Bullet Journaling: Life Management for Creatives

1. Bullet Journaling: Life Management for Creatives Introduction: Are you overwhelmed by all the options, all the ideas, all the art you want to make, by big existential questions like, "What mark do I hope to leave on the world?" Also tiny ones like, "What am I going to eat for dinner tonight?" Have you spent money on underutilized planners, project management apps, and procrastination courses. Are you procrastinating right now by watching this class intro? I am not judging you. My name is Dylan Mierswinski. I'm a complex human that sometimes feels like a mess too. I'm an artist. I get paid to make illustrations for a living and create classes like this. I'm a business owner, so I have things like bookkeeping and email to keep up on. I have ADHD, so my natural state is overwhelmed. I know about shameful procrastination. I know about not living up to your own potential, and I know how painful it is to feel incapable and in competent at adulting in your own life. I started a thing called bullet journaling this year. It's what this class is about, it's what I believe can help you, fellow creative and maybe fellow creative with ADHD, to wrangle your big, big life, creativity and all. A bullet journal, practically speaking, is a way to take any notebook and turn it into your own custom planner, project manager, notebook, journal, sketchbook, you name it. It's a place, finally, for all the things. But beneath that, the practice itself of bullet journaling asks us, what's important to you? What would you like to do about it? If that sounds like a little much, just know a bullet journal is a really cool organizational tool that helps manage your life stuff and grow your discernment muscle, a valuable exercise for all people, even productive ones. It's so simple and so customizable that it can be a little hard to explain, but thanks to my bullet journal, I've been turning client projects in early without all the added drama, I have a dream to write a book one day and I actually wrote a pitch and turned it into my agent. I'm finally cooking more meals at home, I give myself more time to read books on the back patio and I more easily let go of things that no longer matter to me, which leaves a lot of room for the things that do matter to me. I feel centered, thanks to my bullet journal. In this class I'm going to lay it all out for you. What a bullet journal is, I'll show you spreads from mine. I'll walk you through getting your started in an easy, breezy way, and we'll even talk about some of my most treasured productivity tips for chronic procrastination. If you find yourself avoiding your life because you're overwhelmed, or if you simply just want a better way to check in with your day, allow me to show you my way of bullet journaling. Let me show you how your next notebook could become a place for all the things you care about. Even if you haven't yet figured out what that is. Cant wait. See you there. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: In this lesson, I'll cover the class project as well as the provided class resources. This class is a lot of theory and examples, but the harder that is to get you excited to start your first or next bullet journal starting with the index, the future log, a monthly spread, a daily spread, and at least one project or note-taking spread. I recommend watching all the lessons in order first. But for your actual class project, the Quick Start lesson and putting it all together lessons are really going to help you get your bullet journal up and running. If you'd like to share your class project, I invite you to take a photo or scan in some of the spreads that you've created. When you're ready, head to the Project and Resources tab and click "Create Project." You can add a cover photo and title, but don't forget to upload your photos to the actual body of the project. That way we can all see what you're sharing. This is also where you can add supporting texts telling us how the process was for you. Also in the project and resources tab are the class resources, which in this class is a written Quick Start guide to accompany the Quick Start video lesson, a reference sheet of smart bullets and spread types and a few examples of how different tasks and projects might move through a bullet journal system. I'm so excited for you to start your bullet journal, but first, let me tell you how I super failed at it 10 years ago. 3. My (Big) Bujo Fail: In this lesson, I'm going to share my story of how I failed big time at bullet journaling, and then how I got to here fully loving it and creating a course so that you can start your own practice. My hope is my story will inspire you to try out bullet journaling without fear or confusion, especially if you've ever struggled to get things done or even tried and failed at bullet journaling before yourself. I first came across bullet journaling in 2012, I don't remember how, I just remember being drawn to these little black notebooks with tiny neat little handwriting in them. At the time, bullet journaling was framed to me as a way to turn any notebook and turn it into your own personal hub, combining planners, notebooks, and project managers all into one. I found the instructions on writer Carroll's website but the problem is, is I got really excited about the gist of the idea without really fully listening to his ideas about the full system of the bullet journal and how it could all work together. Therefore, I did a half-ass job getting it set up. I made things very complicated and unrealistic for myself. I couldn't keep up, I rejected it after two weeks. Then I felt guilty every time I spotted my moleskin and remembered how long it took me to number all those still blank pages. I added my bullet journal to the burn pile of planners I had bought and abandoned and accepted that I would never live a planned day in my whole life. That didn't stop