92: The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll

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1. 00:00:00 So I have some long-term follow-up to episode 68 where we talked about how to take smart notes by Sankay Arrens.
2. 00:00:08 And I want to talk to you a little bit about this new hotness in the text base called "Rome Research."
3. 00:00:17 You familiar with this, Joe?
4. 00:00:18 I am.
5. 00:00:19 Okay, well, I got a demo of it this morning from a friend of mine who is using it,
6. 00:00:25 and I've seen Drew Kaufman rave about it on Twitter.
7. 00:00:30 And I have looked at it before. It's a web app. The logo is ugly.
8. 00:00:34 It doesn't have an iOS equivalent and thought, "I don't want to touch this thing with a 10-foot pole."
9. 00:00:40 But this is the digital zettelcast that we were looking for in episode 68.
10. 00:00:46 And as it pertains to this book, I think it might have a place in my workflow going forward,
11. 00:00:52 but I have so many questions that need answering.
12. 00:00:55 Sure.
13. 00:00:56 Sure.
14. 00:00:57 So why don't you tell me, first of all, what's your general impression of this app?
15. 00:01:00 When I first saw it, my assumption was that somebody took the idea for Envy Alt and Wikilinks inside of Envy Alt
16. 00:01:09 and made a web app version of it.
17. 00:01:11 That's what I originally thought it was, and the more time I've spent looking at it, the more I think that's what it is.
18. 00:01:17 Okay.
19. 00:01:18 But I have no interest in this because I really want, now, if I understand it correctly,
20. 00:01:25 because I think there is a potential that I have a flawed view of this,
21. 00:01:29 but I get the impression that Rome Research is really geared towards, you know, web only
22. 00:01:38 and you don't really have access to the files behind it, that could be flawed because I have not looked into it at that level
23. 00:01:45 because when I realized, you know, it's Wikilinks, and it works the same way Envy Altra or Envy Alt work,
24. 00:01:53 I had no interest in it because I can get access to the raw files in those other formats,
25. 00:01:58 but this just feels like another, you know, Evernote notes scenario to me,
26. 00:02:05 and I don't want to go down that road.
27. 00:02:07 Okay.
28. 00:02:08 I had, I basically discounted it once I got to that point.
29. 00:02:12 You could probably correct me in all the, you know, assumptions I've made and how those are incorrect now.
30. 00:02:17 So please enlighten me if I am incorrect.
31. 00:02:20 Well, I was not familiar with the Wikilinks. This is interesting, and I think that you are partially correct
32. 00:02:27 that Rome Research does take part of this.
33. 00:02:31 So basically, as you're typing things, yes, you can add links to other things,
34. 00:02:36 and the demo that I saw today, my buddy Brandon Wentlin was walking me through this
35. 00:02:41 and he was showing me basically a daily page, kind of like the daily log in the bullet journal,
36. 00:02:45 which we're going to talk about a little bit, where you just shot down everything,
37. 00:02:48 and then you can link those things to other pages.
38. 00:02:50 So if you have a thought that you jotted down on the daily page about a project that you're working on,
39. 00:02:55 you can also go to the page for that project and see all of the daily pages where,
40. 00:02:59 or anything else, basically, where that term is linked to,
41. 00:03:02 where I think it's kind of powerful, though, is in addition to adding those links manually,
42. 00:03:06 there's a section underneath that where it has, what did they call it?
43. 00:03:10 Unlinked mentions or something like that.
44. 00:03:12 So if you use that term somewhere, it's going to show up in the same space as all of the ones that have links,
45. 00:03:17 and you can easily add the links to the other places and kind of fill in the holes that you missed
46. 00:03:22 of your digital Zetal cast, and does that make sense?
47. 00:03:25 It does.
48. 00:03:26 I've always had issues with that sort of thing, though, because I'm one that likes to create the links manually,
49. 00:03:36 that way I have a little more control over it.
50. 00:03:38 Like, that's my tendency.
51. 00:03:40 So whenever I have something that wants to do it for me,
52. 00:03:43 I sometimes get frustrated with it because it's doing it wrong.
53. 00:03:47 Sure.
54. 00:03:48 And I think this is probably not quite the thing that would annoy you,
55. 00:03:52 but maybe more than you're looking for than in that case,
56. 00:03:54 because it's not going to add the links automatically,
57. 00:03:56 but it's going to show you all the other places in the same space.
58. 00:03:59 So basically, it's a reminder of, hey, you mentioned this, these other places,
59. 00:04:02 too.
60. 00:04:03 Maybe you want to add the link to these places.
61. 00:04:05 And I totally get the value of this as I was going through the book for today,
62. 00:04:10 the Bullet Journal Method, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
63. 00:04:13 They talk about the threading of the different collections and jumping from one page to another.
64. 00:04:19 So everything kind of ties together.
65. 00:04:21 And that's kind of what this reminded me of is this bidirectional linking where you've got this collection,
66. 00:04:25 but also a previous collection that's related to it over here and another collection afterwards
67. 00:04:30 that's related to it over here.
68. 00:04:32 And I have to admit that I am so confused right now as to how to tie all this together.
69. 00:04:36 Well, in the meantime, absolutely loving using my fancy fountain pens and the analog tools at the moment.
70. 00:04:42 So maybe we should just get into today's book here.
71. 00:04:46 But before we do that, you do have one follow-up item here with your journal prompts,
72. 00:04:51 which is Apropos, since we're talking about the Bullet Journal.
73. 00:04:54 I know, right.
74. 00:04:55 So did you do this?
75. 00:04:57 I did.
76. 00:04:58 I can't say I'm 100% on, you know, actually, you know, following through with it every single day.
77. 00:05:06 But I have been doing it probably four or five days a week right now.
78. 00:05:11 And those, there's two particular prompts, which are very morbid to talk about without the context of the antidote,
79. 00:05:20 which this comes from.
80. 00:05:21 But the idea is to reflect on what life would look like without things that I find extremely important to my life.
81. 00:05:31 So one of those is what would my life look like without my family?
82. 00:05:38 And the secondary of those are what is the worst that could happen to me tomorrow?
83. 00:05:47 Which both of those are not fun to think about or talk about, but they at least help me in the process of becoming aware of how important things are to me and keeping that stuff front of mine.
84. 00:06:00 So I will continue to do those.
85. 00:06:03 But again, a little morbid without the context of an entire book, I would say.
86. 00:06:08 Right.
87. 00:06:09 So are those working their way into your Bullet Journal system then?
88. 00:06:12 They are.
89. 00:06:13 Yeah.
90. 00:06:14 I have a collection to use the terminology.
91. 00:06:16 I have a collection of journal prompts.
92. 00:06:18 And then I just review those each day.
93. 00:06:20 That's all it is.
94. 00:06:21 Okay.
95. 00:06:22 Super complicated.
96. 00:06:23 Well, we better get into this because.
97. 00:06:26 Yeah.
98. 00:06:27 Probably.
99. 00:06:28 This is probably going to be a long one.
100. 00:06:31 And very well could be.
101. 00:06:33 Yes.
102. 00:06:34 All right.
103. 00:06:35 So today's book is the Bullet Journal Method by writer Carol, who is an interesting person.
104. 00:06:40 If you understand his story, I was familiar with pieces of it.
105. 00:06:45 I heard them on different podcasts when this book first came out.
106. 00:06:48 I feel like he's a really good writer and reading the stories in this book added a lot more context to some of the things that I had heard previously.
107. 00:06:56 And I'm going to try and summarize kind of how this came to be here right at the beginning.
108. 00:07:01 Because in the first part of this, he talks about why he developed this Bullet Journal or BOOJO system.
109. 00:07:08 And it was basically because everything he tried did not work.
110. 00:07:13 And he was diagnosed with, was it ADD or ADHD?
111. 00:07:17 One of those two.
112. 00:07:18 I forget which one.
113. 00:07:19 Well, they're the same thing.
114. 00:07:20 We just used to call it ADD.
115. 00:07:22 Okay.
116. 00:07:23 And so he thought kind of that there was always something wrong with him.
117. 00:07:28 And he developed this system in a notebook that he brought with him everywhere.
118. 00:07:32 And it was kind of the only thing that held his life together.
119. 00:07:35 And then someone asked him like, what's the deal with the notebook?
120. 00:07:38 And he shared it with them.
121. 00:07:40 And he thought they were going to be like, you are crazy.
122. 00:07:43 But instead they're like, this is amazing.
123. 00:07:45 You got to tell people about this.
124. 00:07:47 And he was kind of shocked by that.
125. 00:07:48 But that's kind of how the Bullet Journal came to be.
126. 00:07:50 He created some videos it took off because a lot of people really liked what he did.
127. 00:07:55 And it's an analog task management system that you can do with a pen and a notebook.
128. 00:08:01 And that is very appealing to both of us.
129. 00:08:05 I think maybe you more than me just based on your history with all this stuff.
130. 00:08:10 But I have to admit that as I was reading through this, I'm really excited to start implementing this.
131. 00:08:16 Now I haven't started it yet because I placed an order for a journal, which unfortunately has not shipped yet.
132. 00:08:22 And that is the heirloom journal by Uggmonk.
133. 00:08:26 It's kind of like a fancy Levenger circa disc system type journal because I wanted the flexibility to move around the different pieces and things like that.
134. 00:08:37 But we'll get into how we're going to implement this in a little bit here.
135. 00:08:42 But let's start maybe with just the basic idea.
136. 00:08:46 What's the problem that the Bullet Journal is trying to solve here?
137. 00:08:49 That's really part one of this book, the preparation.
138. 00:08:52 Yeah, and I think that particular piece is one.
139. 00:08:56 Let me back up here.
140. 00:08:58 You and I had a phone conversation earlier in the week about this because I think we both got a little excited about it.
141. 00:09:04 And the next thing you know, we're like talking through pieces and my cat ideas and I have been doing stuff like this for a while.
142. 00:09:11 So I think one thing that's important to call out here is that given the craziness of the world right now,
143. 00:09:19 it seems like a lot of people are going back to pen and paper.
144. 00:09:24 I don't know if that's because of a desire to step away from the screens when you could watch live streams 24 hours a day and learn constantly, which does not work for me.
145. 00:09:35 But you know, people do that.
146. 00:09:37 And because of that, it seems like there's a strong interest in stepping away from the screen for a little bit and going to pen and paper.
147. 00:09:46 And I know this is something that, you know, in the realm of ADHD people, the bullet journal has become, you know, kind of a, I don't want to say defacto answer, but it's kind of the default answer when it comes to task management, it seems that might be flawed, but it seems like there's a ton of people that that dive into this from that world.
148. 00:10:07 But I do think there's a lot of people interested in it. I, of course, have been playing with pen and paper for a long time now.
149. 00:10:14 I don't know what that means as far as my overall systems.
150. 00:10:18 It's caused me to do some things that are quite painful.
151. 00:10:21 I'm sure we'll talk about those later, but we'll, yeah, we can jump in here for sure.
152. 00:10:27 So, since you brought it up, let's just rip the band-aid right off here.
153. 00:10:33 You are kind of known in the productivity space for your OmniFocus videos.
154. 00:10:39 This is a task management system.
155. 00:10:41 So my question to you at the time, hopefully you're comfortable talking about this here is, are you still using OmniFocus with this?
156. 00:10:49 See, you had to go right for the gut, didn't you?
157. 00:10:51 You just had to jump in there.
158. 00:10:53 I did.
159. 00:10:54 Thanks, Mike.
160. 00:10:55 Well, because I think also you mentioned that you've dealt with ADHD stuff in the past, and this really is clicking for you.
161. 00:11:08 So I want to talk about the difference between those two systems and kind of why you think this is working so well, because I think this fits into this first section here where we're talking about kind of the mental decluttering and his system, but not a system.
162. 00:11:24 Sort of a thing.
163. 00:11:25 Sure.
164. 00:11:26 Well, let's, okay.
165. 00:11:28 Storytime, I guess.
166. 00:11:30 The thing here is that I have been fighting Lyme disease in a mold infection for almost two years now, which is not a fun process.
167. 00:11:41 The good news is I'm towards the very tail end of that whole endeavor.
168. 00:11:46 The problem with that is that I have been struggling with ADD.
169. 00:11:50 I'll call it ADD.
170. 00:11:52 People in the world, you know better.
