I am a digital native, and now with my laptop/smart phone combo, I can run almost 100% of my life from keeping track of appointments to tracking my water consumption. I realized halfway through my undergraduate degree that I didn't really need notebooks anymore - all my notes were on my computer, and that way they were searchable as well. By the time I got to my fellowship year in my PhD, I hadn't used a paper planner since my last year of high school but yet, I found myself craving less screen time. After years of different planning systems and experimenting, I've landed on a system I like - bullet journalling, with a daily planner - and I'm sharing how I work in the hopes that there are ideas you can use, too.
I use a modified bullet journal and a daily planner to keep track, on paper, of all that I want to track and accomplish on a day to day, week to week, and monthly basis. I will write more later about how I use a daily planner - including ways to replicate it digitally - but today will be focusing on my bullet journal, where I do my monthly tracking, long term planning, and goal monitoring.
What is bullet journaling, you ask? Here's a video put together by Ryder about how to set up the system:
What I love about the bullet journal system is that I can change the system however I'd like based on how my needs are shifting. I use collections the most often - I use them to organize notes about my business, books I'm reading, plans for weekend trips, tracking workouts or meditations - and find great satisfaction in looking back and seeing month by month how things are shifting and growing. Here are a few of my favorite spreads, with notes on how I use each of them.
Self Care Tracker
This is my self-care monitoring tracker that I've been experimenting with. The legend on the side corresponds to the different lines. Every morning, I assess how I felt in each area on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being great. As you can see, the beginning of the month was hard for me (I have a pain condition that is cyclical, and knocks me out for a few days a month) but this is very useful for me to see the correlation between all the various aspects of my life.
Business Tracker
I use this to track my business as I grow it, but you could easily adapt this to dissertation writing or any other long term project with multiple parts. I like that I can visually see if I'm favoring certain tasks over others and that I can "get credit" for making little bits of progress every day. Blank squares are of course scary, but it helps to see that just because I didn't do anything one day doesn't mean that I didn't do anything all week/month.
Water and Meal Trackers
I am actively working on eating more regularly and drinking more water - so I created two trackers this month to visualize those goals. I might incorporate these next month into something that lets me see the correlation between eating/water intake and my energy so I can have direct feedback on effects.
Sleep Tracker
This is one of my most time-consuming spreads to set up every month but honestly, I find that making these spreads is therapeutic in a meditative sort of way. I just love the way it looks when it is complete, especially since regular sleep and routines is a huge indicator of my overall health.
Chore Running List
I use this kind of a spread to keep track of all the things I want to get done (in this case, around the house) but never remember to do. When I have time set aside to work on the house, it is so much easier to flip to this spread and see a list of things I meant to do than to just blindly do whatever came to mind first. I can see how this could be adapted to list books/articles you want to read, professional development tasks you want to follow up on, films to watch....
Reading Tracker
I made a personal goal of reading 50 books this year and I made this spread to see how I was doing with that! I've seen other people write titles they want to read on the shelf and then color them in when read but I like reading whatever I want and I didn't want to stop coloring once I started.
But what I love most about the whole system is that it gives me a few minutes every day, off my computer and away from my phone, to check in with myself and see what is working, and what isn't. My professional self mixes in with my personal self, just like real life. Plus, fun pens and colors!!!!!
For more inspiration, check out the Bullet Journal Blog! Or Reddit and Instagram have huge bullet journaling communities too!
