I tried bullet journaling for 30 days

we're in the middle of a productivity Renaissance head over to the App Store and you'll find thousands of different apps from notion to aana to Google Docs and to- doist you can manage all your work in one place digital to-do lists notebooks and calendars all designed to help make our lives a little more organized our work a little more seamless and our days a little more productive and all of these systems are sitting behind a screen but over the past few years I've been hearing a lot about an analog productivity system called bu journaling it's

got a dieh hard following online people who use the system call it Bojo there are books blogs and tutorials all teaching their own version of how to make the most of pen and paper and people swear by it saying it's helped them stay focused track their mood and get more things done it's really a great way also to creatively express yourself that's Abby Sai a bullet journaling Pro and she creates some of the most beautiful journals I've seen on the internet if you watch YouTube videos you'll find a lot of bullet Journal set up videos

and it's not just about tracking everything but also having a really nice cover page decorating everything with like stickers and calligraphy and all that jazz and it's basically a BL canvas so it's really up to you and how you want to organize your life through that notebook and I want to see what all the fuss is about will bullet journaling make me happier and more productive I'm going to try it for 30 days to find out this video is brought to you by Art list more on them later all right so I'm about to try

bullet journaling for 30 days but first what the hell is bullet journaling and how do you do it bullet journaling was founded by a digital product designer Nam ryer Carol as he puts it the bullet journaling method is an analog system to track the past organize the present and plan for the future instead of just opening up your journal and throwing notes to-do list and errands at it it turns a blank notebook into an organized system and there are vast differences in how people set up their bullet journals which makes a lot of sense because

everyone's different we've all got varying goals stress and professions simply copying and pasting what worked for someone else might not exactly work for you but there are some commonalities that you'll find across most of them for starters they all use a similar key to track tasks events and notes a DOT represents a task an X indicates a task has been completed a right arrow means that you've pushed a task forward a left Arrow indicates that you've scheduled it into your calendar Crossing an item Out means that you've canceled it completely a triangle represents an event

a dash indicates a note and a star means that this thing is really important you might use it for a task like this most people also set up their bullet journals with a yearly view monthly View and weekly view these are meant to help you get a bird's eye view of all the important events and goals in your year as well as to give you a granular look at your weekly tasks and priorities so I've started to pull inspiration from people all over the Internet to build a bullet Journal of my own but by far

my favorite that I've come across is from Sadia of pickup limes I'll link to her setup video in the description below which was hugely helpful as I prepared to create my very own all right so these are all the tools that I'm starting with it's absolutely basic we've got my ruler here one mol skin notebook with the dotted interior very basic papermate pen here couple highlighters and a white out marker it's time to actually set up my journal so let's get into it so setting up a journal should be a fun stress-free experience right I

mean when it comes to setting up a journal how hard could it be you really couldn't screw it up that bad could you in fact you can and now everything's you see the thing about journaling is that it's all in ink sure you've got a white out pen but that doesn't do a great job of erasing stupidity you've got to really plan out each page in advance measure each line meticulously oh I [ __ ] missed things and hope that you don't accidentally mess things up and if you're bad at math like I am you'll

mess things up what the you stupid fing dude no I don't know how to reverse this maybe bullet journaling isn't a great idea for perfectionists all right so I've finally set up my bullet Journal it only took me 4 hours which um feels like a waste of time so hopefully this works all righty so these are the first two pages of my journal we've got my my goals and priorities here on the left and then over here I've got my key these are the bullet journaling Essentials so these two pages enccompass my yearly view it's

my 2022 Bird's eyee view I've got all of my days here with the really important dates to keep in mind like the master YouTube course enrollment Valentine's Day pay quarterly taxes all that fun stuff and I will continue to fill this out as the year progresses on this next page this is the monthly view this is where we can dive a little bit deeper and add things like the title of my YouTube video I'm releasing or just some personal things I have going on I will fill this out more as I get going through this

experiment here we've got my monthly habit tracker my monthly mood check which I'll be able to fill out down here how I'm feeling my anxiety levels and up here in the corner I've got my idea section so that's any video ideas course ideas I can just dump them right in this corner here as the month goes on I will repeat these every month and then we get down to the weekly view so this is basically my to-do list or task list so it goes from Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday there's nothing else after

this and so basically I will continue to repeat this section from week to week and then when a new month happens I will repeat my main sections and maybe I'll change it up depending on how things go but let's see how this goes oops doesn't even close any if day one of setting up my journal is any indication of how things might go I'm a little bit worried this practice might be a complete waste of time do you have any advice for me what would you recommend as I start to set out on this journey

