One year of bullet-journaling

Exactly 12 months ago, right when the pandemic started to hit Austria and in the first weeks of my educational leave, I started replacing GTD with bullet journaling as the primary method to organise my life. I’ve already written about the actual move back then and also in my updates after two and six months so I will try to only write here about what has changed since then 😀

The biggest change since September is that I no longer miss OmniFocus. It took nearly a year but now I’m finally at a point where I trust the system enough! The last missing step that pushed me over the edge was mostly me solving my inbox problem in January by just using some small A6 booklets for that.

Page types

Over the course of last 12 months I’ve experimented greatly with how I should structure my weekly, monthly, and daily pages. In the end (well, for now at least) I’ve settled on a simple list of days on the monthly view (one row per day) which also includes my habit trackers, an Alastair-style weekly page, and classic bujo floating daily pages. On the daily pages I keep all the operational tasks and organize the weekly pages once every week (usually on Sunday) so that I usually don’t need the monthly page or the future log until the next Sunday.

Aside from classic task management I’ve also mostly moved all kind of content tracking into my journal. I now have a list of books that I want to read, TV/Netflix shows I want to watch, and even games I want to play. Previously I had at least part of that on services like Goodreads which I now only use as a mirror of those canonical lists in my journal.

Hardware

Hardware-wise I’ve mostly use A5 hardcover notebooks during the last year. Since last March I’ve filled 2.5 (around 250 pages each) of them and also kept additional notebooks for work-topics and certification efforts. Right now I’m using Leuchtturm1917 notebooks for that but I’m still experimenting. Next on the stack will be a softcover notebook Rhodia, something that I’m really looking forward to but I will probably have to wait until late summer for that 😅 I can then finally use my Roterfaden Taschenbegleiter to its full potential! With this I want to split my journal up into a more permanent part and an operational part, something that will be easy once I can keep more than one booklet in the Taschenbegleiter 😊

Pen-wise I’m now extremely happy with the following setup:

1. Lamy 2000 with EF nib and black Parker ink (might be replaced with Platinum Carbon black in the future for resistance to sweaty hands)
2. TWSBI Diamond 580 ALR with gray Pelikan Moonstone ink which I use for shadowing and borders

As supporting colors I also have some mango ink for highlighting calendar events on the daily page so that I don’t miss any important calls or something like that (has happened in the past and so I added the highlighting).

Conclusion

After a year I’m now finally at the point where I fell at home in my journal. I like the system and it’s adaptability and I don’t really see myself moving back to GTD or over to some other system anytime soon. On to another year 😅