January 14, 2019 • 28 mins
Francesca and Rebecca are back with their new podcast "Works For Me." In each episode, one of the two becomes a human guinea pig as she tries to solve a specific work-related problem. We've dropped the first episode here for you to enjoy! If you like it, you can subscribe to "Works For Me" on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, game Plan listeners, it's me Rebecca Greenfield and me
Francesco Leavie. We're back. We wanted to tell you about
our new show Works for Me. If you loved Game Plan,
you'll love this show. This is game Plan on steroids.
Instead of talking about work culture, we live it. We're
(00:23):
human guinea pigs trying out productivity experiments on ourselves. And
we're going to play the first episode right here, right now.
But if you want to get the full experience, subscribe
to Works for Me on Apple Podcasts or wherever you
listen to podcasts. Yeah, that way you won't miss a
single episode. We hope you'll love it. Bye. I'm Rebecca
(00:47):
Greenfield and this is how good I would be at
my job if I had my life in order. Becca,
this article you wrote is the best ever. Wow. Thank you.
It was all thanks to my to do list. Hey Becca,
(01:09):
congrats on your promotion ahead of the writers. It's easy
to be productive when you're this organized. Tweeter and the
pulitzer goes to Rebecca Greenfield for her groundbreaking series on
a very important topic. I'd like to thank being organized.
(01:34):
It has changed everything. M tweeter. Of course, this is
a ridiculous idea, but that kind of wish fulfillment drives
(01:54):
a ten billion dollar self help industry. We're told that
one productivity hack will not just clean up your inbox
but change your life. But what tools actually work and
what hacks are worth it? That's what we're here to
find out. Welcome to Works for Me, the show where
(02:23):
we try to fix our workplace problems to find out
what strategies will work for you. I am Franchise Believe,
and I'm Rebecca green Gale. We all wish we could
be the best versions of ourselves, and lucky for us,
there are countless articles, apps, videos, and books that promised
to make us better coworkers, or spouses or human beings.
(02:44):
Here's the key to do this. Anyone that has a
goal and they're moving towards it, they're successful in this phase.
I wish someone would have grabbed me and said, I
showed you already how you do it. Number one, you
gotta believe in me, and number two, you gotta believe
in the possibility. And so I'm here to say I've
actually made a lot using these technique. I know how
they really work. But does any of this stuff actually work?
(03:07):
On this show, we're going to try out tools and
methods that promise results. Yeah, we're going to be human
guinea pigs. This is how we're going to do it.
Each week, one of us, either Becca or Me, will
present a real work life issue that she's having. Then
we'll try out a self help method to solve it
and report back. This week, it's Becca's turn. Becca, what
(03:30):
is the problem you were trying to solve? So? I
have trouble keeping track of all of the things that
I have to do. For a long time, I didn't
have a calendar app on my phone, I didn't have
a dedicated notebook for taking notes, and I like sporadically
made to do lists. And I have this idea that
(03:51):
if I were better about writing things down, then I
would be more on top of my stuff and my
work would be better. Okay, so you want to write
things down more? There are a million ways to do that, right.
People have apps, people have books, They've written about it.
What what is your chosen method of getting there? Bullet journaling.
(04:13):
Bullet journaling sounds violent, what is it? It's not violent.
A bullet journal is a journal, a calendar, and a
to do list all in one. It kind of reminds
me of one of those planners that you get at
the beginning of the school year in high school, but
you get to decide what goes in it for your
own purposes, so it's customized. Weble the pages have these
(04:36):
dots on them instead of lines, are a blank page.
That's why it's called a bullet journal, and the doctrid
makes it easy to create different types of calendars or spreads,
so it's like a planner that you could buy in
a store, only you kind of have to draw it yourself.
Correct So what made you want to be a bullet journal?
(04:57):
Or I first saw bullet journals all over Instagram. There
are tons of people who post pictures of these hand
drawn journal pages with the hashtag bou joe, which is
short for bullet journal Joe. I get it. And the
drawings are super high quality or nate. They look incredible
(05:18):
and like a lot of things on Instagram, it feels
totally inaccessible for normal people like me who have zero
artistic ability, but that is also the allure. If thousands
of people can do this, why can't I. It's aspirational,
so it's easier to understand if I show you so
I'm going to pull up a video from a popular
(05:41):
bullet journaler named Amanda rachel Lee. Everyone, it's Amanda, Welcome
back to my channel. October is coming. Every month, Amanda
puts up a YouTube video of her setting up her
bullet journal with that month's calendars, to do lists, trackers,
and all the spreads. And so here's one from October.
To the voice over. Now, okay, so for this month's theme,
(06:03):
we are doing something that you guys have been asking
me to do basically since I started bullet journaling. We
are doing magic and wizardry. I actually also so she
has very skillfully drawing witch and wizardry themed things on
her journal. There's a scroll, there's a cauldron, there's a hat.
