Ryder, welcome to the UK and welcome to Waterstones
Thank you for having me.
I don't have a diary or a journal or anything like that
and before we get to whether this is gonna sort of change my life I want to
talk a little bit about you because you were the man who invented bullet
journaling effectively and this is something that a lot of people do and
they found it has made a huge difference to their lives but I was really
intrigued when reading your book to know about the origins of it. So that for you
it was your ADD, your attention deficit disorder that sort of helped
shape this way of journaling. Could you tell us a little bit more about that...?
Yeah it became evident very early on in my educational
career that I had challenges that my other classmates didn't have. So after I
was diagnosed I had a kind of conundrum in that yes, you have a
condition, but we don't really have a lot of solutions or tools that you can, that
could help you out. So I was left to my own devices and I started actually
designing my own tools, my own tips and techniques, one little piece at a time.
Trying to figure out ways that I could focus better, become more organised and
more productive. Because these skills seemed to elude me.
I have in my hand here, this is a bullet journal, it's a really beautiful journal actually and
this is a very analog way of doing things in a very digital age. And of
course there are just gazillions of apps out there that claim to be able to
organize your life and make things easier for you. Why is this approach more
effective as far as you're concerned than the digital alternatives that are out there?
I mean I guess it depends on what you need, right? I would
never say that the analog is the solution, right? For me it's not digital
versus analog, it's digital and analog. They're all just tools and I think tools
need to be judged by how effective they are in helping you move towards where
you're going, help you accomplish your goals. And for me I found that using only
digital tools was not in fact making me more productive.
And I think a lot of that came down to the fact that I spent so much
time organising everything just so that I actually wouldn't do anything. And
the second part is that it lends itself to too many distractions, you know? On the
one hand I'm like planning a meeting and all of a sudden I'm buying shoes and I
don't really know how that transition happened. And I found that in the analog
space I can actually take a moment and think about what I'm working on, ask
myself why am I doing this? What is the value here? And these might seem like
very obvious questions but I don't think it's clear that we are asking ourselves
those questions enough, and on an ongoing basis. And the process of journaling,
a) makes me go offline and b) has helped me form a habit of actually checking in
with myself to make sure that I understand why I'm working on what I'm
working on. See if I'm actually doing this the best
way possible and just all these small tiny adjustments that over time
compounded in making quite a difference.
This is one of the sort of myths that
you explode quite early on in the book which is this idea of being 'busy'. In the
modern world we all feel that we're very busy all the time, we've got a lot to
contend with. But actually you point out that it's not really that we're any
busier than we used to be but there's just a lot more competing for our
attention, there are a lot of distractions. Is there anything that we
can do about that through the day or is it simply, as you say, by taking those
moments with the journal for reflection and to take stock of things that really
help you to kind of get rid of those distractions?
For me that's proven to be
a very powerful technique. Sure, there are other ways of doing this, maybe go for a
walk, you know, or carve out the time that you need to detach. And what's
interesting is if you know that that time is coming then you also start
behaving differently because generally speaking, at least for me, when I went
online I'd just be like okay I'll work until I'm not working anymore.
But if all of a sudden I start time-boxing my day more effectively then I know it's
like okay I only have three hours to get this done. Because after that I'm gonna
go for a walk or I'm gonna sit down with my book and I dedicated myself
to allowing myself to have that time. Make sure that I always did do X Y or Z
and I found that with journaling was nice
because I could actually think. As opposed to taking a walk, I might think
of something but then I forget it. So being with a notebook immediately
allowed me to capture my thoughts and clarify my time and thereby I became
less and less busy. The interesting result was that I realized that I was
working on so many things that didn't matter or add value to my life. And I
think that we're all guilty of that. In the sense of like we hoard our tasks and
our 'to dos' because the busier we are the more important
we become, quote unquote. Because like look I'm so busy I can't do anything,
that must mean I'm meaningful or desirable or whatever it is. But in fact
what you're doing is you're just letting a lot of noise into your life and I feel
like true productivity's about working on less but having more focus to invest
in the things that are meaningful.
We're not going to talk about how bullets journalling
really works because there's a brilliant video that you've made that actually sort
of shows really clearly how the journal can actually work. And what I've been
intrigued by through reading the book is that it's so much more than just simply a way
of making a better 'to do' list and being more productive with your time.
That there are these elements of as you say stripping away the stuff that's
unnecessary but therefore leading a better life and actually being far more
effective at doing what you want to do in the future and that there's almost of
I hesitate to use the word but there's this sort of mindfulness aspect to it
where if you give yourself the time to really think about who you are, what you
want to achieve it becomes way more than just a journal doesn't it?
Certainly I mean the idea is not that we're trying to run faster in the hamster wheel, right?
I find that bullet journaling encourages people to actually think about what it
is that they're doing, you know, not just about how to become more effective and
how to get more crammed into your day. But actually understand what value these
things add to your life. And you're doing it every day so it's not that every time
you're sitting down with your notebook you're having like an existential meltdown!
You're just asking yourself why am I doing this, is this vital, does this
matter? What would happen if I never did this, ever? And all of a sudden you
start realizing that a lot of these things don't pass that
test. But you also are getting in touch with yourself by asking that. It's like
okay why does this matter? You need an answer for that. And if you
don't then all of a sudden that's something you can explore. And in that
process you just become more familiar with the way that you think and the
things that you respond to, the things that you don't. And you start creating
more of a framework of self learning on an ongoing basis. And through that
process you can make much more informed decisions. Now you know when an
opportunity arises, is this an opportunity that I'm just going to go on
autopilot and sure I'll to say yes to everything? Or am I gonna say no to this
because I know that it's gonna take too much of my time and energy and really
not provide the value that I need for my investment. That kind of thing. So you
just become significantly more mindful about how you're investing your time and
your energy which are really the only two resources that ultimately matter.
One of the things that's sort of unique about this I suppose as a system of organising
your life is that there's this community that you allow to sort of help shape how
it works. So that it's changed a lot since you first came up with your
version of it and it continues to adapt and evolve. Have you been surprised by
anything that's come from the community that's taken it off in a completely
different direction?
Constantly. Absolutely. I mean the way I designed the
bullet journal method was to be very flexible because I thought in different
ways so it would be my sketchbook it would be my you know tracker or to-do
list or class notes and I never found a system that could do all these things in
one place and I always found that really irritating that I needed a different
notebook for all these things. So I designed the methodology to be able to
essentially house whatever your thought looked like and that was just for my own
mind. And it never occurred to me that that flexibility would lend itself for
other people in different use cases to so seamlessly adapt my methodology. Like
I'm never going to be a mother, I'm never gonna be a doctor. I don't know what that
experience is like. But because it's so flexible they were able to map that on
to their experience and I'm constantly surprised by how that
flexibility ends up, you know, ends up being used for such specific things that
I have absolutely zero awareness of. You know it's like wow that that works
perfectly for this thing I've never even heard about before! So for me that's
one of the more exciting parts of all; that the community constantly shows me
the potential of the thing that I designed. And that was unexpected and kind of like
a really happy accident.
Well I have as I said earlier, I've never really kept
a diary or a journal and I know that I need to get better at sort of organizing
my time so I have a fresh bullet journal, I have your guide here to get me
through it. It appears to have already had an effect. I appear to have picked a shirt today which
seems to be covered in symbols from the journal. But it was great to get a bit
more insight from you about how it works and how developed so, Ryder,
thank you so much for this.
Thank you for having me.