About Agile and Bullet Journaling
A lot of people never heard of the term „Bullet Journaling“ or if they did, they think about beautifully illustrated weekly layouts, fancy habit trackers and colorful tape.
What if I told you that the original idea is by Ryder Carroll and doesn’t include any of those things? In his videos on YouTube he explains Bullet Journaling as a flexible method to keep track: „[…] to track the past, organize the present and plan for the future“. The journal consists of an index, a future log, a monthly log and daily logs.
The daily log entries are short „bulleted“ sentences and belong to three categories: a dot bullet indicates a task, a circle bullet shows an event and a dash bullet is for notes. You can mark important tasks with a star next to it to signify priority. This rapid system is supposed to make it easier to keep track of all those things in your day.
Now there comes a very interesting concept, called migration. When you set up the next monthly log, you go through the tasks you did or didn’t do in the month before. You can mark done tasks with a cross. And the tasks that are still open? Now it’s time to think about if they are still important. Why didn’t you do them? Are they just not relevant? If that’s the case, cross them out. If not, take them to your new monthly or to your future log and mark them with an arrow. Migrating tasks help you keep your work organized and as Ryder Carrol says: „It’s the difference between being busy and being productive.“
The last element of the original bullet journaling method are collections. They can be used to collect related tasks and for example give an overview over a project you’re working on.
So, Bullet Journaling per se is a productivity tool and not something only artistic people can do. That is very important to me because many of the times I start talking to people about it, they say they could never do it, because they aren’t “artsy” enough, their handwriting is bad or they don’t have the patience to make it look nice. But as we saw before, that’s not the point! Sure, it’s a bonus if It looks nice, because most people prefer working with nice looking things. But that shouldn’t be the focus if you really want to improve the way you work with tasks.
The beautiful thing about the method by Ryder Carroll is that it’s like a blueprint. It’s good to have a starting point and do it this way for a few months. But you will soon realize that you might have special needs you want to address with your journal or that you might not need certain elements from the method. After about a year of consistent bullet journaling my system also looks certainly different from Ryder Carrolls original proposal. I threw out the future log! I just didn’t use it and now I have a yearly overview that I use solemnly for birthdays.
For me, one of the important aspects is migrating and I still do it, just not in the original sense. Instead of reflecting about the tasks at the end of the month, I do it every day. If I didn’t complete the task, I migrate it to the next day. Sometimes this happens multiple days in a row and that way I can reflect about why I am not doing it and if it’s even important.
This is one of the aspects where I see connections to agile. In the Kanban method, you observe how long your tasks stay „in progress“ and reflect on it if it doesn’t move for a long time. When I realized this similarity I started to look for more. Monthly logs feel a bit like (sprint) backlogs from Scrum, for example.
But agile isn’t just about the methods. We see being agile as being able to react and adapt to changing requirements and learn from it. When we think about migrating our tasks and reflect about them, we do that because probably the requirements of our life have changed! The world is complex and everything is changing all the time, so it’s important to check back with your tasks in regular intervals. So in that way, bullet journaling is definitely agile if you do it the Ryder Carroll way!
There is a lot of potential to connect agile and bullet journaling even more: Let’s think about those monthly logs again. You write everything down that you want to to accomplish this month. Now, how could we make this more agile? What methods can we think of? We can prioritize this list. Prioritizing can make it a lot easier to decide what you are working on next and you often feel like you already accomplished a lot when you can cross off the most important tasks.
We can also talk about how to write down those tasks. Is there a way to write your tasks down as some sort of User Story? Or at least write down why you want to do them and think about the value the accomplishment of this task would bring you. Also, ask yourself: When will this task actually be done? What exactly needs to be done? Write it down as detailed as possible. You don’t have to put it down as detailed every day you’re working on it, that wouldn’t be the purpose of bullet journaling, which is journaling fast. Just try writing it out the first time and look back on it from time to time!
Let’s look at an example for this. Let’s say, this month you want to clear out your wardrobe. You could write down „• clear out wardrobe“ or you could think about why you want to do it and write down „• clear our wardrobe so that I have a better overview of what I have and actually like and use less time to choose outfits in the morning“ or something like that. Now you have an actual purpose and it might help you to actually do it.
Second step, ask yourself: When is this task done? It could be that you’re finished with the task if you took out all the clothing you don’t want anymore and put them in a box. Or it could be that you aren’t finished until you get the excess clothing out of your house, may it be by throwing it away, donating or selling it. Maybe you even realize that it’s a whole project and you want to make a collection in your bullet journal for it. This way or the other it might help you get a feeling for the effort and also you’ll have a specific finish line so you can work on your task more purposefully.
Those are just a few ideas on how you could use Bullet Journaling and agile methods together. I think they could work quite well! Also, if you think about it, working and being agile isn’t about fancy boards and beautifully illustrated posters too! In the end, we use all of these methods to be more productive and to feel more meaningful with what we do and I’d say that’s the beauty of it.