171. 00:11:54 Like it's, I'm gonna call it ADD.
172. 00:11:56 I don't have the hyperactivity side of it.
173. 00:11:59 So I have struggled with ADD for a long time, but the trick here is that fighting an illness like that, it had as a strong effect.
174. 00:12:10 At least in my case, it had a strong effect on my brain, which actually in some weird way minimized my ADD symptoms.
175. 00:12:18 But now that I'm coming out of that fight, my ADD has gotten severely worse, which brings me to what do I do about it.
176. 00:12:28 And the big thing that I have found that I really have to watch is how much screen time and how much time I spend playing with technology.
177. 00:12:39 Now, that means that things like spending all of my time managing tasks in a digital task manager really isn't a great idea.
178. 00:12:50 The reason for that being that whenever I go from task A to task B, that transition is extremely dangerous for me, because it's very simple for me to have a fleeting thought.
179. 00:13:03 And then I spend 45 minutes to two hours researching that thought, trying to figure out, hmm, could I use that Ruby library?
180. 00:13:11 If I could use that, oh, that means we could develop that product, and then we could do this.
181. 00:13:15 And oh, would I be able to use to do us alongside Omni Focus for that?
182. 00:13:19 Oh, what about Trello?
183. 00:13:21 Like, you know, Rome Research.
184. 00:13:23 Yeah, Rome Research.
185. 00:13:24 Who knows?
186. 00:13:25 Like, I can go down that rabbit trail very quickly and multiple times a day.
187. 00:13:30 And it almost always happens between tasks.
188. 00:13:34 And when it's in a task manager, like, if you have bought my course on it and you've been through any of the articles I write about it, you know that I have a tendency to build a single list in Omni Focus, and I only work off of that one list.
189. 00:13:50 I'd call it a dashboard or something.
190. 00:13:52 And that is because if I have multiple lists to look at, it's way more fun to jump around and then, you know, dive down a rabbit hole trying to explore how those different lists can work together.
191. 00:14:05 I have to stop all that and focus on one.
192. 00:14:08 Otherwise, you know, the research train can get away from you very quickly.
193. 00:14:12 Now, coming to the bullet journal, bringing everything into a paper world, it forces me to, you know,
194. 00:14:21 move from task A to a notebook and then go to task B.
195. 00:14:29 Like, I have to change tools to know what comes next, which for me means that that whole transitional period gets interrupted.
196. 00:14:39 Like, I have an interrupted to my potential interruptions.
197. 00:14:42 Very meta here.
198. 00:14:43 That has allowed me to stay on task significantly more often than I would have in a digital world.
199. 00:14:51 Which means I had to do the not fun thing and actually deleted Omni Focus off my phone.
200. 00:14:59 I know that that was hard.
201. 00:15:01 You don't know how long I sat there and stared at that delete button.
202. 00:15:04 Like, you know, whenever you do the long press and you hit the X and it says, do you want to remove all of this app's data from your phone?
203. 00:15:12 I stared at that for a while before I actually hit the delete button.
204. 00:15:17 So, yes, it's true.
205. 00:15:20 I've been moving away from Omni Focus.
206. 00:15:22 Now, I do still have quite a bit in it at the moment, but I have been transitioning things over to my notebook of choice, which is a luke term, 1917, has been for a long time, multiple years now.
207. 00:15:36 So, I did pick up a new one and started doing a formal bullet journaling system in that.
208. 00:15:43 But yes, I have stepped away from Omni Focus and gone all in with pen and paper.
209. 00:15:49 There you go, Mike.
210. 00:15:50 It's all out in the open.
211. 00:15:52 Band-Aid's ripped off.
212. 00:15:53 Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
213. 00:15:55 I find myself wanting to do the same sort of thing in having the same sort of resistance where I don't like the idea of deleting Omni Focus.
214. 00:16:05 I am still trying to think through how all of these pieces tie together.
215. 00:16:10 Like I said, my notebook is not here yet, so I have a little bit of time.
216. 00:16:14 But I have seen some of the stuff that you've put together and I totally get why this works.
217. 00:16:22 And this is kind of the point that he's making in this first section, why I wanted to talk about it right here at the beginning, is that this is designed to help you sort through things and be intentional.
218. 00:16:35 He's got a bunch of really cool diagrams in this book.
219. 00:16:38 Right at the beginning, he's got a Venn diagram of productivity and mindfulness, and the intersection of those two things is what he calls intentionality.
220. 00:16:46 Obviously intentionality is a big thing for me. The definition of the word that they use here is the fundamental power of the mind to direct itself towards something, a specific object, purpose, or end.
221. 00:16:57 And really, any sort of system that you would use, regardless of how powerful it is, whether it be Omni Focus or a blank notebook, is really designed to support that end.
222. 00:17:07 And if you find that something works better than something else, even if you want the other thing to be the thing that really clicks, I think that's where a lot of people make mistakes when it comes to productivity is they hear people talk about Omni Focus or whatever tool, things to do is whatever it is, and they're like, "Oh, well, they're somebody I respect and they get a lot done and they use this thing so I should be using this thing."
223. 00:17:32 Well, not necessarily. And even as it applies to yourself, just because you've done something a certain way in the past doesn't mean that there's not a better way to do that.
224. 00:17:40 And that's one of the things I really appreciated about this book is it forces you to reconsider everything.
225. 00:17:46 For digital natives like us who live and breathe this stuff. This is where we live and work.
226. 00:17:52 So that's a little bit scary to me as executive editor of the suite setup is like, "Hmm, how do I tell people I'm not using a task management system, not using a notes app, and I'm going back to pen and paper?"
227. 00:18:01 Am I still qualified to write about this stuff?
228. 00:18:04 I am really looking forward to that mindfulness meditation Monday article on the zen of leaving digital apps for pen and paper from Mike Schmitz.
229. 00:18:15 I really want that to happen.
230. 00:18:17 It's not going to completely happen, I don't think, because I don't bring my notebook with me everywhere and I get that that's kind of the core tenet of this.
231. 00:18:24 I have had the thought that since I am stuck at home now for who knows how long, there is probably not a better time in history to force myself to get used to carrying a notebook everywhere.
232. 00:18:35 This is perfect, Mike, it's set up for you.
233. 00:18:37 Yeah, yeah.
234. 00:18:38 But I also know that I tend to jot things down on the go.
235. 00:18:43 One of my favorite ways to capture ideas, for example, is using drafts on my phone, actually not even on my phone on my watch when I'm out for a run.
236. 00:18:50 I'm listening to something and it will spark an idea and I tap the complication on my watch and I use the user dictation to capture the note directly into drafts.
237. 00:19:00 Does drafts have a place?
238. 00:19:03 I know you and I talked about this and it kind of does for you.
239. 00:19:05 We'll get into the specifics of our methods, maybe how we're thinking about how I'm thinking about doing this, how you're actually doing it a little bit later on.
240. 00:19:14 But I just don't think there's a real clear way for all of these pieces to intersect for me yet and I'm not sure which ones are worth removing.
241. 00:19:24 But as again, as it pertains to this first section, this mental decluttering, I recognize that I've got some work to do here.
242. 00:19:33 He's got another diagram here with the test where you jot down your tasks and he would say do this in your notebook and then ask, is it vital?
243. 00:19:41 And does it matter?
244. 00:19:46 So if it's vital, then you keep it.
245. 00:19:50 If it's not vital, but it does matter, you still keep it.
246. 00:19:53 If it answers no to both of those things and you delete it and it's got a kind of GTD style diagram there.
247. 00:19:58 But I like how simple this is.
248. 00:20:00 Really jotting things down in your notebook is kind of the place to capture them.
249. 00:20:04 And then as we get into the system here, that's kind of where you refine these things and you decide what's worth keeping and what do you delete.
250. 00:20:12 And that's actually part of a migration process that takes place at the end.
251. 00:20:16 But maybe the thing to do here would be to talk about the individual pieces of the system first.
252. 00:20:20 Sure.
253. 00:20:21 Yeah.
254. 00:20:21 Now that might make a lot more sense because I feel like the rest of this conversation could go into how it's implemented.
255. 00:20:27 Right. So since you are using this currently, do you want to kick off this section?
256. 00:20:34 Sure.
257. 00:20:35 Do you want me to try to cover the whole thing or just individual pieces?
258. 00:20:39 Maybe let's just talk about some of the individual pieces and real briefly how they tied together and then we can go into and talk about more detail specific parts of this.
259. 00:20:49 Sure.
260. 00:20:50 So kind of give us the overview.
261. 00:20:51 Yeah. So the piece I think you're talking about, you know, you're referring to drafts and how that plays into your system, but that's, that's one that starts with what writer calls the daily log or rapid logging.
262. 00:21:09 Think of it as your scratch pad for the day.
263. 00:21:13 Now, we like to use drafts. We like to put things into it and then we can action it off and it goes to some other app, which is where the whole digital world can get complex very quickly.
264. 00:21:24 But this is a simple process of having a list of things that you're going to work on that day, but also the ability to add to that new things that come to mind or something I like to do with it too that he recommends is just noting interesting things that happen that day.
265. 00:21:42 Even things like if you have a phone call with someone writing down two or three points of what happened or what you talked about on that phone call afterwards, just kind of as a quick reflection point for that.
266. 00:21:55 It's, it's a place to just record what you're going to do and what happened that day.
267. 00:22:00 And I think this is where, you know, my previous attempts at bullet journaling have fallen down because I didn't really think of this as a notebook that I would keep.
268. 00:22:12 I treated my bullet journal as something that was ephemeral and that would be thrown away when I was done and moved on to the next one.
269. 00:22:21 That's not the case.
270. 00:22:22 And I think that was a light bulb moment for me in this book. And it's one of the reasons I told you before we started this, like, I always do better with systems when I read the book on it.
271. 00:22:31 I think a lot of people are that way. I was the same way with GTD.
272. 00:22:34 Like I was trying to do GTD before I had read the book and how many of us raise your hands have tried that and it didn't work well.
273. 00:22:42 Like, I am definitely one of those. I think this is one of the same deals.
274. 00:22:46 And just knowing that it's a notebook that I'm going to keep throwing the shelf and then reference in the future, I think was a key takeaway.
275. 00:22:55 But yeah, I really like this concept of a daily log. It's just a straight up list of what I'm going to work on today and what happened that day.
276. 00:23:03 All right. Yeah. And the rapid logging, the way this happens is that you have different topics, which identify and describe the content.
277. 00:23:14 And then under those topics and pages, you've got all the bullets for the tasks, which are the things you need to do the event.
278. 00:23:23 So your experiences, notes, information that you don't want to forget. And then it gets into a little bit of like custom bullets and signifiers that you can use.
279. 00:23:31 So there's a whole syntax that goes with this in the book. And this is where I think if you just like watch the video on this, you come away with it and you're like, that's a lot.
280. 00:23:45 I'm not going to do that. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's very fair. Do you do the actual bullets, like the dots?
281. 00:23:52 I suppose you don't have not doing any of this yet because my notebook isn't here.
282. 00:23:56 I can tell you what I have been doing, which is probably a version of bullet journaling, but definitely not what Ryder Carroll is talking about here.
283. 00:24:04 And that is that I have a time block for my entire day. I write down my highlight from Make Time by Jake Knapp, John Zorowski.
284. 00:24:12 And then I jut down up to five tasks that I want to get done that day. And I cap it at five.
285. 00:24:18 And basically what I've been doing is copying that in my notebook that I'm using right now is the Baron Fig Confinata plus size, the James Clear one.
286. 00:24:28 Sure. So it's just a doc read. I bought the James Clear one because it's black and has a shiny cover. It looks cool. That's really it.
287. 00:24:35 And I've been using the rest of the space that I have on those pages for just jotting things down like a daily log.
288. 00:24:43 But I confess that when I jot things down, at first I was thinking about the different types of bullets.
289. 00:24:48 And I eventually just started using standard bullets. And I don't have any place that I'm putting these things yet because I'm still thinking through how these pieces are going to tie together.
290. 00:24:59 Maybe actually that's a good place to lead into the next part of this system unless there was something else you wanted to say about the rapid logging first.
291. 00:25:06 Yeah, I would just say that you don't have like people get caught up on the type of bullets that they're using.
292. 00:25:13 And if you want permission to deviate, I'll give it to you because I don't use it at all.
