This summer I set off on a task. I wanted to lose 30 pounds by the end of August for my health. I started out strong, as many do on this type of journey, but I found that as time wore on my willpower started to fade, as my schedule got busier and busier. Fresh out of my first year of college, I was living on my own for the very first time. I worked two part-time jobs, an internship, and I had to keep up my Arabic skills for the upcoming school year. I found that very quickly I was barely keeping my head above water. Adults reading this may laugh when I say that I had no idea how long you were supposed to cook chicken or how to budget for groceries, but as a newbie in the world of adulting, these were all new and challenging tasks I now had to complete if I wanted to stay alive. I needed a way to manage my time and fast. So, as most people do nowadays, I google how to manage my time.
What I found was a barrage of information. I eventually, after what seemed like hours of research, stumbled upon the world of bullet journaling. To those of you not familiar with this word, bullet journaling is a term widely used to describe a type of planner you create yourself. There is, of course, official bullet journaling websites, but trust me when I say you do not want to fall down that rabbit hole. These sites often featured the beautiful journals that seem to be from the next Picasso, but to be honest, I did not have the time or the willpower to set off on that sort of endeavour (also I couldn’t even begin to draw like these guys can). After much research and many, many failures, I present a method bullet journaling that I think is reasonable to the everyday working gal.
1. List your goals. You can choose to opt for long term or short term goals, it is completely up to you. Personally, I choose to do it by the seasons and write a check-in every month to see how I am doing. I have listed below six examples of what some of those goals may look like.
2. Everyday set-up. Below I have shown what the body of my bullet journal looks like, the meat and potatoes if you will. This can look different for everyone and can be adjusted to fit the week. Now let’s break each part down. The large boxes are used for your tasks. Tasks may be things such as: going grocery shopping, sending an email to a coworker, studying for a big test, and so on. Tasks typically do not have a certain time they have to be done by. The smaller boxes on the right-hand side of the page are where you put your events. Example of events are: interviewing for a job, working out, or just going to work. I see events as something that has to be done that day and unlike tasks, cannot be delegated to another day. At the very bottom of the right page, you will see a few different boxes. Here are where your daily personal goals come in. My two goals in the example below are labelled “M” and “J”, which stands for meditation and journaling respectively. These goals can be anything you want. My mother chose to track whether she had or had not drunk 8 cups of water that way. Also within this corner I have is something I call “wins”. Again, this is personal to my own taste, but I find it nice when you are having a bad day to remind yourself of your accomplishments of the week, no matter how small.
3. Basics. Now that I have laid out what the body of my bullet journal looks like I have a specific way of filling it in. We will start off with the tasks box. Here I use bullet points to denote my tasks. If I complete that task I put a checkmark on the bullet point. If I did not finish that task I put a horizontal line through the bullet points to tell me I need to schedule it for another day. As for the events tab, I put small squares next to the events. I will fill in the square if I completed that event. If I did not, I will put a horizontal line through the square to signify that I did not complete that event or that the event was cancelled. This system for filling in events also applies to the goals section as well. And voila, you have yourself a planning system ready to go. I would like to reiterate again that this is simply my method of keeping track of my tasks, events, and goals. If this does not suit you, I encourage you to create your own symbols!
4. Setting Aside Time. At this point in the article, you may be thinking to yourself, no way that you have time to set all this up. I felt this way too, believe me. I decided to set aside 1 hour on the weekend to set-up my bullet journal for the week, but honestly, it can take as little as 20 minutes. I consider this in the realm of self-care because by setting aside time for yourself to take care of your personal goals and (hopefully) mitigating the stress of an impossibly long to-do list, you are taking care of your mental health. As for writing down the everyday tasks, it takes at most five minutes to write them for the next day, and it saves you from forgetting anything. Knowing that I have a place where I keep my schedule and tasks gives me peace of mind.
I have tried to create a planning method that is achievable for even the busiest among us. As you can deduce from the pictures I have provided above, I am no artist. I can barely even draw a straight line. This planning method has helped me to stay on top of my hectic schedule and helped to ensure that I am staying accountable to my personal goals and ambitions. By reviewing at the end of the week I am able to see what is working and what isn’t in my life. For example, I use to cook all of my meals every single day, which I noticed led to me not having the energy or the time to complete my goal of studying Arabic every day. So, I changed to meal prepping for the week and found that not only was I hitting my studying quota for the day, I was completing my to-do lists faster.
Even if this system does not appeal to you, I strongly encourage you to explore and think about how you are managing your time. An article written by Forbes, titled “Five Ways To Set Yourself Up For Success Like A CEO”, found that many CEOs plan their week in advance in order to productively manage their time. I think that we can all agree that CEOs are generally considered to be successful people, so there really is something to be said about planning your time in advance. As for myself, I am proud to say that I am on track to lose that 30 pounds in the near future.