January 11, 2019 • 27 mins
The bullet journal—the all-in-one calendar, to-do list, and diary—has become the DIY life organizer de rigueur. But trying to get into the bullet journal fad can be intimidating. This week, Rebecca Greenfield spends more than two months trying it out. It’s the first episode of our new podcast, Works for Me, where Rebecca and fellow host Francesca Levy try to figure out what productivity hacks will help them become their most work efficient selves.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Rebecca 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,
(00:24):
congrats on your promotion ahead of the writers. It's easy
to be productive when you're this organized. And the Pulitzer
goes to Rebecca Greenfield for her groundbreaking series on a
very important topic. I'd like to thank being organized. It
(00:49):
has changed everything Twitter. Of course, this is a ridiculous idea,
but that kind of wish fulfillment drives a ten billion
(01:11):
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
(01:37):
for Me, the show where we try to fix our
workplace problems to find out what strategies will work for you.
I am Franchise Believing and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. 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
(01:58):
or human beings. 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 a twenty five 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 techniques. I know how they really were, but
(02:19):
does any of this stuff actually work? 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
(02:40):
help method to solve it and report back. This week,
it's Becca's turn. Becca, what 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 album my phone,
I didn't have a dedicated notebook for taking notes, and
(03:02):
I like sporadically made to do lists, and I have
this idea that 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
(03:25):
of getting there? Bullet journaling? 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
(03:46):
in it for your own purposes, so it's customized. Weble
the pages have these dots on them instead of lines,
are a blank page. That's why it's called a bullet journal.
And the doctord 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
(04:11):
want to be a bullet journal er? 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
(04:31):
or nate. They look incredible 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
(04:51):
if I show you. So, I'm going to pull up
a video from a popular 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
(05:14):
one from October. Now, okay, so for this month's theme,
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
(05:34):
her journal. There's a scroll there's a cauldron, there's a hat.
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
(05:56):
the aesthetic part of the bullet Journal. On the other page,
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.
The inspirational quotes from Harry Potter are also a part
(06:17):
of this organizational system. It's not a requirement, but that
is definitely part of the vibe. It's like you have
to have beautiful handwriting, be really good at drying, 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
(06:38):
is just the beginning of setting up the journal and
she goes on to hand draw calendars. She makes 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
(07:02):
trying to get organized by committing to this level 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,
(07:24):
don't you just want to be the type of person
that keeps a beautiful hand drawn 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
(07:47):
we do on this show is experiment on 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
(08:07):
see if using this journal makes me any 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 discovered that
(08:36):
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 lot of
(09:00):
jargon and bullet journal specific rules. This is what's called
like 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.
(09:21):
But I do a squear 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
(09:42):
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've got a term November. Wait, I miss, I think
I forgot about that. Yeah. She decoded the language and
(10:05):
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 brand called Loister m
(10:27):
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 he spent
a lot of time on the set up. How did
it go from there? At first, I was very into it.
About a weekend I got into the studio to talk
(10:50):
about it. That's how excited I was. I have 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 do list, um,
and then I really look forward to at night we
(11:10):
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. I
don't know about you, you know. I was like, I'm
(11:30):
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 sit on
the couch. And then it only devolved from there. In
(11:53):
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 one
(12:15):
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 I'm home in
(12:36):
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 did end up using
(12:58):
it because I felt like 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 just talk to the lawyers
(13:20):
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 journal when it's convenient, like I
(13:44):
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 a little it was a little self pitying. But okay,
(14:08):
you went from being excited to get up in the
morning so that you could write in your bullet journal
to like it sounds like being angry at your bullet
journal for existing and demanding that you write in it.
At dinner when you're it's your birthday and you'd rather
just be having fun. Yeah, I really went downhill so quickly. Yeah,
(14:28):
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
(14:49):
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
(15:11):
that you've committed to do, then you haven't tracked that
and you're still trying to use your head as 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
(15:32):
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 help
me stay on top of what could have been a
(15:53):
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 struggled
(16:15):
with it. More on my struggles after the break. I
(16:44):
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
(17:06):
you 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
(17:28):
kind of set it up one page at a time,
and like you can embrace that 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
(17:49):
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
(18:09):
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,
(18:32):
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
(18:54):
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,
(19:21):
I don't care about that. You should track the amount
of times 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 could
(19:42):
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 a yeah yeah. So I wanted better data,
better data, And despite the guff I got, I ended
(20:05):
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 five dollars. Here's
me talking to our producer tofor about it. Do you
think you're going to do anything with that information? What
(20:28):
am 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
(20:50):
I'm like spending a reasonable amount of money on drinking.