293. 00:25:20 Uncle Joe says you can.
294. 00:25:21 I've been using Patrick Roan's Dash Plus system for years now, probably five years or so.
295. 00:25:29 I remember reading his article about it when it first came out and I adopted it very quickly after that.
296. 00:25:35 But yes, it's one that I have been using that system for quite some time.
297. 00:25:40 And I just, it's going to be very difficult for me to change my thinking from using dashes to dots.
298. 00:25:47 So I just keep that.
299. 00:25:49 Sure. And I think Ryder Carroll would probably say that that is completely fine based on some of the examples of other people and the customizations they've made to their bullet journals.
300. 00:25:58 But part of the thing that he mentions here with the bullets is that you can mark something as a task, for example, and then you can modify that bullet.
301. 00:26:08 You can make it an X for when it's completed.
302. 00:26:12 You've got like a forward arrow if it's migrated or a backward arrow if it's scheduled.
303. 00:26:16 And those things are being sent then to one of the other pieces to the system, which is the future log.
304. 00:26:24 And that's kind of like your month at a glance. And if you were going to say, "I want to do this thing on this day," you put that in your future log or your collections, which can really just be collected information in any way, shape, or form that you can imagine.
305. 00:26:36 And that part appeals to me the most, I think, out of everything in this system.
306. 00:26:40 That and the daily log, the rapid logging, where the notebook is the place for everything to start.
307. 00:26:46 I like that idea, but the collections really excite me too. I haven't really thought about exactly what my collections are going to be yet.
308. 00:26:53 You sent me a screenshot of what you're doing, and it instantly made me feel like I was just scratching the surface with this stuff, and I've got a lot more work to do.
309. 00:27:03 Sure. Sure. Well, there's a piece in the middle there that's not on the outline. It's actually the monthly log.
310. 00:27:09 Yes.
311. 00:27:10 Yes.
312. 00:27:11 And if you want to put all those pieces together, the future log is your next six months. At least that's the way I set it up.
313. 00:27:18 That's the way he has it as the original setup. So your future log is the next six months.
314. 00:27:25 And it's just purely, what are the big events or the big tasks or projects that you need to do in those months?
315. 00:27:33 Then you have your monthly log, which he puts a single, like he puts the number of the day, so one through 30, 31, or 28, or 29.
316. 00:27:44 So he'll number those all the way down the page and then write a single thing that happened that day that was of importance.
317. 00:27:52 But the opposite side of the spread, he'll keep track of the tasks that he needs to do in that month.
318. 00:27:59 Yes.
319. 00:28:00 And I've ended up using that as kind of my catch-all for tasks that I need to do this month, or aspire to do this month, and then be willing to move those later.
320. 00:28:13 And then move those later in the migration process, which I'll talk about later.
321. 00:28:17 But you do have that future log that then gets migrated into the monthly log, which can then get migrated into the daily log.
322. 00:28:26 But like that you were talking about the collections, that's kind of interesting because it's like a separate list that doesn't really play into.
323. 00:28:32 Like some people have weekly logs. He doesn't mention that as something.
324. 00:28:38 I have actually very few, the ones that I sent you, the pictures of, and I can explain those, but those are part of my monthly.
325. 00:28:46 So I've got setups for things that I track every month.
326. 00:28:51 And there's two different ways that I do that. One, and he talks about it later on, is habit tracking.
327. 00:28:57 There's all kinds of ways that you could draw up or write out ways to track habits.
328. 00:29:03 And I can get a picture of this. Actually, you can use the picture.
329. 00:29:06 And put that into the show notes. But I just have a list of the habits that I want to track.
330. 00:29:14 A number of the days of the month, I just put a dot on the dots in my notebook for the days that I got it done.
331. 00:29:21 And then it's really easy to see a list or a running tally for the month on the ones that the days that I got it done.
332. 00:29:27 And I love that I have kind of a graph where I track my sleep, my mood, and my stress.
333. 00:29:34 Sleep is based on a number of hours. It's a scale from one to ten.
334. 00:29:39 So those are somewhere around eights in the picture Michael put in the show notes.
335. 00:29:45 There's one day if you look at it towards the beginning that says four and a half.
336. 00:29:49 Didn't sleep well that night. Lots and lots of reasons for that.
337. 00:29:54 And if you look through that, that's also the day that you didn't follow through in any of the habits.
338. 00:29:58 Correct. And it was also a day I had some pretty high stress. So yep.
339. 00:30:03 It's a rough day. So, and I have forgotten all the details around why that was.
340. 00:30:09 But whenever I look back at this, it explains quite a bit. But yeah, and the graph, I mean,
341. 00:30:14 I rank my stress levels from one to ten throughout the day. I rank my mood from one to ten throughout the day.
342. 00:30:20 And it's a graph that goes across the top. I got to find the link. This is not something I came up with.
343. 00:30:25 This is something I borrowed from somebody that I ran across on YouTube that had this.
344. 00:30:30 I don't remember when I discovered this, but I definitely like the concept.
345. 00:30:36 So yeah, I'll have to hunt down that link and send it to you. But it's super interesting to track things in that way.
346. 00:30:42 I think anyway, makes it easy to see what's going on for the month.
347. 00:30:45 It's definitely fascinating. And I think that's one of the cool things about the bullet journals that it's flexible.
348. 00:30:52 And there's a lot of people doing a lot of really cool things with it.
349. 00:30:55 I think we mentioned on this show Matt Ragland. He's a YouTuber who he is the bullet journal guy.
350. 00:31:03 And by the time this goes live, he'll actually have a journaling course available.
351. 00:31:07 So we can link to that if people are interested in it.
352. 00:31:10 But even if you just watched some of his videos, he's got some really cool ways that he's implementing some of this stuff.
353. 00:31:16 And what I like about his stuff is that it looks good, but it's not super fancy like a lot of the other stuff that you'll see.
354. 00:31:24 Because you look at some of this stuff and you're like, "Pfft, I can't do that. So I'm not even going to try."
355. 00:31:30 And Ryder does address that in this book too that you don't have to do that.
356. 00:31:35 I want to go back just for a second though. I'm glad you corrected me because this flow, I think this is important to describe.
357. 00:31:41 So basically you're jotting down things in your daily log.
358. 00:31:44 Like let's say you have an idea, you want to figure out what we're going to do for Bookworm Episode 100
359. 00:31:49 because we were chatting about that before we hit the button.
360. 00:31:51 Right.
361. 00:31:52 Okay. So that goes to the daily log. And then you realize that Episode 100 happens sometime later this year.
362. 00:31:57 So then that goes to the future log under that month.
363. 00:32:00 And when you start that month, you go to the monthly log and you transfer those things from your future log onto your monthly log.
364. 00:32:08 And there's actually two pages to that. There's a calendar page and then there's a task page.
365. 00:32:13 The calendar page is all of the events that are going to happen on specific days.
366. 00:32:17 The tasks are just things that you want to get done during that month. Correct? Correct. Good job, Mike.
367. 00:32:22 Yeah. And then I suppose you could take it further like you said and from the monthly.
368. 00:32:26 Go to like a weekly. That was one of the questions that I had for you when we were chatting prior to recording this was.
369. 00:32:33 So GTD is kind of built on this idea of a weekly review. There's no weekly log here.
370. 00:32:38 Do you just do it daily monthly and that's good enough then? And you kind of said, yeah, it is.
371. 00:32:44 Yeah. I think so. I mean, the way writer spells it all out, that's how he's been doing it.
372. 00:32:49 But what I... This is another one of those light bulb moments for me.
373. 00:32:55 I've always struggled with the weekly review. That's why I wrote so much about it whenever I was learning about it.
374. 00:33:00 Because the more I wrote about it, the more I would actually do it. It was kind of a requirement thing for me.
375. 00:33:05 But when you step into this system, yes, people still do weekly reviews and will do a weekly log, but that's not the original design.
376. 00:33:13 And it's one that writer has gone to the daily. He recommends a morning check-in with your bullet journal and an evening check-in.
377. 00:33:26 So when you do those two, you kind of get a view for your week as it is.
378. 00:33:32 And if he's developing this for an ADD brain, the concept of keeping a week's view in sight is not going to help all of you.
379. 00:33:42 It's not going to help a whole lot, at least in my case, I know it doesn't. So I'm sure it's not in him either.
380. 00:33:48 So trying to keep track of that just doesn't work out, I don't think.
381. 00:33:53 But you do have to, you know, on it, when you are doing that daily check-in, whether it's in the morning or night that you're transferring things, doesn't matter.
382. 00:34:00 But you do have to check in with that monthly log when you're doing that to make sure you're actually, you know, doing the things for that month.
383. 00:34:07 Sure. Not just, "Oh, it's a nice collecting zone and all eczemauff later." Like, you know, it doesn't work that way.
384. 00:34:13 Yeah, and this is the thing is I'm thinking about it. I don't see this part of it working for me, where I am sending things to the future log and then to the monthly log and then using those when I'm creating my daily log.
385. 00:34:28 Just because I've built this time blocking practice, which is built on looking at my calendar and then blocking out the hours in my day.
386. 00:34:39 And as I'm thinking about blocking out the time in my day and working around the appointments that I have, I don't see myself not using a digital calendar for that.
387. 00:34:52 And then I've got this task piece and I could have these things in all these different places and I could be moving things back and forth.
388. 00:34:59 Or these could just stay an omni-focus and I could use those start dates to create a perspective that just shows me these things and I limit it to the five and I jot those down in my bullet journal at the beginning of the day.
389. 00:35:12 That appeals to me a lot more, especially with something like a forecast view inside of omni-focus where it can combine those things, which I haven't been real good about using that.
390. 00:35:22 But as I'm thinking through how all the individual pieces work and wanting to work off of the notebook throughout my day, I think that's the piece that that's what I'm going to land on is omni-focus is still going to be there.
391. 00:35:35 That's ultimately where the tasks are going to get scheduled. Those are going to be pulled in with the events into the forecast view, which I'll use at the beginning of my day.
392. 00:35:42 And then as I jot things down in the notebook, transferring those two omni-focus at the end of the day.
393. 00:35:49 And that's the part that's a little bit scary for me.
394. 00:35:53 I think that's the weak spot in my routine right now would be getting those things into the task manager.
395. 00:36:00 But I do think that for me, that's less friction than moving them from place to place to place.
396. 00:36:07 And I get that that's part of the system because it forces you every time you move it to decide if it's really worth doing.
397. 00:36:14 I just am not sure that I am all in with all the different logs.
398. 00:36:22 It makes sense to me to just have one place that has all of those things. But maybe that's just me desperately trying to omni-focus on.
399. 00:36:31 I think it is because, well, there's one more piece to this and then I want to come back to that.
400. 00:36:36 The last piece that we haven't talked about is the index. It's the very beginning where you write down the page number for the things in your bullet journal.
401. 00:36:44 It's exactly like it sounds.
402. 00:36:46 This is another thing I think I'm going to be doing wrong.
403. 00:36:48 You are? Okay.
404. 00:36:50 Yeah, that's why I bought the heirloom journal so I can move the pages around.
405. 00:36:54 I'm hoping to use tabs to indicate the collections and the page numbers. I don't think I'm going to be using.
406. 00:37:00 But we'll see.
407. 00:37:01 The index is the light bulb for the whole thing I find because it means that I don't have to worry about where I put things in the notebook.
408. 00:37:10 I can just go to the next empty page and go without having to try to get it all organized.
409. 00:37:17 It means that, here's an example.
410. 00:37:20 My wife and I were talking about building a wood-fired stove for outside, which means center blocks, masonry work, putting down a concrete foundation for it, etc.
411. 00:37:32 It's quite a bit to it.
412. 00:37:34 Whenever I was working through that, my first thought was, "Well, I need to one design the layout of this thing and then two figure out what materials we're going to cost for it so that we could determine if we wanted to spend that amount of money for it."
413. 00:37:46 Spoiler alert, we decided no. It wasn't worth it.
414. 00:37:49 But what I did in order to figure that out was just flip to the next empty page.
415. 00:37:54 I wrote wood stove project at the top of it and started sketching, just drawing things on that page.
416. 00:38:02 But whenever I finished writing the title, I flipped back to the index, wrote page, I forget what it is, page 18 in the notebook, and wrote the title for that.