me from buying planners and notebooks and whiteboards and list pads and task management apps, it just let me forgive myself easily when I would crash and burn a few days in. It's just how I am, well, self-forgiveness and acceptance are awesome. But there was still a fairly big pain point in my life. I was chronically procrastinating work tasks and things that I had already committed to, which in itself is painful. But I also had literally no idea how to dedicate any steam towards tasks that were important to me, but not urgent. If you don't know about it, Eisenhower's urgent important principle can be a nice way to break down tasks based on their level of urgency and personal importance. For example, a client project that's urgent but not terribly personally important on my calendar could derail me for weeks, meaning I spent weeks unhappy and nervous, showed up last minute for the project with resentment or just cruising on a burst of urgency and then I would need time to recuperate after only to find myself in the fire of something else that I had said yes to. What about my not urgent but important to me dream of being a lettering artist? What about all the not urgent but important to me, books on my shelf that I had wanted to read? I spent years in this shameful fog procrastinating my days away, keeping things barely afloat, and watching my own wasted potential stare at me and say, why can't you just try harder? I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2020 and if you don't know what that means, it means that my brain didn't fully develop my executive functions. Things that make it possible for people to direct or inhibit their attention, plan and prioritize, access verbal and nonverbal memory, and more. It met my struggles, maybe warrant because I was the laziest loser on earth and it was actually because my brain had checked out and said, I'm good at basic life endeavors. Basically, ADHD means prioritizing is hard and doing things is hard and consistency isn't a thing. If I may share an opinion, if you're a creative person and you don't have ADHD, you may as well have honorary ADHD. Your brain may not have impaired executive functioning but my guess is that you're no stranger to the resistance and shame that I'm talking about. I have good news. I think bullet journaling is helpful for all of our creative brains and if you have ADHD, you're no exception. But as I was saying, I do have ADHD and so often my brain will put this invisible wall between me and the things that I could and often want to be doing. Since my diagnosis, I've spent a lot of time getting to know ADHD and practicing skills that help support my executive non-functioning brain. I even use the planner that first year of diagnosis for 11 entire months. I was finding a way to make progress and showing up for more things. But if I'm honest, I was still relying on a lot of urgency to do things instead of desire, fun, or curiosity. This year I was at the library when I saw writer Carroll's book on bullet journaling in a pile of just returned books. It's like my body said, yes, before my mind did. I slapped the book on the top of my pile and cracked it open on the patio that day. Finally, reading about this system that I had failed at and pined for was a revelation. The problems he laid out resonated deeply and his arguments for bullet journaling felt nothing short of genius. It was the middle of April and I decided to buy another little black journal and try again for May. For four months now I've been bullet journaling. It's a place that holds my ideas, my work tasks, the foods I ate last month, the foods I hope to eat this year, my passing whims, my lasting whims, and any and everything. This summer while enjoying the desert heat and turning in some of my best client work, I also dreamed up, wrote, and turned in a book pitch to my agent. This summer I got things done and paid the bills and I also remember smelling Mandarins as I peeled them. I stared at the sky through the phases of the moon and sent birthday cards on time to only the people I felt were worth it. My bullet journal holds onto notes from YouTube videos and doesn't judge me if I never read them again. It is a living, working thing, as unique as I am. We'll talk about the benefits of bullet journaling in the next lesson. But as it pertains to my story, bullet journaling has improved my experience of my day-to-day life as a creative person with ADHD. The best I can describe it is life felt pretty static and overwhelming before, especially when I found myself with big chunks of time and no one urging me to do something. Monday mornings used to be awful, and this is coming from someone who works from home for a business that they started. But now my days feel calmer and full of accessible potential. It feels like things can move. My days all feel different, yet I wake up knowing and trusting that I'll find the day as it comes. I know I'll move a little bit closer to the things that are important to me and I'll be present for the day. I used to wonder, how do people know what to do with their day? Now I'm one of those people that just knows and does, and it's not a huge deal. I'm not a productivity machine, yet bullet journaling has helped me be more productive, a freaking miracle for this ADHD-riddled brain. But more than that, it helped me be present and better experience this life I get to live. In the next lesson, we'll discuss the benefits of bullet journaling. 