet Journal also seems to be a system that rewards regularity, but doesn’t punish a lack thereof. If you miss a few days of using the journal, it’s trivial to pick it back up. As long as you’re willing to let it be ugly and reflect regular life rather than try to prettify it.4
There is a certain amount of jargon that comes from a) Carroll having to make a living from this, so adding some extraneous elements and b) the Bullet Journal being a product of that particular era when programmers were tweaking analogue systems to work in similar ways to digital. But then, it’s hard to blame programmers for this when Zettelkasten exists.
But despite this, the Bullet Journal has a low learning curve – apart from the basics, everything is optional. You can ignore whatever part of Carroll’s system you don’t connect with, and even better, if you change your mind later, it’s trivial to add stuff back in. It’s a spectacularly modular system.
I know some people have this impression that the Bullet Journal requires a whole lot of commitment and that it needs to look pretty, and honestly, YouTube video creators haven’t helped this impression. Some people seem to waste time using their Bullet Journal the way writers will fuck around with fonts and page layouts to avoid writing. But what I like about it is that I can ignore all of that and build my system my way.
I’m also starting to get a bit sick of being online. I love the Internet – it has done so much for me, and I think humanity would be in a much worse place without it. But social media just feels rancid at this point. I’m still on there once in a while, but other than looking at art, there’s rarely anything there that makes me feel good. It almost always feels like a waste of time.
So I want to be more analogue for a bit. I’ve fallen in love with film photography, and I want to see what else is better when it has the texture of physicality and material life to it.5
I won’t pretend that the profusion of generative AI doesn’t have something to do with it. Anywhere you go now on the Internet, apps and websites force AI down your throat – you can’t turn off AI summaries on YouTube, for example, even though there are human-crafted summaries right under them, and I stopped using Google Search because I don’t want a computer to guess what I want to see. Social media is clogged with this slop, and I just don’t want to see this shit anymore. It hurts my soul a bit every time I read something not written by a human, and I don’t want to do it if I don’t have to.
That’s part of the reason I want to try to live my life out of a notebook. The idea of looking back at a notebook and seeing a physical log of the things you went through, the things you read and watched and heard – that seems a lot healthier at the moment than allowing the Internet to make me and the world around me less human.
I might change my mind about some of these things, and of course, I’ll keep using a calendar app for reminders and stuff, but for the foreseeable future, this is replacing my Trello board. I’m also likely going to stop posting my capsule reviews from May onwards, after posting a massive Feb-April round-up in the next week or so – I do those mainly to track stuff for myself, as an extension of the Twitter threads I used to do, and I’m going to note this stuff down in the notebook instead.
- I’m linking it here for completeness, but I recommend watching the updated video linked lower down. ↩︎
- This system also had a lot of redundancies, because I have severe attention issues, and I liked to keep any given task in multiple places, so if I missed it in one place, I could catch it somewhere else. For example, if an editor emailed me revisions, I’d add them to my Trello board and to my calendar, so even if I forgot to look at one place, there were two others to nudge at me. Or if I forgot to add the task in the first place, the email was still in my inbox, marked unread till it was done, just in case. ↩︎
- The maxim that helped me out at this time was, “If it’s not a FUCK YES, then it has to be a NO.” ↩︎
- I will note that I spent a fair amount of time on YouTube looking at different people’s journals to help me set mine up, and it was alarming how many “minimal” bullet journaling setups were created by people who seemed to have no idea what “minimal” means. On the other hand, Carroll’s original journaling setup is minimal and amenable to ugliness. ↩︎
- I’ve also been using a notebook to track my film photography since late last year, and I’m so happy I chose to do that instead of maintaining an Excel sheet – I carry the notebook with me when I’m doing serious photography, and I use it to track what I shot on which film roll, and what settings I used, or what mistakes I made, and so on. I can also later reflect on how I did with each roll when it comes back from the lab, and make updated notes based on it. It’s rather beautiful to see the progress over the pages. ↩︎