417. 00:38:10 And that was it.
418. 00:38:11 It's just there.
419. 00:38:13 Now, if I'm ever referencing that or want to look back on that, I just go to the index, find it, and go to that page.
420. 00:38:20 As opposed to trying to figure out what order did I put things in, that's the beauty of it, I think, is write your future log, get it, draw it out, go back, put it in the index.
421. 00:38:31 Put your monthly log together, go back, put it in the index.
422. 00:38:35 The thing he doesn't say to put in the index is your daily log. That's where he recommends using the bookmarks that come with most notebooks today, which is exactly what I do.
423. 00:38:45 There's one of them, the striped one in the look term, always is my daily where I need to be at.
424. 00:38:51 To me, the index is something that ties a lot of it together.
425. 00:38:56 But I think the piece you're struggling with that I want to come back to is this migration step.
426. 00:39:02 Before you get there, let me just explain the index, because I want to get your perspective on this.
427. 00:39:08 The reason that I went with the journal that I did is, just like you said, next blank page, you can jot down whatever.
428. 00:39:16 And my solution to this problem, which appears a lot more elegant in my brain, is not going back and creating an index for that, but popping that page out and putting it in the appropriate section indicated by a tab for that particular collection.
429. 00:39:31 And again, I don't know exactly what I'm going to use for the tabs in this notebook, but that appeals to me a lot more than having a bunch of random numbers all over the place.
430. 00:39:41 I get that that works to go find things, but it feels to me like that's a limitation that is present in a bound journal and does doing it, like being able to rearrange those things in order.
431. 00:39:59 Does that appeal to you at all?
432. 00:40:01 No.
433. 00:40:02 And that's because, okay, here's a question for you.
434. 00:40:07 What am I missing?
435. 00:40:08 Yeah, so here's a question for you.
436. 00:40:10 The purpose for the rapid logging piece and the daily log and different aspects of this, the monthly history log, with those particular pieces, some of what you are recording is a history of what happened that day and how you're feeling about it.
437. 00:40:28 I've got a number of notes in mine already on day to day about, you know, why did I only sleep four and a half hours at night? Why was that day so stressful?
438. 00:40:38 And, you know, maybe depending on how I spelled it out, I have notes about what I should do differently next time or like a reflection point about it.
439. 00:40:47 But that ends up in the daily log.
440. 00:40:49 My journal prompting goes into my daily log as well, just so it's all tied together and all in one spot.
441. 00:40:54 My question for you is, you know, if you have that viewpoint, you're saving these notebooks in perpetuity.
442. 00:41:03 You're not going to be getting rid of these.
443. 00:41:05 They become a history of your life in some way.
444. 00:41:09 That's the way that, you know, at least that's the way that writer Carol presented it to me in the bullet journal method.
445. 00:41:15 And that's what clicked for me.
446. 00:41:16 In your system, if you're moving things around and you have the ability to put them in order, how do you maintain that history?
447. 00:41:27 And when you pull things out of that, does that mean you have to buy a bunch of the little discs and a bunch of these in order to maintain them?
448. 00:41:34 Like, what does that look like?
449. 00:41:35 Yeah.
450. 00:41:36 No, good question.
451. 00:41:37 And to be honest, I don't know.
452. 00:41:38 I had the same thought because I'm like, I'm not just going to keep adding things to this discount journal.
453. 00:41:44 It's not going to be three feet thick.
454. 00:41:46 You know what I mean?
455. 00:41:48 Right.
456. 00:41:49 It's the only thing that I can bring in my backpack.
457. 00:41:50 Right.
458. 00:41:51 Go ahead.
459. 00:41:52 But I also think that, like he talks about the migration process, maybe we can start talking here.
460. 00:42:00 Like you go through a notebook and then you start a new notebook and that forces you to migrate things.
461. 00:42:06 And that's kind of like a cutting away of all of the things that don't really matter anymore.
462. 00:42:11 So in essence, the one that you're done with, that becomes the archive that goes on your shelf.
463. 00:42:15 And that I don't like either.
464. 00:42:19 So my thought, again, who knows whether this is actually how this is going to play out.
465. 00:42:25 But I'm thinking that I've got these different collections and I've got the logs, the daily logs for however long.
466. 00:42:33 And I don't know exactly how many are going to be, like how often I'll have to cycle through these.
467. 00:42:38 But at some point, I anticipate that I am archiving these things and I'm taking these pages out.
468. 00:42:43 And I'm hanging onto them, but I'm not going to be looking at them frequently at least.
469. 00:42:49 And I want to, as part of this process, start digitizing these notes as well and sticking them inside of something like day one or good notes.
470. 00:42:58 Again, I haven't exactly landed on where this should go.
471. 00:43:01 It seems to me that day one is a good spot for this because I could create just like a digital journal.
472. 00:43:07 Everything that I wrote on a specific day, just snap a picture, OCR it, I can go back, I can search and I can find that stuff later inside of day one if I need it.
473. 00:43:17 But in my actual notebook is all of the active stuff.
474. 00:43:20 And then as I'm working on the different collections and the wood fire pizza oven gets archived, I take that whole collection out of the notebook and make room for something else.
475. 00:43:30 Does that make sense?
476. 00:43:32 Yes, but I think you're bypassing one of the most important parts by doing all that because the migration piece he calls out as something that's super important in all of this.
477. 00:43:43 So much so that he'll tell you that if you're going to do this, do it at least 30 days because that forces you to get to the point where you're doing the monthly migration and that's the point at which things click.
478. 00:43:55 Yep, the core component with the migration is to give you the chance to review each task or each item on your logs and decide is it important enough to carry it over and rewrite it.
479. 00:44:13 If the answer is no, it's not even worth rewriting, then you're culling it from your entire system.
480. 00:44:21 The process you're talking about with just moving pages around so that you don't have to rewrite your monthly logs that bypasses that whole process of reexamining the tasks you have in there.
481. 00:44:33 This is an issue I've had with OmniFocus and I didn't realize it.
482. 00:44:36 It's what the weekly review is designed to combat and that's reviewing all of the things that you have in your system to make sure that you actually still want to do them.
483. 00:44:46 But again, raise your hands if you've done the weekly review gone through that whole system and you're just glancing at them and saying, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, just so you can get it finished without actually deciding again.
484. 00:45:00 If I have to actually write the thing out, I'm much more likely to have that conversation because I really don't want to rewrite it.
485. 00:45:08 I've even seen that with the daily log. The number of times I've written lists of things to do for the day and I will bust my tail to get those done because I really don't want to rewrite it for tomorrow.
486. 00:45:19 It's just enough to get me to do more.
487. 00:45:23 It's nuts how that all works out. But I feel like you're skipping that if you don't rewrite it, Mike.
488. 00:45:28 I am and you hit the nail on the head because I do think that the review feature and OmniFocus is the thing that allows you to check in with the things and you're right that that is a temptation to just say, oh, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I'm done.
489. 00:45:41 I would be lying if I said I never did that, but I also think that process of using custom review intervals inside of OmniFocus, so you're not reviewing everything every week, but you have a project to check in every two months, whether this is something you still want to do or whatever, and then it shows you the appropriate things at the appropriate time.
490. 00:46:08 I feel like that's where OmniFocus really shines and I was also thinking, so back up just a little bit, like for example, I know other people do like a hybrid system.
491. 00:46:20 Sean Blonk does a hybrid system with an analog notebook and he uses things and one of the things I don't like about things is that there is no really weekly review feature like that where you can check in on the projects.
492. 00:46:34 You have to go through everything and I don't know, maybe I just need to just need to give it a shot with the bullet journal, but I feel like that process that you described of having to rewrite the things, that would be in that would just make me really angry.
493. 00:46:51 And I get like that's an incentive and a motivation for you.
494. 00:46:55 I feel like for me that would cause me to just be like, no, I'm not going to do this anymore.
495. 00:47:01 So I'm a little bit worried about that.
496. 00:47:03 That might be the difference between an ADD brain and someone who's not like a normal brain.
497. 00:47:11 That might be the difference there.
498. 00:47:13 Don't call me normal.
499. 00:47:14 But yes, that might be why because I will just naturally have tons and tons of ideas and things I will write down that go into this.
500. 00:47:27 I have had a couple daily logs that fill an entire page and I've seen other people's daily logs that are like four or five lines.
501. 00:47:35 How do you do that?
502. 00:47:37 My brain runs way too fast.
503. 00:47:39 It's like I had a psychologist tell me it's like, oh, you just have a Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes.
504. 00:47:44 Like, yep, yep, that's about right.
505. 00:47:47 So it works.
506. 00:47:48 It's a great description.
507. 00:47:49 So yes, I think you're going to be skipping some of the important pieces if you don't rewrite it.
508. 00:47:55 But maybe that's not something that you find you really need because you can reevaluate it just by looking at it without the pain of having to rewrite it.
509. 00:48:04 Well, I don't know.
510. 00:48:06 I feel like the last 12 months specifically, we've talked a lot about and I have done a lot of work on culling the things that I should not be doing.
511. 00:48:22 And I feel like the migration process, as he describes it in this book, is a system or a framework which helps you to keep the important things, the important things.
512. 00:48:36 And maybe it's just because I feel like I've had some success in this area lately where it almost feels like I don't really need that right now.
513. 00:48:48 Maybe that's not true. Maybe I'm looking at this through rose color glasses and because I don't practice the migration, this whole thing falls apart.
514. 00:48:57 But the value for me, I think, is in the rapid logging and the analog tools and the curating the collections and thinking things through on paper.
515. 00:49:10 Again, if I were to just go all in with the strict bullet journal method, that means that most of my favorite apps I don't use anymore.
516. 00:49:20 And that makes me a little uncomfortable to tell you.
517. 00:49:25 We were talking before we hit record on a mine node and how notes from books that you read, that could be a collection, a custom collection inside of your bullet journal.
518. 00:49:34 Could be, but I've got hundreds of these things at this point, and I'm really happy with the system that I've landed on.
519. 00:49:41 So I don't want to look for a different way to organize that information.
520. 00:49:48 So now I've got this digital piece, which is going to remain a part of my workflow and how do I make bullet journal work with that?
521. 00:49:56 How do I maximize the benefit from this system, which is really appealing to me, but still use my node for capturing all of my book notes and writing my articles and stuff like that?
522. 00:50:08 I don't really know. I think I need to play around with this a little bit more.
523. 00:50:12 I do think, by the way, on the topic of my maps in particular, that as soon as I start doing the rapid logging inside of my daily templates that I've been doing,
524. 00:50:25 that all of a sudden I will start doing some mind maps on paper and not going to the app because it's right there and it's going to be something simple and I just got to get it onto the paper and out of my brain.
525. 00:50:38 I'd fully anticipate that happening, but I am uncomfortable with the thought of leaving all of these things behind.
526. 00:50:46 It's tough for me to decide which ones to keep and which ones to let go. I am not naive enough to think that I can make everything work.
527. 00:50:57 If I'm going to try and do this, it's going to have to replace some things. I've got to keep this as simple as possible, but there's a lot I like about my current system that I don't want to chuck because this worked for writer Carol, if that makes sense.
528. 00:51:12 I'm not going to get your exploring Rome research.
529. 00:51:15 I know. I know. Again, because he talked one little section in here about the threading of the collections.
530. 00:51:22 I thought that was brilliant the way that he did it, paper pencil or paper pen, how you can tie these things together and go from one collection to the next collection to the next collection and they're all related.
531. 00:51:32 I'm not sure how that's really cool. There's got to be a digital way to do that. Rome's the big thing right now. Everybody's talking about it.
532. 00:51:42 Just so happened, my friend Brandon was talking to me about it this morning and he's like, "Hey, if you're familiar with this, I'm like, "Well, yeah, I'm familiar with it, but I really don't get it."
533. 00:51:49 He walked me through it and showed me some of the stuff that he's doing. I was like, "Wow, this is pretty cool."
534. 00:51:54 I don't know where all this fits. I don't even know how much Rome is going to cost once it comes out of beta. So that's another factor.
535. 00:52:02 But if you're not capturing every note inside of drafts, for example, do you still pay a draft subscription?
536. 00:52:11 I don't know. I think for me it probably makes sense because there are places where I'm not bringing my notebook and I got to capture some things, but I don't know how all this stuff ties together yet.
