Bullet journals burst onto the scene in 2013 and exploded in popularity over the last decade.
Productivity experts, life coaches, and all types of influencers gush about the many benefits of bullet journaling. They claim it can simplify life, boost productivity, and keep you organized.
And they’re right!
Here’s why you should try bullet journaling.
Bullet Journal Origins
The bullet journal origin story showcases why it’s an essential tool for mental health and wellness.
Digital product designer Ryder Carrol struggled with his ADHD diagnosis and sought to design a method for keeping track of his life that worked alongside his ADHD.
He created the bullet journal method. It helped him, and it can help you too.
What is the Bullet Journal Method?
The Bullet Journal Method is a system for personal productivity.
It’s a simple way to organize everything you need, but the real beauty lies in its adaptability. Anything, from schedules, to-do lists, appointments, reminders, trackers, and more, can be organized into a single notebook or planner. You can pick and choose which items are crucial to your life.
Many people use bullet journals to track their weight, moods, habits, or diets, while others use them to track their progress on personal goals. Some even use them to keep track of homework assignments, chores, or long-term projects.
The versatility is out of this world.
The Benefits of Bullet Journaling
Bullet journaling has many uses, but it also bursts with benefits.
Here are 12 ways bullet journaling can enhance your life:
- Improve Productivity
- Get Organized
- Offers Insights into Challenges
- Clarify Priorities
- Stay Focused
- Track Progress
- Make Smart Decisions
- Develop an Action Plan
- Address Obstacles
- Set Intentions
- Clear your Mind
- Provide a Creative Outlet
Let’s explore how a simple bullet journal can do so much for you.
Improve Productivity
Bullet journals found fame as a productivity tool.
Jacob Udodov, founder and CEO of task management platform Bordio, says journaling improves productivity because it helps you clarify and structure your thoughts.
“Let’s say you want to focus on a new project but feel all over the place. Bullet journaling will facilitate you to come up with a list of key tasks and goals,” Udodov explains.
He adds that it’s okay if your initial plan is short and basic because that can lay the groundwork for something bigger.
Mark Joseph, owner of Parental Queries, a website dedicated to helping busy parents succeed, agrees that the best benefit of bullet journaling is the productivity boost. He says journaling improves productivity because writing down your thoughts can help you prioritize and reflect.
Get Organized
Journaling can help you organize your thoughts and, thus, your life.
Sarah Watson, psychologist, certified coach, and COO of BPTLAP, says that making simple lists and charts in your bullet journal can help you organize your time.
For example, Watson says you can create a monthly calendar to help you plan your work and keep track of deadlines. You can also make weekly lists to remind yourself of important tasks you need to accomplish.
A bullet journal helps you organize all your thoughts, ideas, appointments, tasks, projects, and everything else in your busy life.
Having everything organized in one place makes finding information, following up, and staying on track a breeze.
Offer Insights into Challenges
Joseph recommends journaling to busy parents because it can provide insight into their challenges.
Writing down your thoughts, feelings, and ideas allows you to work through and review them. The journaling process will help you handle situations wisely and prevent you from making rash decisions.
Keep space in your bullet journal spread for thoughts and musings. Use this space to work through complicated problems as they arise.
Clarify Priorities
Emma Williams, a certified strengths and career coach who serves as the Chief Research Officer at HIGH5, says bullet journaling is a fantastic way to clarify priorities, allowing you to focus on the most important things.
When you write your goals, tasks, and to-do list in a journal, you can see which items need immediate action and which can wait. Creating these lists also helps you see which tasks are related and in what order you need to accomplish things for optimum results.
Stay Focused
Bullet journaling helps you stay focused on your goals. When your brain starts to wander, you can quickly open your bullet journal pages to remind you what you’re supposed to be doing.
Watson says bullet journaling can help you set clear intentions for each day, which can help you filter through distractions and stay focused on the things that matter.
Track Progress
Sometimes, it’s hard to keep going if we can’t see how far we’ve come. Bullet journals allow users to track their progress toward goal accomplishment, giving them that motivational boost to keep going.
Watson explains that you can use your bullet journal to break your larger projects into smaller action items. It’s easier to track small action items than large goals, and you will get a sense of accomplishment seeing everything you’ve already completed.
Bullet journaling can also help you track progress on personal goals, such as reading more books, losing weight, or adding more veggies to your diet.
Include a habit tracker in your spread and enjoy the immense satisfaction of filling in the little circle whenever you accomplish that daily habit.
Make Smart Decisions
One of the best “secret” benefits of bullet journaling is that it helps you make better decisions.