(06:23):
It looks like something I could never ever do. This
does not This doesn't seem like something I would spend
time on, and it looks like it takes a lot
of skill. And I'm also struggling to see how this
makes anyone more efficient since she seems to be spending
a lot of time making drawings. Yeah, this is just
the aesthetic part of the bullet journal. On the other page,
(06:46):
I decided to do a quote, and of course I
had to do a quote that was said by the
legend herself, JK. Rowling. It says we all have magic
inside us, which I thought was obviously very fitting for
this theme. Inspirational quotes from Harry Potter are also a
part of this organizational system. It's not a requirement, but
that is definitely part of the vibe. It's like, you
(07:08):
have to have beautiful handwriting, be really good at trying,
and also be into inspirational quotes like you want your
life to be better. It's part of the culture like
geist of the bullet Journal. Yeah, it definitely. It seems
like a lot. Yeah, So the decorating part which we're
watching is just the beginning of setting up the journal,
and she goes on to hand drop calendars. She makes
(07:30):
something called a mood tracker to keep track of her
mood throughout the month, and it's all hand drawn and
decorated on theme to Harry Potter. And this happens every month,
right every single month. So it's a lot. I can't
imagine trying to get organized by committing to this level
(07:51):
of like artistry and perfection. I could never do that.
That's my worst nightmare. You see that and you think
I want to say anything, Oh my I'm I'm not
good at this kind of thing at all. But I
think that these people are probably so on top of
their okay, right, Like, don't you just want to be
the type of person that keeps a beautiful hand drawn
(08:14):
weekly calendar and does it every week and fills it
out every week, and then you've achieved all of your goals? Okay?
So what we do on this show is experiment on
(08:34):
ourselves to see if these methods really work. So you
want to be better at writing things down. You've decided
to try bullet journaling. So what is your experiment? What
are you gonna do for my experiment? I have decided
to use a bullet journal for two full months. I'm
going to see if using this journal makes me any
(08:55):
better at writing stories are doing my job. And at
the end of your experiment, how will you know if
bullet journaling has in fact made you more organized? I
think if I can stick to it and use it
every day, then it's proven to be worthwhile. I immediately
(09:20):
discovered that there is a high barrier to entry for
bullet journaling. The setup is a lot There are YouTube
videos explaining how to do it. But the possibilities for
what a bullet journal can be or look like our endless.
A given journal can have multiple to do lists, calendars,
and trackers, so it's hard to know where to start
or what to put in it. Also, there is a
(09:44):
lot of jargon and bullet journal specific rules. This is
what's called the future log. Is what we're getting into.
A future log, you just kind of like at a glance,
you know, you've got your dates down the left side
of it. You could also add a second column that's
kind of just like, okay, if you do a less
than symbol that is for things that you schedule. UM,
an open circle is kind of like the core idea.
(10:06):
But I do a swear to do when you finish
the thing, you put an X through the dot. It's
complicated to explain. It's not that complicated to do. And
I think that's after I did it and I was
trying to explain it to other people, they just their
eyes sort of glaze over, and but as soon as
you've got it, you're just like, oh, this is not
complicated at all. That's Rachel will Kerson Miller. She's one
(10:27):
of the celebrities of the bullet journal world. She wrote
a book called dot Journaling, a practical Guide. I asked
her to help me set mine up, which I know
is kind of cheating, but it was super helpful. All Right,
we got a term November. Wait, my, I miss, I
think I forgot about that. I forgared to lie. Yeah.
(10:48):
She decoded the language and helped me decide what spreads
I might find useful. And after an hour and a
half with her, I had a basic layout. I had
a monthly calendar, an activity tracker for documenting how often
I do certain habits like cleaning my apartment and making dinner.
And then she showed me how to make daily to
do lists and daily journal entries. The journal it's the
(11:11):
brand called Lois term cost me twenty dollars, and then
I spent another fifteen dollars on pens. I bought the
Pilot Precise V five retractable pens in black, and then
another pack of Pilot pens in an assortment of colors. Okay,
so you spent a lot of time on the set up.
How did it go from there? At first I was
(11:31):
very into it. About a weekend I got into the
studio to talk about it. That's how excited I was,
I've used up eighteen pages in one week, which I
don't know what the measurement is, but that seems like
a lot. And I just kind of like look forward
to opening it in the morning and making my to
(11:51):
do list, um, and then I really look forward to
at night when you needed to write your little night
notes or I call them nine notes. It's like your journal.
You look forward to writing and you wake up thinking
about writing in your journal. That's yeah, that sounds into it. Yeah,
I was. I think, you know, when you started a
new project, you get really into it, like predictably I do.
(12:13):
I don't know about you, you know. I was like,
I'm going to commit, and I did, and one weekend
I was all about it, high end life. But pretty
soon I developed a love hate relationship with it. A
few weeks in, I still liked it, but it quickly
started to feel more like a rewarding chore, like going
to the gym. I know it'll feel good once I
do it, but most of the time I'd rather just
(12:34):
sit on the couch. And then it only devolved from there.
In a matter of weeks, I started having trouble fitting
it into my life. Here's me less than a month
into it. I have a confession to make. I haven't
done the journal part of the bullet journal. And let's see.
