Scheduling: Bullet Journaling

Time management is a necessary skill to be a successful student. Studying is stressful and if you don’t have the right balance between being organized and productive throughout your academic years, you won’t get the results you want. So, what’s an excellent way to get organized? Bullet journals. Learn about this simple, yet effective method of helping people accomplish more by working less.

What is bullet journaling?

Bullet journaling is a method created by Ryder Carrol, which helps you organize your thoughts and tasks in a short-form way. All you need is a notebook and a pen to begin and if you choose to, you can use highlighters, stickers, or colorful markers but if simple is your thing, bullet journaling is most definitely for you!

The basic format of a bullet journal is to have a daily log, a monthly log, and a long-term or yearly log of things you have to do. By breaking your long-term goals down into smaller chunks, you have an easy format to view your entire academic year but also see what needs to be done and what is coming up soon including exams and events. If you find it difficult to stay on track or remember what you are working towards, bullet journaling is a great organizational tool for you to try.

Where do I begin?

There are a few main components and terms that bullet journals have and these include bullet icons, rapid logging, modules, future log, monthly log, index, and task page. It sounds complicated on the surface, but once you know how to do a bullet journal, it will change your life and your way of studying and organizing. So, let’s start with bullet icons, these are simple signifiers that indicate status, so a full stop is when a task needs to be completed, an X represents a completed task a < symbol is a task that needs to be moved and written down on a specific day and a > is a migrated task that was not completed but it needs to be completed in the following week or month. There are also a few other symbols, including an O for an event, a - for a note, and a * for a task you need to prioritize.  

So, what about rapid logging? This is where you jot down the tasks you need to complete, make sure you use page numbers, titles, and bullet icons. Once you have done this, the next step is to create some modules, these include an index, a future log, a monthly log, a task page, and a daily log.

An index is your inventory of tasks and the page numbers they can be found on, a future log is the tasks you need to complete months in advance throughout the year and a monthly log is an overview of the month with the days of the week next to each other and the task page is what tasks need to be completed during that month. Of course, the daily log is just a view of the week with the tasks needed to be completed each day. The purpose of the migration process of a bullet journal is to stay organized. Strike out a task that becomes irrelevant, use the migrate symbol > if it needs to be moved or the < scheduled migration symbol that has been scheduled.

Some extras that you can add to your bullet journal, to make it more personalized are adding an assignment tracker to keep track of the essays you need to complete, a class schedule that helps you keep track of your different classes and where and when they are or even a reading tracker to keep note of all the books you are reading on your course.

Why Bullet journaling?

There are many productivity fads out there that you have probably tried and given up on, so why is bullet journaling different? Well, bullet journaling is paper-based and unlike an organizational app, it allows you to focus on the page and only see what you need to complete, the daily log helps keep you organized in the short-term and the migrations system keeps you on track, so you never forget to do something important. Bullet journaling is an efficient and effective tool for you to use during your studies, why not try it today?