537. 00:52:21 I got to get this notebook in my hands. I feel like not having the page numbers and the ability to move things around, especially for me at the beginning, is going to give me the ability to try some things and not feel like I've wasted the whole notebook when I mess something up.
538. 00:52:34 Sure. I can just pop that page out and try something else.
539. 00:52:37 Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. I know that for me, I like having just a single notebook, but I've been carrying a notebook like this for years now, so it's not a new thing.
540. 00:52:48 I've had a reading material book and a notebook in my backpack for at least three and a half, maybe four years, three years somewhere in there.
541. 00:53:01 This is not a new process. I even bought my latest backpack as a peak design everyday backpack.
542. 00:53:09 I love that thing, but I bought it with specifically knowing how I would carry my books with me.
543. 00:53:18 That was a core component of searching for a backpack. It was super important to me.
544. 00:53:23 Right. Lots of moving pieces here. I do want to talk about some of the custom collection stuff. That's addressed in part four though.
545. 00:53:31 Before we get there, maybe we should talk briefly about part number three, which is the practice.
546. 00:53:37 There's basically a whole bunch of productivity principles that he talks about in here. Lots of cool personal stories.
547. 00:53:44 I don't want to try to go through all of these, but there's a couple things that kind of jumped out to me.
548. 00:53:48 I will say at the beginning of this section and then also part four where he talks about the art, there's like a two page spread, which is handwritten.
549. 00:53:58 It talks about some of the key concepts. These pages are awesome. These look amazing. I really like these.
550. 00:54:05 It's one of the notes I have written down is that the makeup of this book is fantastic.
551. 00:54:13 I'll talk more about it when we get to style and reading because I think it plays into that. The way that this book is put together is phenomenal.
552. 00:54:20 Yes. It's really well done. It is a long book for sure, but it's a really easy read. Lots of pictures, lots of diagrams, which make it very easy to understand the concepts and how everything ties together.
553. 00:54:35 There's lots of images in this mine node file. But in this section, there's a lot of things that we have discussed before.
554. 00:54:45 He talks about goals. He talks about time. He talks about flow. Mention's our boy, Mihaly, Memento Mori, which we talked about in the last book.
555. 00:54:55 A couple of specific things from here that jumped out to me. Number one, he talks about goals. I don't really like goals. We've talked about that previously.
556. 00:55:07 We don't need to spend a whole lot of time there. It's worth going out, though, that I did disagree with him a little bit on the value of the goals.
557. 00:55:14 But I do like how he breaks him down. He has a really good section, though, on reacting versus responding, in my opinion, and the difference between those two, where reacting is instinctual, responding is intentional.
558. 00:55:30 In my opinion, I feel like this perfectly encapsulates what the bullet journal method is all about, because by logging all of these things and forcing yourself to slow down, you are able to see things the right way, and you are able to not just react, but you are able to respond intentionally and appropriately
559. 00:55:49 because the process of transferring the things down onto the page helps you work through things. Anything in this section that really jumped out to you, I've got a couple other points here.
560. 00:56:01 I don't think so. The big piece that I like about the way he did this is he has to intro the book, but you could tell he just wants to get straight to the system. He just wants to, but he has to lay some groundwork first.
561. 00:56:18 So he does that at the beginning. Then he explains the entire system. Then he explains the practice of using that system, which is where we're at right now, and all of this, which I feel like has a lot of core productivity tenants that I think he's including because this is designed for people who are brand new to the world of productivity.
562. 00:56:39 I think he does a phenomenal job with that. Then he gets into the art and the detail, the subtleties that go into using the system. So I think he laid it out really well, but this particular piece in the practice, I didn't have anything in this section that really
563. 00:56:56 stood out to me that I really, really, really wanted to talk about because I feel like it's a lot of things we've talked about already in the past.
564. 00:57:02 Sure. Well, there is a section here on rubber ducking. Do you do this as a developer? Totally.
565. 00:57:10 Rubber ducking is solving a problem by verbalizing the problem to a rubber duck. So just the process of explaining things, things coming out of your mouth. You see them for what they really are, and you see the solutions to the problems, which is really good.
566. 00:57:26 You made a comment, which I didn't think about of this being like a productivity primer sort of a thing. I didn't think of it that way when I read this.
567. 00:57:35 But maybe that's just because of where it is, where it comes after the system. I feel like if this was, if you really was trying to create a productivity primer, like a book for people who had no experience with productivity, the content in this section is written that way, and it's really good, in my opinion.
568. 00:57:54 But maybe I just based on the other books that we've read, we would expect that sort of stuff, the why to come before the how in the system.
569. 00:58:03 So maybe like flipping part two and part three around. Now that I see it that way, it does feel a little bit weird that he walks through all the specifics of the system and then tries to explain why it all works.
570. 00:58:15 I feel like maybe some of this stuff could have been at the beginning, but I'd never even had that thought until you shared it right now.
571. 00:58:25 So I don't think it necessarily needs to be. I feel like it gives you enough to keep you engaged as you go through this.
572. 00:58:33 But maybe if you were coming to this and you just have an absolute disdain for productivity books and you want to, it might be worth jumping to part three and reading some of these concepts before digging into the specifics of the system.
573. 00:58:46 I could see that as a viable approach as well.
574. 00:58:49 I see this is kind of a, it's similar to the GTD approach. So when David Allen wrote, "Getting Things Done," he starts that whole process by helping you get your day to day and week to week tasks under control and then works his way up to helping you figure out what your life mission is.
575. 00:59:07 So he starts ground level and then works his way up. I feel like this is the same thing.
576. 00:59:12 He really needs to talk about the system at the beginning because that's what people are after. And it's one of the main reasons I think people pick up the book is so if they can understand those pieces a little bit better.
577. 00:59:22 So it's like, okay, they're going to jump into that. If I put it in part three or part four, they're going to go read that part first and then come back to the rest of it.
578. 00:59:31 I think that's just how people would read it. I don't know. I think you're right. It probably feels a little weird.
579. 00:59:37 If you see it as it's good to have a productivity primer before you explain the system, but I think given the popularity of the bullet journal process, I don't know that he could have done it the other way.
580. 00:59:50 I'm not sure his editor would have allowed him to do it.
581. 00:59:52 Well, it feels a little bit weird between the system and the art where he talks about some of the custom collection stuff, but I'm not quite ready to go into that section yet.
582. 01:00:03 There's a couple of things I wanted to call out here. There's a reflection section, which I think we probably talked enough about that in other episodes. We don't need to dig into that a whole lot, but I do admit that I want to incorporate some sort of reflection into my bullet journal.
583. 01:00:19 Again, I've got to work through what that looks like. I've got the template set up inside of day one. I honestly love doing it that way, but I get the value of pieces of that being sprinkled into the bullet journal itself.
584. 01:00:35 Then if I'm going to be doing it there instead, do I take a picture, store it in day one so I can go back and find that stuff later? Because I do do that occasionally where I go back and I search through those things and review those things.
585. 01:00:49 One of the things that I've been bad at doing consistently, but I totally see the value and is going back and reviewing all of your old journal entries. I feel like that's way easier to do if you are using day one rather than a bunch of notebooks on a shelf.
586. 01:01:04 That's probably justification for wanting to do things the way that I'm doing them too. Maybe that's not as big a deal as I'm making in my head.
587. 01:01:12 A big piece of that though I think is gratitude. That specifically I want to incorporate into my daily log.
588. 01:01:20 He calls it a daily log. For me, it's more like a daily spread. It's like a custom design thing where I get to use my fancy fountain pens to design it every day.
589. 01:01:30 I'm completely okay with that even though it takes me a couple minutes just to jot down the individual pieces. It brings me joy in doing that.
590. 01:01:37 Then mentioning the rapid logging being a part of that. I think the gratitude section as I read through this, I realize that that's a piece that I want to plug in.
591. 01:01:47 Then he's got a section on Radiance. This is where my other action item, really the one that I jotted down other than tri-bullet journaling.
592. 01:01:55 He talks about logging your interactions. The whole idea behind Radiance is that he defines it as it's the ability to control the world around us.
593. 01:02:04 You can't control the people around you, but you can influence them and the people that you surround yourself with will shape you.
594. 01:02:12 Again, great images and examples of these types of logs where he just journals real briefly a couple of sentences about an interaction that he had.
595. 01:02:23 Then you're able to remember the specifics of how it went last time you met this person for dinner or for coffee or whatever.
596. 01:02:31 I totally see the value in that sort of thing. That's something I want to start doing.
597. 01:02:36 That's probably just going to be inside of the daily log as I do that inside of my notebook whenever it comes.
598. 01:02:43 Right. Which is where I do it. I do that same process whenever I have a phone call or I've got a meeting of sorts.
599. 01:02:51 I've got that in the daily log with the time so I know that it's happening that day as an event.
600. 01:02:56 But underneath of that, I usually or somewhere in the daily log will write the notes of two or three things that were important about that in my opinion on it.
601. 01:03:06 I think there is some value in that. But again, this is important so that when you do that reflection process, you can...
602. 01:03:14 How did that go? How did I feel about it? Was I happy with that interaction? Did Mike drive me absolutely crazy when I recorded Bookword with him?
603. 01:03:22 Or did I really enjoy doing that? We won't answer that question. But this is a process that I think is super, super helpful.
604. 01:03:30 I think one of the things... I kind of get the feeling from you that you're trying to maybe systematize it a little bit too far.
605. 01:03:42 Because I think one of the things I picked up from reading this is the purpose of this is to have a notebook that you go spend time with to slow you down so that you can think things through more effectively and reflect on things more fully.
606. 01:03:59 But if you're trying to systematize it just a bit too far and digitize things so you can find it later, that kind of defeats the purpose.
607. 01:04:08 Sure. Not entirely, but it skirts around the intent a little bit. Does that make sense?
608. 01:04:16 It does. I think that's completely fair. My question then would be, I guess, how do you plan to incorporate reflection into what you capture here? Is it just going to be part of the migration process?
609. 01:04:32 And that's enough? Or are you going to do something extra? I am staying loose with it. So what I have been doing is my brain runs a million miles a minute.
610. 01:04:45 So what happens is there are times either recently it's been a couple daily, but it's not always where I'll just kind of flip back through my other daily logs and check, look through the past of the monthly log, like the history piece of that.
611. 01:05:03 I just kind of flip back through it and see, wait, how did that go again? Something will trigger a memory and I want to go check and remember what was my thought on that meeting.
612. 01:05:14 When I finished that meeting, what was my original thought about it? Because some new thought may have come up about that. So it's not scheduled. It's not on a routine.
613. 01:05:25 It's just as I feel the need to look back on things. And I expect that to happen from a monthly and annual stance too. I'm sure whenever I migrate to a new notebook, I'm going to have an interest in just kind of flipping through the old one.
614. 01:05:40 I think that would seem of interest to me and I'm sure that'll have some form of a positive effect in some form. So I don't know. I don't think I'd want to put it on a schedule. I just want it to be an option.
615. 01:05:51 Sure. And that makes sense. But I feel like it's missing some key pieces. Like, for example, when I want to go back and reflect on things, things that have happened, it's great to have a couple of notes that I jotted down.
616. 01:06:09 Something cool that happened. But you know what's better than that? A picture or a video, which I've been taking a lot of with my family while we've all been home together.
617. 01:06:20 It's kind of amazing to me some of the photos and videos we've been able to get. And that's the type of thing that I want to capture as well. And that's super easy to throw that in a day one journal.
618. 01:06:34 And having that in line with all of the text and things, I feel like I want all that stuff together in order to serve the purpose that I see that playing in my workflow, I guess, feels weird to even say workflow.
619. 01:06:52 Because not just working anymore. It's all of the feels, all of the emotions associated with the things, which is really what we're getting into. We're like this reflection stuff and mindfulness and yada yada yada.
620. 01:07:03 So I don't, again, I don't know how to connect all these pieces yet. But I feel like the pictures and the videos, that's something that I would want stored in the same location as all this stuff right alongside my notes from whatever day, all the pictures that I took from that day as well.
621. 01:07:17 And just doing it in a notebook, obviously, I'm going to lose that.
622. 01:07:23 I think there's two different ways that people come at, like, logging their history as it happens. One is people want everything in one place, like what you're talking about, which I think is why day one has been so successful because it is that.