It's opening it up. Let's see. Okay, I did it
(12:59):
one week ago. I wrote some notes so kind of
a failure, also called behind on my activity tracker, and
was unable to remember all the things I did. But
it's really hard because I come home at night and
it's so late, I just don't do it. But tonight
(13:21):
I'm home at like a reasonable hour, it's eight, so
I'm gonna do the journal part. So I started developing
these two conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I get
really mad at myself for not using it, But then
I started getting mad at the journal for when I
(13:42):
did end up using it, because I felt like it
was getting in the way of my life. Okay, so
there's been a major bullet journal development. Um, I'm at
dinner at an Italian restaurant. It's my birthday, and I
thought of something I had to write now my bullet
journal to put it on my to do list, but
(14:03):
just talk to the lawyers at work about something important,
and I put it in my bullet journal, and then
I got olive oil all over, But like tassels, it's
just a mess anyway, just like a just a bad
thing that happened. It's like I don't use my bullet
(14:25):
journal when it's convenient, Like I should be doing this
like every night and like checking in, but like I'm
not going to check in tonight. It's Friday night, so
instead I got breaking olive oil all over anyway, Happy
birthday to me. Wow, that was a low point. That's
(14:49):
a little it was a little self pitying. But okay,
you went from being excited to get up in the
morning so that you could write in your bullet journal
to it sounds like being angry at your bullet journal
for existing and demanding that you write in it at
dinner when you it's your birthday and you'd rather just
be having fun. Yeah. I really went downhill so quickly. Yeah,
(15:13):
at this point, I'm a little demoralized, and I'm wondering
why am I doing all of this? Doesn't take any time.
To have a good idea, or to be creative or
innovative or strategic does don't take time? What those do
requires space. That is David Allen. He's arguably the creator
of the entire life hack industry. He wrote a book
(15:34):
called Getting Things Done in two thousand one and it
sold over a million copies since I called him up
at his home in Amsterdam to ask about the benefits
of writing things down in my bullet journal. If your
head is still wrapped around food you should have bought
this morning or the last meeting you were in, and
you didn't write down all the stuff that you promised
somebody that you would do, or if you've got stuff
(15:56):
that you've committed to do, then you haven't tracked that
and you're still trying to use your head is your office.
Your head is an absolutely crappy office, and most people
are trying to use their head as their office, and
it didn't evolve or is not designed to remember, remind, prioritize,
or any of that. So in David Allen's theory, the
bullet journal would be the thing that is supposed to
hold all of the things that are cluttering up your
(16:17):
head right now and keeping you from doing your best
work exactly, And in some ways my bullet journal was
doing that. Like I was really good at the daily
to do lists. We were working on this big project
at the time, the paycheck and any series podcast about
the gender pay gap that I hosted and you also
worked on plug Go Listen, and keeping the lists helped
me stay on top of what could have been a
(16:38):
very stressful and overwhelming project. In other ways, it wasn't
working for me because I wasn't using it. And the
thing that was particularly difficult for me to get into
was the tracker. Like I said, the bullet Journal can
do a million things, but I'm going to talk about
the tracker for a little while because I really struggle
(17:00):
with it. More on my struggles after the break, I
(17:29):
had made a very basic habit tracker where every day
I was supposed to track if I made dinner, or
clean my apartment or did a series of other good habits,
and I wasn't using it. I was really beating myself
up about not using this tracker. But as Rachel, my
personal bullet journal sherpa told me, the whole point of
the bullet Journal is that it's customizable and that you
(17:51):
can and should create something that works for you. So
it's kind of like you need to customize it for
yourself and just sort of be realistic about your own
limitations and figuring out if something's not working for you,
like really narrowing in on like what the problem is,
you can fix it without scrapping the whole thing. I
think to like the whole point is that like you
(18:12):
kind of set it up one page at a time,
and like you can embrace the flexibility where it's like
if a weekly spread isn't working for you, you just
start something new the next page and you move on.
So Rachel said, I really had to figure out what
my specific problem was and then I could change it.
So I decided that my tracker was the problem because
(18:34):
I was putting in all this work to collect this
data of how many times I did X, Y and
Z things, and then I wasn't really doing anything with it.
So I decided that I needed a new tracker that
collected more interesting data. Here's me explaining the tracker I
chose to my boyfriend Danny. So basically, I'm going to
(18:54):
track how much I drink every day and ounces but
ounces are cups? How many cups I drink every day?
And then how much I spend on it? Why did
you choose to track your alcohol intake? Um? I just
felt like the tracker as it was was not specific enough.
(19:16):
Like I tracked my activities back in April, way back when,
and I was just like, well, I don't really care
how often I drink. I'm moren't care about how much
I drink and how much I spend on it. Are
you trying to reduce the amount of alcohol you consume?
Why are you asking me so skeptically? This just seems
(19:38):
like a tracker for people who want to reduce or
want to drink less. No, I just want to know.
I feel like you really just did this so you
could draw that picture of a cocktail. I didn't even
know I was going to do that until the end. Rude,
Well what would you track? I would track my sleep? Yeah,
(20:05):
I don't care about that. You should track the amount
of time as you nag me. Oh man. I got
a lot of pushback on the drink tracker from Danny.
Yeah you did. He I mean, I can sort of
get what he's saying, which is like, why even pay
attention to a habit if you're not if there's nothing
about the habit that you want to change. But I
(20:27):
could also see you said you were going to track
how much money you were spending, right, So, like, if
you can see how much money you're spending, you might
shock yourself into spending less, right, Like the expectation is
that the number is going to be Like, oh, I
didn't realize. I thought the original tracker was dumb and
I was gonna do Yeah, So I wanted better data,
better data, And despite the guff I got, I ended
(20:50):
up liking that a lot better than my other tracker.
