There’s one system for planning your day that is known to help even the busiest people in the world achieve more and be more focused and that’s the bullet journal method. The bullet journal method was created by Ryder Carroll after years of testing different productivity methods, far more than just a system to help you achieve more, it’s about tracking your life and living with intention. It’s essentially a much smarter way of keeping notes that will help you stay on top of everything and make you feel more productive than ever. What’s more, the science behind bullet journaling is pretty incredible, the mind can only focus on three things at once before it gets overwhelmed, so with clever scheduling techniques, you will actually be more productive, not just feel it!
The best thing about bullet journaling is that you don’t need anything besides a pen and a dot-grid journal to start organizing your life. The Master Plan is a dot-grid journal designed to minimize distractions and increase productivity, you can use it to bullet journal your entire life and finally be more productive every day. If you need some inspiration, here’s how you can adapt the bullet journal method to make ticking off your daily to-dos easier than ever.
STEP ONE
MAKE YOUR DAILY TIMELINE
The first essential part of bullet journaling is the daily timeline, this allows you to have a visual overview of what you’re actually spending your time on and make sure you actually stick to it. In the original BuJo method, this includes blocks for gratitude, self-reflection, and more. In this version, you only focus on what’s important during that day. In a way, this is a sort of brain dump, because what you write down alongside your checklists acts as a loose schedule for your day. Write up the most important things first and then if you need to add anything to your schedule, you can always amend it.
One of the best things about the dot-grid system is that you can draw blocks, grids, and lines without the need for a ruler. Making creating a timeline super easy, all you really need is to think about what your priorities are throughout the day. You can even cross them off or underline them on your timeline to track your progress throughout the day and check how you’re using your time.
STEP TWO
START RAPID LOGGING
The bullet journal system consists of a variety of symbols to track your progress and productivity. This is called ‘Rapid Logging’. It’s a smarter (and much more satisfying) way of writing down what you need to do and quickly ticking them off. Alongside your timeline, you can create a couple of blocks for different goals and to-dos. In our example, we created a section for daily to-dos, another to help us keep track of our monthly goals and a final one to track progress with a specific challenge we’d set ourselves. Now to track these and increase your productivity massively, you’ll need to create a key for your system.
Bullet journaling, at its core, is about helping you on a path to continuous improvement. In our spread, we used a simple system of dots to denote progress. Every to-do starts with a plain circle bullet, which gets filled in when it’s completed. An arrow going through it means that the task has been moved forward, while a line through it means it’s been canceled. This is so easy to do with The Master Plan thanks to the faint dot-grid design, you can repeat your system on every page and really track your daily progress or even get creative with it and add some drawings or stickers to your plan to stay on track.
You can add to the rapid logging system too, using triangles for reminders, squares for events or invent your own system, there are no rules it’s all about making (and measuring) your progress. When you use this method daily, you’ll notice that your focus increases and your ability to get distracted lessens, that’s because you start to train your brain to focus and rapidly finish those tasks. If you’re looking for a new system to make every day feel easy and smash your to-dos, give rapid logging in The Master Plan a go and let us know how you get on.
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