When your entire life is organized in an easy-to-access plan, you can refer to it for decision-making. You can quickly determine when you’re over-committed and decline an opportunity. You can see your calendar and schedule events that work for you.
Another way journaling helps you make better decisions is by freeing your mind to consider important things. Productivity expert David Allen says our heads are for having ideas, not holding them. When our minds are full of tasks and schedules, we can’t use our brains for what they do best: thinking through problems.
A bullet journal helps us record essential things we need to remember in our external brains, freeing our minds to make better decisions.
Develop an Action Plan
Goals without a plan are just dreams. Bullet journals turn your goals into reality by helping you develop an action plan for achieving them.
Using a bullet journal, you can record your goals and then brainstorm what it would take to achieve them. Our main goals are often enormous milestones that take months or years of planning, but each starts with a tiny step, which you can identify with your journal.
Watson says a journal can help you break those larger projects into smaller action items, making it easier to accomplish each step and determine the next steps in your workflow.
Address Obstacles
If it were easy to accomplish our goals, they wouldn’t be goals. Obstacles abound in life and have a way of blocking our plans.
Bullet journaling can help you identify and address obstacles before they become a hindrance.
Williams says using your journal regularly for reflection can help you identify areas where you need to adjust your approach. Reflecting on and addressing minor issues will prevent them from becoming significant roadblocks.
Set Intentions
A magical benefit of bullet journaling is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Use it to set an intention for your life and focus your energy on that intention.
Your overall intention should lead to daily purposes. Set an intention each day, and ensure your daily tasks and priorities align with that intention.
Writing everything out in your journal can help ensure that your actions align with your intentions.
Clear Your Mind
Journaling helps you clear your mind.
Use the brain dump method to record all your thoughts onto paper, freeing space in your mind to think. Use the writing space in your bullet journal for a stream-of-consciousness dump, where you let all your thoughts freely flow out of your brain and onto the page.
Alternatively, as Allen proposes, you can use your journal as an external brain. When you record all the critical items you need to remember externally, your brain can think its own thoughts, granting you space for new ideas.
Provide a Creative Outlet
One of the under-represented benefits of bullet journaling is the creative outlet it provides.
Though you can achieve all these benefits with a basic pen and ink spread, you can make your journal even more expressive by creating beautiful images to accompany your tasks and schedules.
Let your creativity shine by doodling in the margins, drawing your projects, using colored pens, and letting go of boundaries.
Bonus: Journaling is Great for Mental Health
A bullet journal is a fantastic tool for productivity, but journaling, in general, has many great mental health benefits. It can reduce stress, relieve bottled-up emotions, and help you work through past trauma.
A bullet journal with space for free writing is the best of both worlds.
The free area provides an opportunity to write what comes to mind, work through complex emotions, and gain insight into your behavior. Other spread components, including habit trackers, task lists, goals, calendars, or anything else, can help you organize your life and reap the productivity benefits of bullet journaling.
Why Do People Love Bullet Journaling?
People love their Bujos!
Bujo is the shorthand term for a bullet journal, a term lovingly embraced by influencers who preach the virtues of the bullet journaling method. People love bullet journals because they are effective tools.
Bullet journals are helpful because they are highly customizable.
You can track anything.
People who need to visualize things can draw and use stickers to highlight essential items, while list lovers can dedicate their entire journals to different to-do lists.
Most users prefer a mix of charts, calendars, lists, and open space, but you can fill the pages of your journal in whatever way best suits your needs. You can leave room for doodles, sketches and let your creative side take control if you’d like.
Artistic people may want to combine their functional bullet journal with a creative junk journal or art journal. A combo journal will help them get the best of both worlds, allowing them to express their creativity while staying on track to complete essential items in your life.
There’s no wrong way to use a bullet journal, which is why they work for so many people.
Why Do People Quit Bullet Journaling?
Bullet journaling isn’t for everyone. While it’s a great productivity tool for many, some find it unsuitable.
Everyone is different, and no one tool will work for everyone. People quit because bullet journaling doesn’t work for them.
You can still reap the benefits of journaling without a journal.
Williams says that, ultimately, the key is finding a system that works for you and fits into your lifestyle. It may be a journal or an online tool like Evernote or Trello. Some would prefer to use a planner or a traditional notebook.
If you tried bullet journaling and couldn’t keep up with it, don’t sweat it. Not everything works for everyone.
Try Bullet Journaling
If you haven’t tried bullet journaling yet, what are you waiting for?
Grab a journal and see if organizing your life on paper is the hack you need to improve productivity and accomplish your goals.