I did it every day, and I actually was into
the data I was collecting, which turned out to be
incredibly revealing. At the end of the month, I tallied
up how much I drank and how much I had spent,
and it added up to a d do Here's me
talking to our producer tofor about it. Do you think
you're going to do anything with that information? What am
(21:13):
I going to do with that information? I think it
kind of makes me feel okay about how much I'm
spending on this recreational habit and how much I'm doing
it to say to myself, like I wasn't really checking myself.
I wasn't like you can only spend ten dollars a day,
or like you can only drink this much a week,
But left to my own devices, that I'm like spending
(21:36):
a reasonable amount of money on drinking. You began this
thing as a way to clear space in your mind
so that you can focus on other things. And I'm wondering,
you know, does having that tracker, having this information help
accomplish that goal of freeing your mind up for other things.
Or maybe it's giving you a piece of mind so
(21:57):
you're not spending as much time thinking about it. Yeah,
I think so, as I have anxiety around money, like
I have anxiety around spending money and when even when
I buy a round of drinks and I do it
willingly and happily because it's like nice to buy people things,
and um, in the back of my mind, I'm like,
like a fifty dollar bill for drinks stresses me out.
(22:19):
But now, seeing like how it balances out in a month,
I think I can feel a little better. So that,
I think that is the beauty of the bullet journal.
The things cluttering up my mind aren't just tasks, but
(22:40):
anxieties and guilt about my work, and the trackers and
calendars and journals and to do lists help me manage
those feelings. Oh wow, that's pretty deep all that. I'm
a drink tracker. M Okay, So it sounds like you
(23:14):
had a lot of ups and downs, but at the
end you kind of came around to feeling like maybe
this was even more useful than you thought it was
going to be. But at the beginning you did say
that you would think it was a success if you
wrote in your bullet journal every day for two months.
So did you do that? Yes, if that is the
measurement of success, then yes I did that. I used
the to do list every day. But did I become
(23:38):
the aspirational bullet journal user? No, let me show you
my journal. This is a real reveal. Yeah, so wow,
this is how it started. This was the first bread
I made with Rachel. That's the calendar, that's the habit tracker,
you know, mm hmmm, some of are things to do list.
(24:01):
It looks okay, yeah, we're looking at something that's very
well used. It definitely shows that you used it a lot.
I'm gonna say your handwriting is not like that great.
So yeah, here's a March recap. I tried to channel
my inner creative person. This is the artistic part. You've
(24:22):
drawn three stars, like not even fancy stars, they're just
they're just a little five pointed stars that you colored in.
And you've kind of squiggly underlined some of the cursive
writing that you did. But like, this doesn't look like
the professional calligraphy that you see in the Instagram pictures.
Let me show you that the infamous drink tracker. Yeah,
(24:43):
that looks cool. Kind of this looks neat and tidy.
Look like this looks like a journal that you used
a lot, that you've got a lot of use out of.
It's I mean, I don't want to insult you, but
it's not that pretty. To be fair, I was really
bad at making it montage. The thing is, it really
(25:05):
doesn't matter if it's not perfect, because you're the one
who wants to look at it every day. I'm just
like so nervous to mess up that it comes out
looking kind of dumb. Oh my god, this is ugly.
I'm really messing up basically, like I'm getting black pen
in places it shouldn't be. What the hell did that
happen that I don't love this pen? Oh god, it's ugly.
(25:40):
Oh be gay. You're you found a new thing to
be hard on yourself about. You know what? That is? Correct?
You see, this is exactly my problem with these kinds
of like d I y crafty solutions to things. It's
like the bar is pretty high, and you could be
like perfectly organized and actually using your bullet journal really well.
(26:02):
But if you're not coloring perfectly within the margins or
drawing beautiful pictures of flowers, you end up feeling bad
about yourself. Yeah, I didn't feel that bad about it,
which is maybe even part of the problem, like I
just didn't really care enough. But in the moment, I
have a lot of banks you can hear, so yeah,
(26:24):
I don't think I will ever be like Rachel or
the bullet journal experts on Instagram, but I do keep
to do list now, and I don't think the value
of writing things down can be understated. It's not just
about getting tasks out of your head so you can
concentrate on other things. Although that's nice for me, it's
about managing stress and anxiety, and maybe for others it
(26:45):
can be too. Next time on works for Me, it's
Francesco's turn to fix the part of her life that
isn't working for her. She's going to fix her mornings
(27:05):
for good. No, we really need to get up with
Christeners twist push me Lord, thanks for listening to works
for me. If you like the show, please go to
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts and rate,
review or subscribe to the show, and most importantly, tell
(27:28):
your friends to listen. And we want to give us
special thanks to Liz Smith toofor for has and Sea
god Kari, who voiced the fantasy sequence at the top
of the show. Are there any problems in your work
life that you're dying to fix? We would love to
hear about them. Call us and leave us a voicemail
at two one to six one seven zero and we
(27:49):
might use it on the air, or you can tweet
at us I'm at Francesco today and I'm at RZ Greenfield.