623. 01:07:38 It is awesome at keeping track of everything that's gone on. There's all kinds of scripts and recipes and things where people can automatically enter things into day one. That's why.
624. 01:07:49 But there's another world where people have different types and they review those different types as they need.
625. 01:07:57 I fall into that category because I would like to keep all of my text notes separate from my pictures and videos.
626. 01:08:05 So, yes, I'll review my and reflect on my bullet journal on occasion.
627. 01:08:11 But I do that same thing flipping through the photos app on my phone or on my Mac.
628. 01:08:16 But I do those separately. I don't necessarily want to do those together. If I run across a date and it's like, you know, I wonder what all I did that day.
629. 01:08:24 Then I would grab my notebook and flip to that day and see what all happened then, as opposed to the other way around.
630. 01:08:30 I want those separate, but I know a lot of people want them together.
631. 01:08:36 So, I think there's just two different ways of coming at that one.
632. 01:08:39 Yeah, no, that's fair. To be honest, the less I'm on social media, the more I want to create that sort of thing inside a day one.
633. 01:08:48 It's kind of like my own personal social media with just happy stuff.
634. 01:08:52 Sure, yeah.
635. 01:08:53 I can avoid all the negativity and everything else. I can avoid the algorithm and what they think I want to see and all the coronavirus updates.
636. 01:09:04 I can just see the happy memories.
637. 01:09:06 Yeah, for sure.
638. 01:09:07 No, that makes sense. I get why people like it. I'm not downplaying that.
639. 01:09:10 I just know that it doesn't work for me. It's too much of one place and I become too locked into it and I never do like that.
640. 01:09:18 Sure. Well, I guess maybe that would be the place to start talking about how we're going to do this.
641. 01:09:24 Before we get there, we have to talk a little bit about these custom collections just real briefly.
642. 01:09:29 You mentioned something that you were doing. We'll put the link in the show notes for that.
643. 01:09:33 That's a great example of a custom collection.
644. 01:09:37 He gives not a whole bunch of examples here, but a couple of sources for these custom collections, things like goals or challenges or tasks.
645. 01:09:46 Like lists that you want to create, schedules, trackers, those sorts of things.
646. 01:09:51 There's a mission statement in this section for something he recommends you put at the top of your custom collections, which I think this is pretty valuable.
647. 01:10:01 The formula is basically, I want to what so that I can why by how.
648. 01:10:09 It just forces you to answer some of those questions, which again is the whole purpose of this method is to get you to think about being mindful and intentional and choosing the right things.
649. 01:10:20 But if you were to just grab this formula and fill in those blanks, it kind of forces you to think that way.
650. 01:10:26 I think that's really cool.
651. 01:10:28 This is why I like the idea of the tabs because I think if you create that mission statement as part of it, and I don't think I'm going to copy that mission statement exactly.
652. 01:10:37 But as part of these collections for whatever projects and I'm jotting down notes and mind maps and whatever else, like there's one project in particular that I am going to create right away, I know as soon as I get my notebook.
653. 01:10:50 That this forces you to kind of crystallize why you're working on the thing in the first place, but also once that's there, I think it's easy to see when this thing is kind of, it's time has passed and it's easy to using my system, remove that archive it, put it somewhere else.
654. 01:11:06 But that's not exactly the way that he would explain to do it.
655. 01:11:10 He would just say add these things to your collection.
656. 01:11:12 And then as you were mentioning with the migration process, that's the point that you filter these things.
657. 01:11:17 And if it's not important anymore, it doesn't transfer over to the next notebook.
658. 01:11:21 That's kind of terrifying to me, by the way, to create a huge custom collection for a big project.
659. 01:11:26 And then you run out of space in your notebook, so you get a new one, and then you've got to recopy all of that.
660. 01:11:32 Maybe it's 20 different pages.
661. 01:11:33 Because the project I'm thinking about, that's probably not too far off, the amount of information that's going to be in this collection.
662. 01:11:41 And not looking forward to rewriting.
663. 01:11:45 I wouldn't rewrite it.
664. 01:11:47 I would just put the threading process.
665. 01:11:50 And for me, if I've got a big project like that.
666. 01:11:52 Even if it's in a different notebook, you just be like, go look at the other notebook.
667. 01:11:56 Well, he has a, so the threading piece, you know, there's a couple ways you can do it.
668. 01:12:02 So you got the page numbers at the bottom of each page, of course.
669. 01:12:07 If I turn to page, what am I looking at?
670. 01:12:11 If I turn to page 10, this will be a good example.
671. 01:12:14 So one of the custom collections that I'm running is just a list of books I've read.
672. 01:12:18 And I just started it whenever I started this particular bullet journal.
673. 01:12:21 So it starts with the bullet journal method.
674. 01:12:24 And that particular collection, I know, will eventually fill up the two pages, pages 10 and 11 that it sits on.
675. 01:12:31 Whenever I move to another page, it could be in the same notebook.
676. 01:12:35 So at the bottom of page 11, you would put a slash to the right of 11 and then write the page number of where it picks up on the next one.
677. 01:12:45 So if it picks up on page 85, I would have 11 slash 85.
678. 01:12:49 I guess it'd be 84, but you get the point, like you're just telling yourself where to go to get the next and then you add that to your index.
679. 01:12:57 If you go to a different notebook, generally people number these in some form.
680. 01:13:04 Like for me, the way I would number the notebook that I just started would be 20.1.
681. 01:13:10 Because it's the first notebook in 2020 that I've started with the bullet journal method.
682. 01:13:14 If I go to another one, it would be 20.2. Next year, it would be 21.1.
683. 01:13:19 You get the point.
684. 01:13:20 You would do that same process in your threading.
685. 01:13:23 So page 10 in there slash 20.1 dash page 85 in the next in the previous notebook or in the one in the future.
686. 01:13:33 That's how that would work.
687. 01:13:34 It's kind of complicated to explain, but if you see it, it's pretty simple.
688. 01:13:39 But if I've got a big project like that, like what you're talking about, Mike, and it's going to carry over for two notebooks, I'm probably going to carry both notebooks with me for a little while until that project's complete.
689. 01:13:52 But that would also tell me that if I have a project that's so big, that it's going to take me 9, 12, 18 months to get it finished, I probably didn't break it down far enough.
690. 01:14:02 Sure. Like that's another indicator, so it probably shouldn't become that huge.
691. 01:14:08 Anyway, those are my thoughts. I don't think I would have that issue. I wouldn't rewrite it.
692. 01:14:13 Well, I wouldn't bring a second notebook for sure, but I think your point about the size of the project being too big if it's carrying over between notebooks and you use like one-quarter, for example, which I can't remember, but I think I remember him suggesting that.
693. 01:14:27 Yeah. Where even if you're not to the end of it by the end of the quarter, you start a new one or am I making that up?
694. 01:14:32 At the end of the year. So he recommends starting a new one in January 1, regardless of where you're at.
695. 01:14:38 Okay. I think that is definitely a fair argument to make.
696. 01:14:46 But I don't know. Maybe it's just because of some recent projects that have been going on for a long time, like the Intentional Family Podcast that Rachel and I finally started in the middle of this lockdown thing.
697. 01:15:02 We've been talking about that for years, so that would have been if I had been bullet journaling.
698. 01:15:07 Probably the last 18 months, I would have different bits and pieces pertaining to that project. And how many notebooks would that have had to be?
699. 01:15:16 How many notebooks would I have had to carry around or have had to transfer stuff?
700. 01:15:22 I don't know. That's probably cherry picking one example and most of them are not going to fall into that category.
701. 01:15:30 So it's really not that big a deal. But it is the way my brain works and why I want a little bit of flexibility to say, "No, I grab this whole section and keep it in there, and this one's no longer important, so I'll archive that one."
702. 01:15:43 Sure.
703. 01:15:44 Yadda yadda.
704. 01:15:45 No, I get it. I get it.
705. 01:15:46 Coming back to Custom Collections, just, you know, here's some of them I have.
706. 01:15:50 So I've got like the books to read or books I've read, completed books.
707. 01:15:54 I will create one, like a page, I don't know if I'd call it a custom collection, but it's a page where I keep my notes on the books I'm reading.
708. 01:16:03 So each one of them will have its own page. I'll keep track of my blog post ideas now.
709. 01:16:08 I've kind of been migrating like some of the someday maybe stuff from OmniFocus is kind of falling into this category.
710. 01:16:15 I know I need to be careful with that because you can get to where you're capturing too many different things, but I had the same problem in OmniFocus.
711. 01:16:22 There's that. I mentioned the Woodstove project.
712. 01:16:25 The other one that I've been keeping is kind of a running thing. It's a temporary thing.
713. 01:16:30 Improvements to make to our Sunday morning live streaming.
714. 01:16:34 Like I run across things that we've done incorrectly or things I'd like to change whenever I review those recordings.
715. 01:16:41 And I just keep track of the things we want to improve on.
716. 01:16:45 And then I'm looking at it about once a week or so, you know, every four or five days and then, you know,
717. 01:16:50 creating real action is out of them that go on to the daily log.
718. 01:16:53 So that's how I'm using it right now. I'm sure it could become something a lot more than that.
719. 01:16:58 But that's how I'm starting.
720. 01:17:00 I like that. I think the ideas make a ton of sense.
721. 01:17:06 And that was one thought that I had to for a custom collection was just ideas for blog posts that I want to write,
722. 01:17:13 podcasts that I'm going to record, whatever, different projects.
723. 01:17:17 Just having a place to capture all of those because capturing the ideas into OmniFocus,
724. 01:17:22 that has been a big part of my idea system as of late.
725. 01:17:26 But it always has felt like there's a little bit more friction there than is necessary.
726. 01:17:32 But I do understand the value of being able to click on the button and see all the ideas and just pick one.
727. 01:17:38 I do think that capturing those pen and paper will feel a lot better, though.
728. 01:17:43 And probably means that I capture more ideas into that custom collection.
729. 01:17:49 And again, I haven't done anything with this yet.
730. 01:17:52 The other one that I was really thinking about was the habit tracking one,
731. 01:17:57 seeing your example and some other ones that people have created.
732. 01:18:01 I like that idea of tracking the habits.
733. 01:18:05 Interestingly, the James Clear Fair and Fig I'm using has a habit tracker built into it that I have never used.
734. 01:18:12 But I think that's partly because it's pre-made.
735. 01:18:17 And if I were to decide this is something I really want to track, it's important.
736. 01:18:22 And I wrote it out in my own bullet journal system that I would probably follow through with it,
737. 01:18:29 as opposed to just having it be something that I could go use, but I don't.
738. 01:18:35 That's the interesting thing about a lot of this stuff, by the way,
739. 01:18:39 compared to the Baron Fig that I'm currently using, is it's kind of James's version of something like a bullet journal.
740. 01:18:47 But I've never used any of it because it wasn't custom.
741. 01:18:51 It was just like, here's what James Clear recommends that you do.
742. 01:18:56 So I resisted it from day one and just been using the docrid pages in the middle.
743. 01:19:00 Nice.
744. 01:19:01 So I do think that once I start doing this myself, that it is going to be quite a bit stickier.
745. 01:19:08 But I'm not 100% sure as to which custom collections are going to fit there.
746. 01:19:18 This is the beauty of the bullet journal system, in my opinion,
747. 01:19:22 is that there are so many different ways to do this sort of thing.
748. 01:19:25 And I'm a little bit intimidated to go start researching some of the other stuff that people have done.
749. 01:19:29 But I know that I need to do that before I start before my notebook gets here and kind of land on a couple,
750. 01:19:36 at least custom collections that I want to want to keep doing.
751. 01:19:39 I do have a question for you regarding this.
752. 01:19:43 Maybe this is getting into like how we're going to bullet journal section.
753. 01:19:46 But I also am trying to reconcile like all of the rapid logging and capturing the feelings and the emotions that are happening at the moment.
754. 01:19:58 Kind of reminds me of the morning pages.
755. 01:20:03 Are you planning to incorporate any sort of morning pages into your bullet journal?
756. 01:20:08 I, at that level, no, not at that extreme, you know, right three pages and call it good.
757. 01:20:17 But what I have been doing is writing like a goal for the day.
758. 01:20:23 Make sure the stage is completely set for Sunday.
759. 01:20:26 Now I may have three or four actions underneath of that that it takes to accomplish that.