You began this thing as a way to like 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
(21:11):
a piece of mind so you're not spending as much
time thinking about it. Yeah, I think so, because 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 nice
to buy people things, and um, in the back of
my mind, I'm like, like a fifty dollar bill for
(21:32):
drinks stresses me out. 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
(21:53):
mind aren't just tasks, but 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 checker. Okay, So it
(22:29):
sounds like you 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
(22:52):
I become 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, m hmm, some other things
(23:15):
to do lists that 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
(23:36):
the artistic part. You've 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
(23:56):
infamous drink tracker. Yeah, 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.
(24:20):
The thing is, it really 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. The hell
did that happen? This pen? I don't love this pen.
(24:42):
Oh god, it's ugly. Oh back, guy, you're you found
a new thing to be hard on yourself about. You
(25:02):
know what? That is? Correct? See, this is exactly my
problem with these kinds of like d I y crafty
solutions to things. It's like the the bar is pretty high,
and you could be like perfectly organized and actually using
your bullet journal really well, but if you're not coloring
perfectly within the margins or drawing beautiful pictures of flowers,
(25:22):
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
that you can hear. So yeah, 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
(25:46):
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 other us it can be too m h.
(26:11):
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. Oh good Towns Warner,
we really need to get up with Christeners twist, oh
push need Lord. Thanks for listening to Works for Me.
(26:33):
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 your friends
to listen. And we want to give us special thanks
to Liz Smith toofor for hes and Sea god Kari,
who voiced the fantasy sequence at the top of the show.
(26:53):
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
two six one seven zero and we might use it
on the air, or you can tweet at us. I'm
at Francesca today and I'm at r V Greenfield. This
show was hosted and recorded by ME Rebecca Greenfield and
(27:15):
ME Francesca Levi. The show was produced by Topher foreheas
Jordan's Speared did our illustrations, and Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's
head of pot See you next time, h
I'm Rebecca 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,
(00:24):
congrats on your promotion ahead of the writers. It's easy
to be productive when you're this organized. And the Pulitzer
goes to Rebecca Greenfield for her groundbreaking series on a
very important topic. I'd like to thank being organized. It
(00:49):
has changed everything Twitter. Of course, this is a ridiculous idea,
but that kind of wish fulfillment drives a ten billion
(01:11):
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
(01:37):
for Me, the show where we try to fix our
workplace problems to find out what strategies will work for you.
I am Franchise Believing and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. 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
(01:58):
or human beings. 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 a twenty five 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 techniques. I know how they really were, but
(02:19):
does any of this stuff actually work? 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
(02:40):
help method to solve it and report back. This week,
it's Becca's turn. Becca, what 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 album my phone,
I didn't have a dedicated notebook for taking notes, and
(03:02):
I like sporadically made to do lists, and I have
this idea that 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
(03:25):
of getting there? Bullet journaling? 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
(03:46):
in it for your own purposes, so it's customized. Weble
the pages have these dots on them instead of lines,
are a blank page. That's why it's called a bullet journal.
And the doctord 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
(04:11):
want to be a bullet journal er? 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
(04:31):
or nate. They look incredible 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
(04:51):
if I show you. So, I'm going to pull up
a video from a popular 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
(05:14):
one from October. Now, okay, so for this month's theme,
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
(05:34):
her journal. There's a scroll there's a cauldron, there's a hat.
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
(05:56):
the aesthetic part of the bullet Journal. On the other page,
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.
The inspirational quotes from Harry Potter are also a part
(06:17):
of this organizational system. It's not a requirement, but that
is definitely part of the vibe. It's like you have
to have beautiful handwriting, be really good at drying, 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
(06:38):
is just the beginning of setting up the journal and
she goes on to hand draw calendars. She makes 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
(07:02):
trying to get organized by committing to this level 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,
(07:24):
don't you just want to be the type of person
that keeps a beautiful hand drawn 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
(07:47):
we do on this show is experiment on 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
(08:07):
see if using this journal makes me any 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 discovered that
(08:36):
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 lot of
(09:00):
jargon and bullet journal specific rules. This is what's called
like 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.