This show was hosted and reported by m ME Rebecca
green Field and ME Francesca Levi. The show was produced
by Toper forehead Jordan's speared in Our Illustrations, and Francesca
Leivie is Bloomberg's head of Potas. See you next time,
(28:11):
Y
Hey, game Plan listeners, it's me Rebecca Greenfield and me
Francesco Leavie. We're back. We wanted to tell you about
our new show Works for Me. If you loved Game Plan,
you'll love this show. This is game Plan on steroids.
Instead of talking about work culture, we live it. We're
(00:23):
human guinea pigs trying out productivity experiments on ourselves. And
we're going to play the first episode right here, right now.
But if you want to get the full experience, subscribe
to Works for Me on Apple Podcasts or wherever you
listen to podcasts. Yeah, that way you won't miss a
single episode. We hope you'll love it. Bye. I'm Rebecca
(00:47):
Greenfield and this is how good I would be at
my job if I had my life in order. Becca,
this article you wrote is the best ever. Wow. Thank you.
It was all thanks to my to do list. Hey Becca,
(01:09):
congrats on your promotion ahead of the writers. It's easy
to be productive when you're this organized. Tweeter and the
pulitzer goes to Rebecca Greenfield for her groundbreaking series on
a very important topic. I'd like to thank being organized.
(01:34):
It has changed everything. M tweeter. Of course, this is
a ridiculous idea, but that kind of wish fulfillment drives
(01:54):
a ten billion dollar self help industry. We're told that
one productivity hack will not just clean up your inbox
but change your life. But what tools actually work and
what hacks are worth it? That's what we're here to
find out. Welcome to Works for Me, the show where
(02:23):
we try to fix our workplace problems to find out
what strategies will work for you. I am Franchise Believe,
and I'm Rebecca green Gale. We all wish we could
be the best versions of ourselves, and lucky for us,
there are countless articles, apps, videos, and books that promised
to make us better coworkers, or spouses or human beings.
(02:44):
Here's the key to do this. Anyone that has a
goal and they're moving towards it, they're successful in this phase.
I wish someone would have grabbed me and said, I
showed you already how you do it. Number one, you
gotta believe in me, and number two, you gotta believe
in the possibility. And so I'm here to say I've
actually made a lot using these technique. I know how
they really work. But does any of this stuff actually work?
(03:07):
On this show, we're going to try out tools and
methods that promise results. Yeah, we're going to be human
guinea pigs. This is how we're going to do it.
Each week, one of us, either Becca or Me, will
present a real work life issue that she's having. Then
we'll try out a self help method to solve it
and report back. This week, it's Becca's turn. Becca, what
(03:30):
is the problem you were trying to solve? So? I
have trouble keeping track of all of the things that
I have to do. For a long time, I didn't
have a calendar app on my phone, I didn't have
a dedicated notebook for taking notes, and I like sporadically
made to do lists. And I have this idea that
(03:51):
if I were better about writing things down, then I
would be more on top of my stuff and my
work would be better. Okay, so you want to write
things down more? There are a million ways to do that, right.
People have apps, people have books, They've written about it.
What what is your chosen method of getting there? Bullet journaling.
(04:13):
Bullet journaling sounds violent, what is it? It's not violent.
A bullet journal is a journal, a calendar, and a
to do list all in one. It kind of reminds
me of one of those planners that you get at
the beginning of the school year in high school, but
you get to decide what goes in it for your
own purposes, so it's customized. Weble the pages have these
(04:36):
dots on them instead of lines, are a blank page.
That's why it's called a bullet journal, and the doctrid
makes it easy to create different types of calendars or spreads,
so it's like a planner that you could buy in
a store, only you kind of have to draw it yourself.
Correct So what made you want to be a bullet journal?
(04:57):
Or I first saw bullet journals all over Instagram. There
are tons of people who post pictures of these hand
drawn journal pages with the hashtag bou joe, which is
short for bullet journal Joe. I get it. And the
drawings are super high quality or nate. They look incredible
(05:18):
and like a lot of things on Instagram, it feels
totally inaccessible for normal people like me who have zero
artistic ability, but that is also the allure. If thousands
of people can do this, why can't I. It's aspirational,
so it's easier to understand if I show you so
I'm going to pull up a video from a popular
(05:41):
bullet journaler named Amanda rachel Lee. Everyone, it's Amanda, Welcome
back to my channel. October is coming. Every month, Amanda
puts up a YouTube video of her setting up her
bullet journal with that month's calendars, to do lists, trackers,
and all the spreads. And so here's one from October.
To the voice over. Now, okay, so for this month's theme,
(06:03):
we are doing something that you guys have been asking
me to do basically since I started bullet journaling. We
are doing magic and wizardry. I actually also so she
has very skillfully drawing witch and wizardry themed things on
her journal. There's a scroll, there's a cauldron, there's a hat.