760. 01:20:31 But I will set up like a goal for the day at the beginning of that daily log,
761. 01:20:36 but not really anything on the level of morning pages.
762. 01:20:40 No.
763. 01:20:41 Okay.
764. 01:20:42 I find myself resisting the idea of the morning pages, but every time I revisit it,
765. 01:20:48 I feel like it makes a ton of sense.
766. 01:20:50 Sure.
767. 01:20:51 I feel like the rapid logging maybe forces you to take that approach throughout your day.
768. 01:20:58 So you're capturing stream of conscious thought, but not as long form and not as contained as this is the first thing that I do in the morning.
769. 01:21:09 And I get that Julia Cameron would say, well, that's the value in it as you do it first and it primes the pump.
770. 01:21:15 And then you're able to, to create better and stuff like that.
771. 01:21:18 So again, I'm not 100% sure where I land on this, but I do think that it would make sense.
772. 01:21:27 In some situations, and I'm not sure yet if it does for me to build in some sort of morning pages routine into this bullet journal method.
773. 01:21:37 Maybe it's not three pages.
774. 01:21:39 Maybe it's half a page or a single page before the daily log stuff.
775. 01:21:44 You know, I'm, I'm not real sure, but I do know that the pen in the paper that elicits a whole bunch of different thoughts and feelings then.
776. 01:21:56 The digital task manager does.
777. 01:21:58 Yes.
778. 01:21:59 So I'm thinking about how to incorporate pieces of that and maximize the benefit of that into this new whatever system I'm going to be using.
779. 01:22:09 Yeah, one of the things that I do.
780. 01:22:11 So with the, the monthly log, like I have a lot of things that I put into that.
781. 01:22:16 One of the pieces that two, the two pieces that he starts with for the monthly log is just that simple history of one thing that happens each year.
782. 01:22:25 One thing that happens each day, or a couple things.
783. 01:22:28 And then your list of tasks for the month, like those are two pieces left and right hand side of a spread.
784. 01:22:35 That's what he starts with, but I've added to that the graphs and the habit tracker for the month to me that fits as part of the monthly log.
785. 01:22:44 Because it's just, you know, something that applies to that particular month.
786. 01:22:48 But there's one other piece you might be interested in this, Mike.
787. 01:22:51 And I haven't put it into action, but I've been like sketching out what it could look like is an editorial calendar.
788. 01:22:59 Or what is it that needs to happen each day in the month from a content creation stance, articles, newsletters, et cetera.
789. 01:23:08 Right now that's been focused on the work I'm doing at our church.
790. 01:23:12 It hasn't been my own thing, but I'm wanting to incorporate that and bring that back into it.
791. 01:23:18 So that particular piece, I think, is one that might be of interest to you.
792. 01:23:23 But outside of that, you know, I've got some custom stuff around.
793. 01:23:27 Like I've got the list of journal prompts.
794. 01:23:30 I've got like daily weekly routine things, like things I need to do every day.
795. 01:23:36 Weekly like laundry, you know, that sort of thing that needs done.
796. 01:23:40 I just created lists on separate pages for those.
797. 01:23:42 And then I just referenced someone I need them.
798. 01:23:44 That's that's it.
799. 01:23:45 I mean, it's not anything crazy.
800. 01:23:48 Spectacular.
801. 01:23:49 If you do research on bullet journaling, you run across these amazingly colored spreads and people, you know, drawing things at fantastical levels.
802. 01:23:59 I'm not that at all.
803. 01:24:01 I think what happens is, you know, some of what bullet journaling gets into is just spending time with the notebook so that you can keep your head in the right place.
804. 01:24:11 I feel like sometimes people take that too far.
805. 01:24:13 And they spend too much time with the notebook in the same way that we would spend too much time with OmniFocus or things or to do us.
806. 01:24:20 We would spend too much time with these.
807. 01:24:22 That to me is similar to what they're doing there.
808. 01:24:26 Now, maybe some people are just doing that as a form of kind of a mindfulness meditation and they just they do that slowly over the entire month instead of just all at once.
809. 01:24:36 If that's the case, maybe that's awesome.
810. 01:24:38 But that is that is not me. Like, I am not going to do that.
811. 01:24:43 I want the structure sketched out and I'm going to stick to that.
812. 01:24:47 I'm not going to be getting all the markers and colored pencils out and drawing things out and sketching them.
813. 01:24:53 That's that's of no interest to me.
814. 01:24:56 Me either, even though I sketched note.
815. 01:24:59 Yeah, I suppose you might be more prone to that than I would.
816. 01:25:02 Yeah, and this is again something that I struggle with is I was sketched noting originally on pen and paper.
817. 01:25:11 And then I made the blasphemous decision, depending on what you ask.
818. 01:25:15 Yep.
819. 01:25:16 To go do that inside of good notes on my iPad.
820. 01:25:19 And that just feels like the natural place for all of the sketched notes.
821. 01:25:22 And I have a notebook now inside of good notes, which has all of my sketched notes.
822. 01:25:26 And that's just the place I prefer to do that sort of thing.
823. 01:25:30 So I may be on one level would be prone to getting sucked into that and just using all of the colors and making everything fancy.
824. 01:25:41 But that honestly, when I think about bullet journaling, that doesn't appeal to me.
825. 01:25:46 Using different colors for things maybe does.
826. 01:25:48 Like when you have that graph, you're using dots for one line, dashes for another and kind of longer dashes for the third one.
827. 01:25:56 And I could totally see tracking those things using different colors for my fancy fountain pens.
828. 01:26:03 But that's another thing that I think is really going to make this thing work for me is the selective use of those colors.
829. 01:26:11 So I have more fountain pens than maybe my wife thinks that I should.
830. 01:26:17 You have a lot.
831. 01:26:18 I got another one, by the way, a Pelican M205, the Star Ruby, which looks amazing.
832. 01:26:24 See, I thought I was the one with the problem here and then I was the one that was like, I've got too many fountain pens.
833. 01:26:30 And like Mike sends me a picture of his fountain pen collection.
834. 01:26:33 I'm like, what?
835. 01:26:35 Yeah.
836. 01:26:36 This was quick too.
837. 01:26:37 There's a new one and a new bottle of ink since then.
838. 01:26:40 Well done, sir.
839. 01:26:41 I'm jealous.
840. 01:26:43 But I will admit that part of the reason that the time blocking thing using pen and paper works for me is that
841. 01:26:53 I get joy out of deciding what pen I'm going to use every day.
842. 01:26:57 Nice work.
843. 01:26:58 It's something that I look forward to.
844. 01:27:01 And I think that just having, like if I were to just create the notebook and have the same notebook, same pen,
845. 01:27:11 everything the same color, same black, you know, over and over again, that would be enough for me to resist doing this sort of thing.
846. 01:27:19 So again, I got to figure out where that happy medium is for me because I want to incorporate elements of color to this in addition to just choosing what color I want to use at the beginning of the day for my, my daily spread as I create it.
847. 01:27:32 I'm trying to think about the different ways that I could incorporate the colors intentionally to represent different things.
848. 01:27:39 And I don't really have any, anything solid yet, but that is something I'm going to be doing with the custom collections.
849. 01:27:46 I also mentioned, you know, I'm not 100% sold on the future log and the monthly log yet.
850. 01:27:54 So at least for now, you know, I fully intend to implement at least elements of the bullet journal method.
851. 01:28:02 The big ones for me being the collections and the daily logs, the rapid logging.
852. 01:28:07 But again, doing that my own way where I'm incorporating the time blocking for half of the pages in addition to just a list of tasks that I need to do.
853. 01:28:18 But Omni Focus is going to hang around at least for now with the forecast view with the combination of the calendar events and the tasks that I should be thinking about triggered by start dates, not due dates.
854. 01:28:30 I think that's important. That's another thing that kind of sets Omni Focus apart. There are other task managers that do that now, but that plus the review, you know, that's, that's the reason to stick with something like Omni Focus.
855. 01:28:40 I'm going to continue to do the, the book notes inside of my node.
856. 01:28:45 And a lot of the other mind maps that I will be using as I develop things are probably still going to be in my node too.
857. 01:28:53 But I do want to just start jotting down and charting things and being more flexible with stuff, doing that analog inside of the inside of my notebook.
858. 01:29:05 In fact, I was kind of sketching out prior to recording this.
859. 01:29:10 You know, what are the different pieces of the system and what are the, how does this work for me?
860. 01:29:15 How, how do I see this workflow working for me so that I stick with it?
861. 01:29:21 And I kind of like jot it out these different boxes and got arrows pointing all over the place and app icons and things like that as I'm trying to cobble this together in my brain.
862. 01:29:30 But yeah, I, I think for me, the bullet journal method has got to be something a little bit more hybrid.
863. 01:29:38 And I think that is okay.
864. 01:29:43 I don't think that's me just making excuses to stick with my apps.
865. 01:29:47 But I also know that I have to, I have to rethink some of these things and figure out, you know, I got to have a single place for, for this type of stuff.
866. 01:29:56 I think if I try to keep it inside of the notebook and inside of other places that that's not having that single source of truth, that's the thing that would make it make it not work.
867. 01:30:05 And so we can check in next time, I guess, on to what I finally land on my notebook finally shows up.
868. 01:30:12 But you just want to stay digital.
869. 01:30:15 I do want to stay digital at least to a certain degree.
870. 01:30:18 Yeah.
871. 01:30:19 I also mentioned, you know, scanning these things and into day one, whether that's just with a camera on my phone or I have been entertaining the idea of getting a scanner and going paperless for years now.
872. 01:30:31 So again, maybe this is just justification to go buy something else.
873. 01:30:35 You know, but I think the place I'll start is just capturing it with the phone and embedding it inside a day one or good notes that way. But if that is working for me, I could totally see getting some sort of desktop scanner where I can just feed the pages through quick.
874. 01:30:52 And then it becomes part of like a daily routine. I don't have to think about it anymore.
875. 01:30:57 That's ultimately what I want to get to is where I've always got this notebook and I'm always capturing things into it.
876. 01:31:03 But then once they get captured there, that's not the place that they end up.
877. 01:31:08 They end up in the appropriate, the appropriate container based on the shutdown routine.
878. 01:31:15 I don't know. You probably think that sounds ridiculous and that's why you're sticking with just the notebook that you don't have to make those decisions about where things would end up.
879. 01:31:24 I don't know. I don't know. I need to think through this some more.
880. 01:31:27 I think what will change things is if you, if and when you get your notebook, I suppose it would be when, when you get your notebook.
881. 01:31:37 I think when you go through the process of setting these things up and start seeing how some of it works together.
882. 01:31:45 I think some of these questions will get answered for you. That's my speculation.
883. 01:31:50 Sure.
884. 01:31:51 What else do you want to talk about? We've got action items.
885. 01:31:53 Yeah. Is there anything else you want to add in terms of how you are going to be implementing the bullet journal method?
886. 01:32:00 I'm kind of following it by the book.
887. 01:32:03 I'm not really deviating a whole lot.
888. 01:32:07 I say that and I also know that like there's really not a set way to do it.
889. 01:32:13 There are some core pieces to it like the logs, the future log, daily log and index.
890. 01:32:18 Migration piece kind of comes along for the ride.
891. 01:32:21 I'm kind of just following that and then building things in as I need.
892. 01:32:28 I think the overarching component here that's important is that I am using this as a place to spend time as opposed to spending that time on the computer.
893. 01:32:40 There's definitely that component to this that I think is especially important for me, if not vital.
894. 01:32:48 And one that I know I need to continue to develop and build out.
895. 01:32:53 So at this point, I think I'm all in on it.
896. 01:32:57 I am very curious to see, you know, for our next episode, we will have been gone.
897. 01:33:04 I will have the chance to go through that monthly migration from April into May.
898. 01:33:10 I've kind of started bullet journaling even before we picked up the book about a week prior to actually picking the book up.
899. 01:33:17 And then refined it once I got into it.
900. 01:33:21 So I did, you know, before I actually got the notebook that I'm using right now, I had another like term and I just started setting things up in that just to see how it work as a way to demo it before I got my real one.
901. 01:33:33 So I just used another notebook at the time and then took advantage of that migration process to just understand how that could work.
902. 01:33:42 Treating it kind of like a migrating from notebook to notebook method, but knowing I've only got five or six pages worth of stuff to migrate, not 50.
