What is Bullet Journaling? April 14, 2016 10:27
First off, for all of our Charlotte fans: this Saturday, UPstudio will be participating in the Pink Social Girl Tribe Pop-up. It will be held at the Sugar Creek Brewery in Charlotte, NC. Click here for more details.
So.. Bullet Journaling..
We first heard of bullet journaling at the Pink Social Girl Tribe Pop-Up last December. We had a customer tell us about how her roommate had just stumbled upon it and was going to try it. The customer bought one of our planners thinking that since we have a significant amount of graph paper, her roommate could utilize our planner for the task. Let's be honest, we didn't know what she was talking about, and we weren't sure how our planner would stand up to the challenge. Needless to say, the customer went back to her car, watched some videos on bullet journaling to confirm and 15 minutes later came back to our booth and asked us if she could return the planner. We accepted her return and made a mental note to look into this bullet journaling thing.
We then turned to Google. Apparently bullet journaling is a "movement", and there are tons of resources out there to help you understand how to use it to your advantage.
For some, bullet journaling is just using a notebook with pages that have bullets or dots and creating your own designs and layouts for list making, tracking, or as a planner, by connecting dots in a creative manner.
For other it is a more rigorous system. The best resources I found explaining the bullet journal system are the Bullet Journal website and a blog post by Tiny Ray of Sunshine.
First off, I would definitely recommend watching the video on the Bullet Journal website. It is the best way to visualize the system and to understand the basics.
To over simplify, the bullet journal system is a notebook (typically with bullets or dots) containing a collection of ideas (whether it be sketches, lists, diary, planner, etc.) that is organized with an index. Start a new page with a new idea, give it a title/topic and add it to the index at the front of your notebook (page numbers used for reference).
(Interesting fact: The system was created by Ryder Carroll, a Designer based in New York. In his words, the Bullet Journal is meant “to help you track the past, organize the present, and plan for the future.”)
Lets break up this post with some photos of examples:
We won't get into the nuts and bolts of bullet journaling (because lets be honest, that would be a crazy long blog post and you probably wouldn't read it), you can read the two resources we listed above for all the nitty gritty.
But lets talk about how you can utilize some of our products if you decide to dip your foot into the bullet journal pool.
1. Our new Arrow Journals with dot internal pages are 100% ready for bullet journaling. They have 80 numbered pages ready to catch all of your indexing and ideas.
2. Our favorite aspect of the bullet journal system is how you can utilize it when making lists or what they call "rapid logging". Our Sticky Pad - Dots and the UPstudio Planner (in addition to our new journal) are perfect for this system.
Rapid logging relies on a short description paired with bullets and signifiers. Every bulleted item is entered into your list with a short objective description. The type of bullet will help you organize entries into three categories: Tasks, Events, and Notes. Signifiers are additional symbols that serve to give bullets further context.
This is the basic breakdown of bullets and signifiers, but you are strongly encouraged to add your own as needed and make a legend for yourself.
An example list: Note that you start with the simple dot for all tasks and it morphs into one of the other three states as you complete or migrate items.
One of the key components is migration. When creating a new list consider all items on your previous list(s) that were not completed (or simply still just noted with a "•"). Cross out items you no longer want to tackle and transform your dot into a ">" for those you migrate to a new list. If you're like us, you over-commit yourself with your to-do lists and end up migrating a lot of items.
We just brushed the surface on bullet journaling and we are by no means experts. Again, we highly recommend checking out the Bullet Journal website and this blog post by Tiny Ray of Sunshine for more in-depth information. We're learning right along with you!