(06:23):
It looks like something I could never ever do. This
does not This doesn't seem like something I would spend
time on, and it looks like it takes a lot
of skill. And I'm also struggling to see how this
makes anyone more efficient since she seems to be spending
a lot of time making drawings. Yeah, this is just
the aesthetic part of the bullet journal. On the other page,
(06:46):
I decided to do a quote, and of course I
had to do a quote that was said by the
legend herself, JK. Rowling. It says we all have magic
inside us, which I thought was obviously very fitting for
this theme. Inspirational quotes from Harry Potter are also a
part of this organizational system. It's not a requirement, but
that is definitely part of the vibe. It's like, you
(07:08):
have to have beautiful handwriting, be really good at trying,
and also be into inspirational quotes like you want your
life to be better. It's part of the culture like
geist of the bullet Journal. Yeah, it definitely. It seems
like a lot. Yeah, So the decorating part which we're
watching is just the beginning of setting up the journal,
and she goes on to hand drop calendars. She makes
(07:30):
something called a mood tracker to keep track of her
mood throughout the month, and it's all hand drawn and
decorated on theme to Harry Potter. And this happens every month,
right every single month. So it's a lot. I can't
imagine trying to get organized by committing to this level
(07:51):
of like artistry and perfection. I could never do that.
That's my worst nightmare. You see that and you think
I want to say anything, Oh my I'm I'm not
good at this kind of thing at all. But I
think that these people are probably so on top of
their okay, right, Like, don't you just want to be
the type of person that keeps a beautiful hand drawn
(08:14):
weekly calendar and does it every week and fills it
out every week, and then you've achieved all of your goals? Okay?
So what we do on this show is experiment on
(08:34):
ourselves to see if these methods really work. So you
want to be better at writing things down. You've decided
to try bullet journaling. So what is your experiment? What
are you gonna do for my experiment? I have decided
to use a bullet journal for two full months. I'm
going to see if using this journal makes me any
(08:55):
better at writing stories are doing my job. And at
the end of your experiment, how will you know if
bullet journaling has in fact made you more organized? I
think if I can stick to it and use it
every day, then it's proven to be worthwhile. I immediately
(09:20):
discovered that there is a high barrier to entry for
bullet journaling. The setup is a lot There are YouTube
videos explaining how to do it. But the possibilities for
what a bullet journal can be or look like our endless.
A given journal can have multiple to do lists, calendars,
and trackers, so it's hard to know where to start
or what to put in it. Also, there is a
(09:44):
lot of jargon and bullet journal specific rules. This is
what's called the future log. Is what we're getting into.
A future log, you just kind of like at a glance,
you know, you've got your dates down the left side
of it. You could also add a second column that's
kind of just like, okay, if you do a less
than symbol that is for things that you schedule. UM,
an open circle is kind of like the core idea.
(10:06):
But I do a swear to do when you finish
the thing, you put an X through the dot. It's
complicated to explain. It's not that complicated to do. And
I think that's after I did it and I was
trying to explain it to other people, they just their
eyes sort of glaze over, and but as soon as
you've got it, you're just like, oh, this is not
complicated at all. That's Rachel will Kerson Miller. She's one
(10:27):
of the celebrities of the bullet journal world. She wrote
a book called dot Journaling, a practical Guide. I asked
her to help me set mine up, which I know
is kind of cheating, but it was super helpful. All Right,
we got a term November. Wait, my, I miss, I
think I forgot about that. I forgared to lie. Yeah.
(10:48):
She decoded the language and helped me decide what spreads
I might find useful. And after an hour and a
half with her, I had a basic layout. I had
a monthly calendar, an activity tracker for documenting how often
I do certain habits like cleaning my apartment and making dinner.
And then she showed me how to make daily to
do lists and daily journal entries. The journal it's the
(11:11):
brand called Lois term cost me twenty dollars, and then
I spent another fifteen dollars on pens. I bought the
Pilot Precise V five retractable pens in black, and then
another pack of Pilot pens in an assortment of colors. Okay,
so you spent a lot of time on the set up.
How did it go from there? At first I was
(11:31):
very into it. About a weekend I got into the
studio to talk about it. That's how excited I was,
I've used up eighteen pages in one week, which I
don't know what the measurement is, but that seems like
a lot. And I just kind of like look forward
to opening it in the morning and making my to
(11:51):
do list, um, and then I really look forward to
at night when you needed to write your little night
notes or I call them nine notes. It's like your journal.
You look forward to writing and you wake up thinking
about writing in your journal. That's yeah, that sounds into it. Yeah,
I was. I think, you know, when you started a
new project, you get really into it, like predictably I do.
(12:13):
I don't know about you, you know. I was like,
I'm going to commit, and I did, and one weekend
I was all about it, high end life. But pretty
soon I developed a love hate relationship with it. A
few weeks in, I still liked it, but it quickly
started to feel more like a rewarding chore, like going
to the gym. I know it'll feel good once I
do it, but most of the time I'd rather just
(12:34):
sit on the couch. And then it only devolved from there.
In a matter of weeks, I started having trouble fitting
it into my life. Here's me less than a month
into it. I have a confession to make. I haven't
done the journal part of the bullet journal. And let's see.
