- [Matt] 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 Asana to Google Docs and Todoist.
- [Monday.com spokesperson] You can manage all your work in one place.
- [Matt] 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 bullet journaling.
It's got a die-hard following online.
People who use the system call it bujo.
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.
- [Matt] That's Abbey Sy, 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 blank canvas,
so it's really up to you
on how you want to organize your life through that notebook.
- And I wanna see what all the fuss is about.
Will bullet journaling make me happier and more productive?
I'm gonna try it for 30 days to find out.
This video is brought to you by Artlist.
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
named Ryder Carroll.
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 lists, 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, stresses, 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 Pick Up Limes.
I'll link to her setup video in the description below,
which was hugely helpful
as I prepared to create my very own.
(plastic rustling)
All right, so these are all the tools
that I'm starting with.
It's absolutely basic.
We've got my ruler here.
One moleskin notebook with the dotted interior.
Very basic Papermate pen here.
Couple highlighters and a Wite-Out marker.
It's time to actually set up my journal,
so let's get into it.
(dramatic music)
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.
Ugh.
And now everything's (beep).
You see, the thing about journaling is that it's all in ink.
Sure, you've gotta Wite-Out pen,
but that doesn't do a great job of erasing stupidity.
You've got really plan out each page in advance,
measure each line meticulously.
Oh, I (beep) 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 (beep)?
You stupid (beep) 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 four hours,
which feels like a waste of time,
so hopefully this works.
All right, so these are the first two pages of my journal.
We've got 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 encompass my yearly view.
It's my 2022 bird's eye 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.
Whoops.
It doesn't even close.
(bright music)
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.
- [Matt] You stupid (beep) dude.
- Because it's pretty overwhelming.
Try to think of it more of like as not an add-on hassle,
or like not something that 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 eight 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 Artlist,
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 Artlist.
(upbeat music)
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."
(bright piano music)
Let's try this one out by dropping it into my timeline.
[Coal Miner Matt] What do you do for a living young man?
Oh, I make videos on the internet,
and my life goal is to interview
a professional wrestler turned movie star.
[Coal Miner Matt] I work 18 hour days in a coal mine.
Now that's a perfect fit.
Artlist has thousands of high quality tracks to choose from,
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I go with the unlimited plan,
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Once I download a track, I can use it forever.
If you wanna start using Artlist for yourself,
click the link in the description 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 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 thin,
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 gonna be honest, I got a lot of shit done.
But now I'm done; I'm going back to the bullet journal.
I'm gonna finish this experiment strong
because I do see a a lot of benefits from it.
But you know, sometimes when you just get busy,
you're like, "I just gotta get shit done,"
and I cannot be precious about writing down
each thing slowly and intentionally into a journal.
It just wasn't working.
If you opened any of my previous journals,
you'd find a mishmash 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 (beep) 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...
(drumroll)
No.
I don't think I'm gonna keep bullet journaling.
I like to journal when I need to.
So if I'm feeling anxious,
if I'm feeling stuck with my business,
that's when I'm gonna go to a journal.
I don't think, going forward,
I'm gonna be using it very often to track tasks.
I'm definitely not gonna use it to track calendars
and events and all that stuff.
That just makes no sense to me
when I could easily have something synced on a calendar
and I can actually invite people to it.
I really enjoyed tracking my habits.
I really enjoyed the mood check and the ideas dump.
These are probably gonna be sections that I'm gonna keep,
and I'm actually gonna keep my journal
a little bit more structured going forward,
instead of just having it 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 moleskin?
Is that like --
- No, no, no.
It's pretty good.
- [Narrator] 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 Wite-Out.
This was a recommendation from Sadia from Pick Up Limes,
and it definitely relieved a lot of stress.
Having Wite-Out allowed me to correct
some of my mistakes as I got going
without totally 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.