Last year around this time I was extremely excited to start a bullet journal, which I hoped would fix all my problems, and of course it fixed none of my problems I’m still a disaster.
FAIL
I did use my future calendar spread for about half a year. After a while I switched to the calendar on my cellphone because I could set alerts to better remember things.
I ended up abandoning all of my trackers by February. I’ve since gone back to using my trusty wordcount spreadsheet for writing. I set a garbage alert and my other chores I just do whenever. I do however have a big problem with watering my plants. This year, I want to be a kinder, gentler, less murderous farmer, so I need to set up a phone alert (or an elaborate Arduino sprinkler system that takes 6 months to develop because YANNO that’s how I roll).
I stopped keeping my daily lists sometime in May.
I logged boardgame plays for a couple months then switched over to BGG, which is much better suited to the task.
I now use a good old fashioned weekly pill counter when I have vitamins and whatnot to keep track of.
The reason for abandoning all these items was generally the same. Having an journal tracker wasn’t useful, or tracking it simply wasn’t worth the effort.
WIN
Where the BuJo really shone (shined? sparkled?) was as a dev log. It is a really convenient way to track time spent and tasks for programming commissions, as well as whether I’ve sent the invoice yet. It also worked well for short-term logging if I had a particular project I was working on and needed a temporary scratch sheet to jot things down. My bullet journal is mostly filled with game development notes, a few recipes, and random project notes. Currently, I’m using it as a food diary.
For long-term notes, I’ve gotten much more mileage out of the note-taking app Joplin, and when those notes are finalized I post them on the site.
I think the system is really useful, and it’s worth having a bullet journal even though I didn’t use it quite the way I originally thought I would. I will continue to use it for short-term notes rather than tracking long-term things. Once I fill this bujo I will toss it and revisit organization when I start the next one. Looking back through my notes this past year, this has been a really rough year for me, I’m glad to put it behind me to be honest. The site will continue to be my repository for notes I want to preserve.