It's opening it up. Let's see. Okay, I did it
(12:59):
one week ago. I wrote some notes so kind of
a failure, also called behind on my activity tracker, and
was unable to remember all the things I did. But
it's really hard because I come home at night and
it's so late, I just don't do it. But tonight
(13:21):
I'm home at like a reasonable hour, it's eight, so
I'm gonna do the journal part. So I started developing
these two conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I get
really mad at myself for not using it, But then
I started getting mad at the journal for when I
(13:42):
did end up using it, because I felt like it
was getting in the way of my life. Okay, so
there's been a major bullet journal development. Um, I'm at
dinner at an Italian restaurant. It's my birthday, and I
thought of something I had to write now my bullet
journal to put it on my to do list, but
(14:03):
just talk to the lawyers at work about something important,
and I put it in my bullet journal, and then
I got olive oil all over, But like tassels, it's
just a mess anyway, just like a just a bad
thing that happened. It's like I don't use my bullet
(14:25):
journal when it's convenient, Like I should be doing this
like every night and like checking in, but like I'm
not going to check in tonight. It's Friday night, so
instead I got breaking olive oil all over anyway, Happy
birthday to me. Wow, that was a low point. That's
(14:49):
a little it was a little self pitying. But okay,
you went from being excited to get up in the
morning so that you could write in your bullet journal
to it sounds like being angry at your bullet journal
for existing and demanding that you write in it at
dinner when you it's your birthday and you'd rather just
be having fun. Yeah. I really went downhill so quickly. Yeah,
(15:13):
at this point, I'm a little demoralized, and I'm wondering
why am I doing all of this? Doesn't take any time.
To have a good idea, or to be creative or
innovative or strategic does don't take time? What those do
requires space. That is David Allen. He's arguably the creator
of the entire life hack industry. He wrote a book
(15:34):
called Getting Things Done in two thousand one and it
sold over a million copies since I called him up
at his home in Amsterdam to ask about the benefits
of writing things down in my bullet journal. If your
head is still wrapped around food you should have bought
this morning or the last meeting you were in, and
you didn't write down all the stuff that you promised
somebody that you would do, or if you've got stuff
(15:56):
that you've committed to do, then you haven't tracked that
and you're still trying to use your head is your office.
Your head is an absolutely crappy office, and most people
are trying to use their head as their office, and
it didn't evolve or is not designed to remember, remind, prioritize,
or any of that. So in David Allen's theory, the
bullet journal would be the thing that is supposed to
hold all of the things that are cluttering up your
(16:17):
head right now and keeping you from doing your best
work exactly, And in some ways my bullet journal was
doing that. Like I was really good at the daily
to do lists. We were working on this big project
at the time, the paycheck and any series podcast about
the gender pay gap that I hosted and you also
worked on plug Go Listen, and keeping the lists helped
me stay on top of what could have been a
(16:38):
very stressful and overwhelming project. In other ways, it wasn't
working for me because I wasn't using it. And the
thing that was particularly difficult for me to get into
was the tracker. Like I said, the bullet Journal can
do a million things, but I'm going to talk about
the tracker for a little while because I really struggle
(17:00):
with it. More on my struggles after the break, I
(17:29):
had made a very basic habit tracker where every day
I was supposed to track if I made dinner, or
clean my apartment or did a series of other good habits,
and I wasn't using it. I was really beating myself
up about not using this tracker. But as Rachel, my
personal bullet journal sherpa told me, the whole point of
the bullet Journal is that it's customizable and that you
(17:51):
can and should create something that works for you. So
it's kind of like you need to customize it for
yourself and just sort of be realistic about your own
limitations and figuring out if something's not working for you,
like really narrowing in on like what the problem is,
you can fix it without scrapping the whole thing. I
think to like the whole point is that like you
(18:12):
kind of set it up one page at a time,
and like you can embrace the flexibility where it's like
if a weekly spread isn't working for you, you just
start something new the next page and you move on.
So Rachel said, I really had to figure out what
my specific problem was and then I could change it.
So I decided that my tracker was the problem because
(18:34):
I was putting in all this work to collect this
data of how many times I did X, Y and
Z things, and then I wasn't really doing anything with it.
So I decided that I needed a new tracker that
collected more interesting data. Here's me explaining the tracker I
chose to my boyfriend Danny. So basically, I'm going to
(18:54):
track how much I drink every day and ounces but
ounces are cups? How many cups I drink every day?
And then how much I spend on it? Why did
you choose to track your alcohol intake? Um? I just
felt like the tracker as it was was not specific enough.
(19:16):
Like I tracked my activities back in April, way back when,
and I was just like, well, I don't really care
how often I drink. I'm moren't care about how much
I drink and how much I spend on it. Are
you trying to reduce the amount of alcohol you consume?
Why are you asking me so skeptically? This just seems
(19:38):
like a tracker for people who want to reduce or
want to drink less. No, I just want to know.
I feel like you really just did this so you
could draw that picture of a cocktail. I didn't even
know I was going to do that until the end. Rude,
Well what would you track? I would track my sleep? Yeah,
(20:05):
I don't care about that. You should track the amount
of time as you nag me. Oh man. I got
a lot of pushback on the drink tracker from Danny.
Yeah you did. He I mean, I can sort of
get what he's saying, which is like, why even pay
attention to a habit if you're not if there's nothing
about the habit that you want to change. But I
(20:27):
could also see you said you were going to track
how much money you were spending, right, So, like, if
you can see how much money you're spending, you might
shock yourself into spending less, right, Like the expectation is
that the number is going to be Like, oh, I
didn't realize. I thought the original tracker was dumb and
I was gonna do Yeah, So I wanted better data,
better data, And despite the guff I got, I ended
(20:50):
up liking that a lot better than my other tracker.