(09:21):
But I do a squear 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
(09:42):
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've got a term November. Wait, I miss, I think
I forgot about that. Yeah. She decoded the language and
(10:05):
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 brand called Loister m
(10:27):
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 he spent
a lot of time on the set up. How did
it go from there? At first, I was very into it.
About a weekend I got into the studio to talk
(10:50):
about it. That's how excited I was. I have 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 do list, um,
and then I really look forward to at night we
(11:10):
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. I
don't know about you, you know. I was like, I'm
(11:30):
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 sit on
the couch. And then it only devolved from there. In
(11:53):
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 one
(12:15):
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 I'm home in
(12:36):
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 did end up using
(12:58):
it because I felt like 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 just talk to the lawyers
(13:20):
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 journal when it's convenient, like I
(13:44):
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 a little it was a little self pitying. But okay,
(14:08):
you went from being excited to get up in the
morning so that you could write in your bullet journal
to like it sounds like being angry at your bullet
journal for existing and demanding that you write in it.
At dinner when you're it's your birthday and you'd rather
just be having fun. Yeah, I really went downhill so quickly. Yeah,
(14:28):
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
(14:49):
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
(15:11):
that you've committed to do, then you haven't tracked that
and you're still trying to use your head as 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
(15:32):
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 help
me stay on top of what could have been a
(15:53):
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 struggled
(16:15):
with it. More on my struggles after the break. I
(16:44):
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
(17:06):
you 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
(17:28):
kind of set it up one page at a time,
and like you can embrace that 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
(17:49):
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
(18:09):
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,
(18:32):
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
(18:54):
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,
(19:21):
I don't care about that. You should track the amount
of times 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 could
(19:42):
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 a yeah yeah. So I wanted better data,
better data, And despite the guff I got, I ended
(20:05):
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 five dollars. Here's
me talking to our producer tofor about it. Do you
think you're going to do anything with that information? What
(20:28):
am 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
(20:50):
I'm like spending a reasonable amount of money on drinking.
You began this thing as a way to like 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
(21:11):
a piece of mind so you're not spending as much
time thinking about it. Yeah, I think so, because 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 nice
to buy people things, and um, in the back of
my mind, I'm like, like a fifty dollar bill for
(21:32):
drinks stresses me out. 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
(21:53):
mind aren't just tasks, but 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 checker. Okay, So it
(22:29):
sounds like you 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
(22:52):
I become 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, m hmm, some other things
(23:15):
to do lists that 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
(23:36):
the artistic part. You've 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
(23:56):
infamous drink tracker. Yeah, 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.
(24:20):
The thing is, it really 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. The hell
did that happen? This pen? I don't love this pen.
(24:42):
Oh god, it's ugly. Oh back, guy, you're you found
a new thing to be hard on yourself about. You
(25:02):
know what? That is? Correct? See, this is exactly my
problem with these kinds of like d I y crafty
solutions to things. It's like the the bar is pretty high,
and you could be like perfectly organized and actually using
your bullet journal really well, but if you're not coloring
perfectly within the margins or drawing beautiful pictures of flowers,
(25:22):
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
that you can hear. So yeah, 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
(25:46):
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 other us it can be too m h.
(26:11):
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. Oh good Towns Warner,
we really need to get up with Christeners twist, oh
push need Lord. Thanks for listening to Works for Me.
(26:33):
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 your friends
to listen. And we want to give us special thanks
to Liz Smith toofor for hes and Sea god Kari,
who voiced the fantasy sequence at the top of the show.
(26:53):
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
two six one seven zero and we might use it
on the air, or you can tweet at us. I'm
at Francesca today and I'm at r V Greenfield. This
show was hosted and recorded by ME Rebecca Greenfield and
(27:15):
ME Francesca Levi. The show was produced by Topher foreheas
Jordan's Speared did our illustrations, and Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's
head of pot See you next time, h
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