903. 01:33:52 So that made a big difference.
904. 01:33:54 And then whenever I got my real one, I actually set it all up the way I wanted it.
905. 01:33:57 So yeah, I think for me, it's just I want to go through this process, see if I can do the 30 days that he recommends, see how it goes, see how my brain's doing.
906. 01:34:09 And for sure, we'll check in next time. That'll be fun.
907. 01:34:13 Absolutely.
908. 01:34:15 All right. So action items, I think we both have an action item to implement the bullet journal method.
909. 01:34:21 Yep.
910. 01:34:22 Anything else specific you want to call out in terms of action items?
911. 01:34:25 I don't think so because this show has basically been one big list of action items.
912. 01:34:30 That is true. I will mention specifically that I want to start logging my interactions.
913. 01:34:39 I mentioned that earlier when we were in part three.
914. 01:34:43 And I think that's something that you can do whether you are using the bullet journal method or not.
915. 01:34:48 But I definitely see the value of jotting down some notes after an interaction and kind of reminded me of the other action on my head where I rated the relationships of.
916. 01:34:59 All the people that were in my life, like the plus plus plus stuff like that.
917. 01:35:04 I feel like I've done that in the past and I've seen the value of that and jotting down notes about the interactions can help me make those distinctions a little bit easier, recognizing that when I am going to be interacting with so and so, can I expect that they are going to add?
918. 01:35:23 Or can I expect that they are going to take life and energy from me? It sounds really bad to think about it that way.
919. 01:35:30 But it really is true. There are people who charge your batteries and then those who drain your batteries.
920. 01:35:36 And I feel like recognizing that before you get into an interaction is really important in terms of keeping the interaction positive.
921. 01:35:43 Agreed.
922. 01:35:44 But you do deal with this whole draining process of recording bookworm with Joe.
923. 01:35:50 You deal with that quite well.
924. 01:35:52 You're Joe plus plus.
925. 01:35:54 That sounds like a robot of some sort.
926. 01:35:59 Which I am far from.
927. 01:36:02 All right.
928. 01:36:03 How's the style and rating on this one Mike?
929. 01:36:05 The style and rating on this is phenomenal.
930. 01:36:07 Even if you disagree completely with the bullet journal method, it's a very entertaining, very entertaining read.
931. 01:36:13 And I like the visual style. I like all of the diagrams that he uses. There's a lot of them that I jotted down just because they help me crystallize like what this is supposed to look like in my mind node file a lot better than a bunch of text would.
932. 01:36:31 But I also didn't grab everything.
933. 01:36:33 Like there's so much visually going on in this book.
934. 01:36:36 And it looks like they're all hand drawn. I'm guessing that they're all from writers bullet journals in the past.
935. 01:36:45 And that really helps this click. Without those, I don't think this book is as effective.
936. 01:36:51 I feel like this book does a really great job of laying out the method in an understandable way.
937. 01:36:57 Even though it's almost 300 pages long, it's a very easy read because there are so many visuals.
938. 01:37:02 It doesn't feel any longer than a lot of the other books that we've read, at least in my opinion.
939. 01:37:09 We mentioned part three, there's a whole bunch of productivity primer stuff.
940. 01:37:14 A lot of things that we've talked about before, but even as I read through them, there were a couple things that not only were good reminders, but also different ways, things that I had heard described different ways than I had before, and it really helped it click for me.
941. 01:37:28 I think this is a worthwhile read for anybody who's interested in productivity at all, whether or not you are completely digital and you hate the idea of using pen and paper, I feel like understanding the bullet journal method will still spark some ideas.
942. 01:37:43 Like it did for me, you know, I'm not going all in with the bullet journal method as he prescribes it here, but I'm taking bits and pieces of it.
943. 01:37:50 I'd say I'm probably going 75% of the way in, at least in my brain right now, who knows once I get my journal and I start messing around with this stuff, what it actually looks like.
944. 01:38:00 It is going to be fluid, I know that for sure.
945. 01:38:03 But this is easily a book that I would recommend just about anybody.
946. 01:38:07 Very entertaining style of writing, very, in some places self-deprecating humor, which makes it more relatable, I feel.
947. 01:38:19 He talks in here about imperfection and embracing failures as part of the journey and by sharing some of the stuff that he struggled with.
948. 01:38:27 It helps you feel like you can relate to him and his system a lot easier.
949. 01:38:33 There's a ton in here for just about anybody.
950. 01:38:37 I struggle a little bit with where to rate it because it is so fun to read.
951. 01:38:42 And I don't know, on the same level, I don't feel like, maybe this is just because I haven't tried the bullet journal method yet and hasn't completely changed my life yet.
952. 01:38:54 But I don't think this is like a revolutionary book based on a lot of the other stuff that we've read.
953. 01:39:01 But it is very, very good. So I'm going to rate this at 4.5.
954. 01:39:06 All right. Well, I will join you with the conversation about the form factor on this.
955. 01:39:12 There are very few books that we've picked up that have color in them.
956. 01:39:15 This one does. And it kind of has to.
957. 01:39:17 Yeah, true.
958. 01:39:18 That was one of the things I picked up right away.
959. 01:39:21 I blocked a little bit when I bought it because I knew it was kind of expensive.
960. 01:39:25 There is no paperback version of it.
961. 01:39:28 And I just remembered thinking, huh, that's a lot for this.
962. 01:39:33 And then I got it out of the package whenever it showed up and I held on to it and realized, huh, they spent a lot of time designing this from like an aesthetic stance, like how it feels and how like even the paper I noticed, they did some research on and did some stuff special with that.
963. 01:39:55 It does cost a little more than a book like this that I would expect, but I think it was well worth it.
964. 01:40:01 Given the form factor and the design that they put into it. So I liked it.
965. 01:40:06 And you know, I love going through this and just, you know, seeing how they could put the whole thing together, you're absolutely spot on whenever they had the handwritten pieces.
966. 01:40:15 I think they just designed a custom font for it.
967. 01:40:17 That was my, that was my speculation because I have a tendency to pay attention like that.
968. 01:40:22 Did the tail on it go the same on all of them? Yeah, it's all the same. So I think that's a font.
969. 01:40:27 So I think that's what they did in order to keep it more uniform.
970. 01:40:31 And, you know, that does add a lot to it. Even whenever you get to the different parts, they would have almost like an extra index there to explain what was getting ready to go, like what you were about to go through.
971. 01:40:43 It has a very bullet journal-esque feel to the book itself, which is amazing.
972. 01:40:49 It's perfectly set up for that. So they did a great job with that. I absolutely love the form factor here.
973. 01:40:55 You're right with his writing style. It's very easy to read or read the whole thing in about three and a half, four days.
974. 01:41:01 So it was one that, yes, it's 300 pages close to, I think it's 290 somewhere in there.
975. 01:41:07 And I read it very quickly, had no issue with that at all and just loved the process of going through this.
976. 01:41:14 There's some pretty heart-wrenching stories in there, though, where, you know, in one case, a mom had a child who was in a very dangerous health situation and had an ambulance on site and they needed to know when's the last time he had a seizure?
977. 01:41:32 What are all his meds? Who are his doctors? What's the log of his seizures? Like, they needed a ton of information.
978. 01:41:37 They needed it immediately. And mom was in no state of being to be able to answer those questions.
979. 01:41:42 But she went over to her bullet journal, went to those two pages, tore it out, which is like sacrilegious in the world of bullet journal.
980. 01:41:50 You never tear out pages. You don't do that.
981. 01:41:53 Except when your kid is in a life and death situation.
982. 01:41:57 Yeah. So she tore him out, hands him over to the medical personnel there, and it gave him absolutely everything they need.
983. 01:42:06 They didn't need to ask her any other questions. It was all right there.
984. 01:42:10 And one thing that crossed my mind is like, did she ever get those pages back? I feel like she would want those.
985. 01:42:16 Yeah, sure.
986. 01:42:17 I don't know. But that wasn't part of the story. But anyway, that type of story is in here just to show how this can help.
987. 01:42:26 Kind of to finish that particular story. They did talk about how the other moms in that class all started, you know, oddly enough carrying notebooks with them.
988. 01:42:34 Not long after that event. So as you would expect. But those stories bring out the importance of this and how it can be helpful to have a simple pen and paper system.
989. 01:42:47 It truly resonated with me. It's helped me tremendously over the last probably three weeks as I've been using this system.
990. 01:42:54 And I'm kind of excited to see how the setup for the month of May, you know, spells out because it's just one that I know, as I do those monthly sets, like that's where I tend to do a lot of changes in that sort of form.
991. 01:43:12 So I'm kind of curious to see how it's going to continually, like my iteration process and what that's going to look like.
992. 01:43:19 I will put this at a five, because in my case, like I know this is one that truly, truly clicked with me and I've been a strong proponent of pen and paper for a while.
993. 01:43:30 And it does pain me to say that I've left Omni focus as a result of this. But I think that's a testament to the system and how well it's been thought out and how well it's put together as well as how well writer Carol has been able to present it.
994. 01:43:45 So I think this definitely fits that five Oh category, at least for me.
995. 01:43:49 And I will continue to recommend this because I have recommended it to a number of people already. So I'm going to continue doing that love this book.
996. 01:43:57 You need to read this. Sure. I'll recommend it as much as I can. There you go.
997. 01:44:01 All of that said, it's time to put the bullet journal method on the shelf and migrate to our next book.
998. 01:44:08 Yeah, totally going to migrate to the next one. It's nudge by Richard. I didn't look it up. Richard, Tyler, Tyler, I must say taller. Richard H.
999. 01:44:18 taller and Cass Sunstein. So this book is about improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness.
1000. 01:44:25 Having started already, I can tell you, it's semi around the world of setting default answers for questions or decisions that you have to make.
1001. 01:44:36 That's what I think we're going to have. So I think it'll be a very interesting read. I think you'll enjoy it, Mike.
1002. 01:44:41 All right. Then after that, we're going to finally force Mike to read Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
1003. 01:44:48 It's been a gap book of mine a couple times. That hasn't happened. And I want to go through this. I'm dragging you along for the game.
1004. 01:44:57 You got any gap books this time around? I do not.
1005. 01:44:59 Not at the moment, although I feel like since we've been home during this isolation period, it's been harder for me to read for whatever reason.
1006. 01:45:12 I know some people, it's easier for them to read because they have more time at home, but just I haven't been in an emotional state and it's been a struggle for me to even get through the books that we cover for this show.
1007. 01:45:22 But I feel like I have turned a corner and with this book specifically, I cranked through this once I started it.
1008. 01:45:29 And if I get through a book before next time, I will hopefully be back on the gap book train. But as of right now, I don't have one.
1009. 01:45:39 No, that's fair. I have none. And I am not ashamed of that at all.
1010. 01:45:44 All right. Well, if you want to support the show, you can go to bookworm.fm/membership and you can sign up to become a Bookworm Club Premium member, which gives you a couple of perks.
1011. 01:46:01 You can join us as we record these live and you can get the unedited version of our thoughts. Here are my rants and all their full glory before they're nice-ified for the rest of the world.
1012. 01:46:17 It's a lot more fun live. I'll say that.
1013. 01:46:22 Some of the books that we cover, this one, this one maybe not so much. The ones that we like, maybe not so much. But I have been known to hold strong opinions from time to time.
1014. 01:46:33 You also get access to the My Note files that we've mentioned here. So I create my maps for all of these books that we read.
1015. 01:46:40 And those are in a separate section in the Bookworm Club for paying members. Five bucks a month will get you access to that stuff.
1016. 01:46:48 And it will mean a lot to Joe and myself. This is definitely a passion project. And the fact that people are willing to support us really means a lot.
1017. 01:47:00 So thank you to all of the Bookworm Club Premium members. And if you want to join, you can go to bookworm.fm/membership or just tap on the little icon inside of Overcast that will take you there too.
1018. 01:47:13 Absolutely. I love our members. They're amazing. Thanks, team. And it's fun when they listen along whenever we're recording live and then we have chats going on because, you know, we're talking about flight logs and how people use it as a form of bullet journaling before it was cool.
1019. 01:47:29 But yeah, I want to know more about that. Definitely curious. So anyway, bullet journal on the shelf, pick up Nudge if you're reading along with us and we'll go through it next time.