I did it every day, and I actually was into
the data I was collecting, which turned out to be
incredibly revealing. At the end of the month, I tallied
up how much I drank and how much I had spent,
and it added up to a d do Here's me
talking to our producer tofor about it. Do you think
you're going to do anything with that information? What am
(21:13):
I going to do with that information? I think it
kind of makes me feel okay about how much I'm
spending on this recreational habit and how much I'm doing
it to say to myself, like I wasn't really checking myself.
I wasn't like you can only spend ten dollars a day,
or like you can only drink this much a week,
But left to my own devices, that I'm like spending
(21:36):
a reasonable amount of money on drinking. You began this
thing as a way to clear space in your mind
so that you can focus on other things. And I'm wondering,
you know, does having that tracker, having this information help
accomplish that goal of freeing your mind up for other things.
Or maybe it's giving you a piece of mind so
(21:57):
you're not spending as much time thinking about it. Yeah,
I think so, as I have anxiety around money, like
I have anxiety around spending money and when even when
I buy a round of drinks and I do it
willingly and happily because it's like nice to buy people things,
and um, in the back of my mind, I'm like,
like a fifty dollar bill for drinks stresses me out.
(22:19):
But now, seeing like how it balances out in a month,
I think I can feel a little better. So that,
I think that is the beauty of the bullet journal.
The things cluttering up my mind aren't just tasks, but
(22:40):
anxieties and guilt about my work, and the trackers and
calendars and journals and to do lists help me manage
those feelings. Oh wow, that's pretty deep all that. I'm
a drink tracker. M Okay, So it sounds like you
(23:14):
had a lot of ups and downs, but at the
end you kind of came around to feeling like maybe
this was even more useful than you thought it was
going to be. But at the beginning you did say
that you would think it was a success if you
wrote in your bullet journal every day for two months.
So did you do that? Yes, if that is the
measurement of success, then yes I did that. I used
the to do list every day. But did I become
(23:38):
the aspirational bullet journal user? No, let me show you
my journal. This is a real reveal. Yeah, so wow,
this is how it started. This was the first bread
I made with Rachel. That's the calendar, that's the habit tracker,
you know, mm hmmm, some of are things to do list.
(24:01):
It looks okay, yeah, we're looking at something that's very
well used. It definitely shows that you used it a lot.
I'm gonna say your handwriting is not like that great.
So yeah, here's a March recap. I tried to channel
my inner creative person. This is the artistic part. You've
(24:22):
drawn three stars, like not even fancy stars, they're just
they're just a little five pointed stars that you colored in.
And you've kind of squiggly underlined some of the cursive
writing that you did. But like, this doesn't look like
the professional calligraphy that you see in the Instagram pictures.
Let me show you that the infamous drink tracker. Yeah,
(24:43):
that looks cool. Kind of this looks neat and tidy.
Look like this looks like a journal that you used
a lot, that you've got a lot of use out of.
It's I mean, I don't want to insult you, but
it's not that pretty. To be fair, I was really
bad at making it montage. The thing is, it really
(25:05):
doesn't matter if it's not perfect, because you're the one
who wants to look at it every day. I'm just
like so nervous to mess up that it comes out
looking kind of dumb. Oh my god, this is ugly.
I'm really messing up basically, like I'm getting black pen
in places it shouldn't be. What the hell did that
happen that I don't love this pen? Oh god, it's ugly.
(25:40):
Oh be gay. You're you found a new thing to
be hard on yourself about. You know what? That is? Correct?
You see, this is exactly my problem with these kinds
of like d I y crafty solutions to things. It's
like the bar is pretty high, and you could be
like perfectly organized and actually using your bullet journal really well.
(26:02):
But if you're not coloring perfectly within the margins or
drawing beautiful pictures of flowers, you end up feeling bad
about yourself. Yeah, I didn't feel that bad about it,
which is maybe even part of the problem, like I
just didn't really care enough. But in the moment, I
have a lot of banks you can hear, so yeah,
(26:24):
I don't think I will ever be like Rachel or
the bullet journal experts on Instagram, but I do keep
to do list now, and I don't think the value
of writing things down can be understated. It's not just
about getting tasks out of your head so you can
concentrate on other things. Although that's nice for me, it's
about managing stress and anxiety, and maybe for others it
(26:45):
can be too. Next time on works for Me, it's
Francesco's turn to fix the part of her life that
isn't working for her. She's going to fix her mornings
(27:05):
for good. No, we really need to get up with
Christeners twist push me Lord, thanks for listening to works
for me. If you like the show, please go to
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts and rate,
review or subscribe to the show, and most importantly, tell
(27:28):
your friends to listen. And we want to give us
special thanks to Liz Smith toofor for has and Sea
god Kari, who voiced the fantasy sequence at the top
of the show. Are there any problems in your work
life that you're dying to fix? We would love to
hear about them. Call us and leave us a voicemail
at two one to six one seven zero and we
(27:49):
might use it on the air, or you can tweet
at us I'm at Francesco today and I'm at RZ Greenfield.
This show was hosted and reported by m ME Rebecca
green Field and ME Francesca Levi. The show was produced
by Toper forehead Jordan's speared in Our Illustrations, and Francesca
Leivie is Bloomberg's head of Potas. See you next time,
(28:11):
Y
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