my big advice for you is to really be patient you stupid [ __ ] dude because it's pretty overwhelming try to think of it more of like as not an add-on hassle or like not something will slow you down but more of like a tool that will actually help you maybe Foster better ideas after one week of bullet journaling I've already started to see some of the benefits the first thing I started to notice was how using a physical Journal forces you to be more intentional adding tasks into a digital to-do list is really easy

but maybe too easy it's so easy to clutter your to-do list with items that aren't essential and this is the quickest way to derail your productivity the additional effort of writing down a task and putting it into ink surprisingly makes it much more real and forces you to get more intentional with each task all right so at this point in my bullet journaling journey I have fully detached from as much of my digital tools as I could there are some things that I needed to keep like my calendar but I am no longer using a

digital to-do list and I'm relying solely on this notebook here for everything that I do I also have to say that I love the tactile feeling of using a journal I spend most of my week on a computer often 8 hours or more each day bringing part of my routine into a physical notebook has been a really nice break from staring at a screen all day so as a Creator there's nothing that helps me to bring a video to life like finding the right music and that's exactly why I use art list my sponsor for

this week's video so when I'm editing a video very early into the process I pull a bunch of clips from art list for me music is all about controlling the pace the music has to match the moment right now I'm looking for something to help lighten up the mood a little bit for a comedic sketch so I'll sort my search by funny let's try this one out by dropping it into my timeline what do you do for a living young man oh uh I make videos on the internet and my life goal is to interview

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down below this video that link will score you two free months of an annual subscription thanks so much to artlist for sponsoring this video and thank you for supporting the brands that help me make this channel possible so I have seen a lot of the benefits that people who love bullet journaling talk about but I've also come across some things that I really don't like obviously the setup is a pain in the ass and while it did get easier when I set up my second month it was still really annoying and took a couple hours

so this is my May month at a glance and this is June I completely screwed up the formatting maybe the problem here isn't the bullet journaling itself but the fact that I'm too busy as it is maybe if I didn't take on so much and I didn't feel stretched so in this process would be a little bit more enjoyable but there are some practical things that haven't really made sense to me while the yearly view is nice since it gives me a good bird's eye view of the year I honestly haven't found any use for

the monthly view why do I need this page if I've got a digital calendar and then there's note taking and task management it's just so much more convenient to use Simple apps that are synced across all my devices I don't know how to say this but I relapsed I used a digital to-do list last week and I'm going to be honest I got a lot of [ __ ] done but now I'm done I'm going back to the bullet Journal I'm going to finish this experiment strong because I do see a lot of benefits from

it but you know sometimes when you just get busy you're like I just got to get [ __ ] done and I cannot be precious about writing down each thing slowly and intentionally into a journal it just wasn't working if you open any of my previous journals you'd find a mish mash of notes ideas and entries there's no order or system no way to make sense of what I'm talking about bullet journaling has really helped me to improve my organization of my journaling and it's forced me to implement a structure right from the beginning so

I've been experimenting with a few different ways to track habits this is what I did for May and this is what I did for June similar idea just different ways of tracking it was this structure the layout of the Habit tracker and journaling prompts that I appreciated the most did bullet journaling make me happier and more productive over the past 30 days to be honest I would say definitely not in fact doing it stressed me out a little bit more than I'd like to admit you stupid fing dude but it did give me a lot

of ideas and tools that I can now Implement into my journaling practice going forward okay so now that I'm done with 30 days of bullet journaling the question is am I going to keep doing it and the answer no I don't think I'm going to keep bullet journaling I like to journal when I need to so if I'm feeling an ious if I'm feeling stuck with my business that's when I'm going to go to a journal I don't think going forward I'm going to be using it very often to track tasks I'm definitely not going

to use it to track calendars and events and all that stuff that just makes no sense to me when I could easily have uh something synced on a calendar and I can actually invite people to it I I really enjoyed tracking my habits I really enjoyed the mood check and the ideas dump these are probably going to be sections that I'm going to keep and I'm actually going to keep my journal a little bit more structured going forward instead of just having a be a complete dumpster fire bullet journaling obviously it works for thousands if

not millions of people around the world but maybe it's just not something that works for me but that doesn't mean that bullet journaling won't work for you there are tens of thousands of people who swear by it and you might be someone who finds value in the practice but before you take the leap I've got some advice to get you started stop worrying about the detail so much and just get started don't do too much research into finding the best pen or the best Journal just get the basics and adjust your approach as you get

going and do people look down on the mole skin is that like no no no it's pretty good the only recommendation that I'd give for the journal that you select is one that has dotted or Square print this will make it easier for you to set up your journal and create a usable layout and if you're really struggling with perfectionism use white out this was a recommendation from Sadia from pickup limes and it definitely relieved a lot of stress having white out allowed me to correct some of my mistakes as I got going without total

ruining the look and aesthetic of my journal thanks for watching good luck in your own attempts at bullet journaling and I'll catch you next time [Music]