4. The Benefits of Bujo: In this lesson we're going to cover the benefits of bullet journaling over other methods of work-life management. The main benefit of bullet journaling is that it's a customizable and flexible system that combines planners and notebooks to provide structure for our complex and unique daily lives. Think work projects, grocery lists, lists of all the courses you want to take or have already purchased and have started, dream vacation spots, plans for your next newsletter, recipes you'd like to collect, manifestation rituals, etc. It can handle it all. In my experience, planners, even the expensive custom ones that allowed me to add in meal planning sheets or gratitude lists, were still to fixed to fit my life. They're fixed in their layout, they're fixed in how much space is allocated to each thing, and since they were tied to dates, they often moved along much too quickly for me. In the past, I would also need to have a notebook or notebooks in addition to my planner, as my planner was usually just some form of calendar or task manager. While I'm grateful to all the notebooks I've used throughout the years, they were either a dump of many topics and hard to navigate or dedicated to a specific topic and left with unfilled pages at the end. Bullet journaling allows you to customize everything to your liking, and since it isn't set in stone, it allows you to change things as you learn and move along. Love a weekly view, but don't need your gratitude list on the same page? Perfect. Break it into two separate spaces. Have an intense month coming up, and need a more thorough overview of what's to come than you did last month? Perfect. Bullet journal is adaptable, and gives you the space to switch it up. We'll get into this a little bit more later, but I like to use a digital calendar separate from my bullet journal to keep an eye on timely dates and events. Meaning if I don't touch my bullet journal for two weeks, I can go back to it without consequence. Everything is still there. Whereas with a traditional planner, if I miss two weeks and open to today, everything I was working on is left pages behind with huge gaping space between. Smart navigation, which we'll talk about in the building blocks lessons, means everything in the bullet journal is easy to find, connect, and organize, even if the contents hit the book out of order, or it's unclear how much space to allocate for a specific purpose. Practically speaking, bullet journaling becomes whatever you need in terms of planning, note-taking, dreaming, collecting and more. It lets you collect your life as it happens in real time and sort it into something useful for the future. A benefit of bullet journaling specifically for creatives with ADHD is a little thing called object permanence. When a baby thinks you're no longer there because you're hiding behind your hands, that's a lack of object permanence. People with ADHD struggle to remember what they can't see. Bullet journaling keeps all the stuff visible and in front of us. I often forgot we were wedding planning until I would see the wedding planning spreads in my bullet journal. Another ADHD friendly bit is the handwritten aspect of bullet journaling. Now, you can totally do bullet journaling digitally on an iPad or tablet or whatever, if that's your thing. But for me I sometimes need space to be messy, and in an app I feel like I can't always see everything, and so writing things by hand not only gives me free room to ideate in the way that feels natural for me, writing things by hand also helps my soggy brain remember things a little bit better. The deeper benefit of bullet journaling for all of us though, is developing the skill of discernment. Bullet journaling asks, what's actually important to you? What would you like to do about it? If you don't know, bullet journal gives you space to begin to figure it out. Your bullet journal doesn't shuffle your tasks along for you. You need to do it. Writing something over and over eventually makes you ask, why am I writing this? Why am I making myself feel badly every month to go buy birthday cards for every person I've ever met, instead of the few that I actually like? Why am I scrolling on Instagram, instead of staring at the sky or a book or my dog, or a plate of food? When's the last time I saw a friend? Who do I call friend? Do I want to go make some more friends? In writer Carroll's book he shares the quote, "You can't make time, you can only take time." To me, bullet journaling puts that truth in stark contrast. But not in a scary way that makes me want to buckle down and be a machine, but the soul shaking way, that reminds me, oh, yeah, this is my one life. What do I want to experience while I'm here? What trees are worth shaking? With my bullet journal, I get a few things done, I do a little dreaming, and then I close it and get back to my life. Which for me is a lot of reading on the patio, looking through cookbooks, and watching Housewives with my dog Stevie. In the next lessons we are going to go over the building blocks of a bullet journal, as well as the components to my overall bullet journal system. 5. Building Blocks: Basic Spreads: In this lesson, we're going to cover the components that make up my overall bullet journal system, as well as the building blocks of the bullet journal itself. My bullet journal system has two analog components and two digital components. First, I have my actual bullet journal, an A5 dot grid book by luck term and I also have a pocket-size field notes book. For my digital tools, I use Google Calendar for scheduled events, and I also use Evernote as a digital notebook. Before we look at that extra stuff, let's zoom in on the bullet journal itself. My A5 dot grid luck term is dubbed my bullet journal and it's made up of some building blocks that you'll utilize in your own book. The first piece is called the index. It lives at the beginning of the book and serves as a table of contents. This is the first bit of structure we lay down to make things easier to find later. The index also relies on numbered pages, which is why I prefer using this brand of notebook as they number the pages for me. If you have a different preferred notebook, you can simply number the pages at the beginning of the startup process. The next building block, or in this case called a collection or spread, is the future spread. This is a high-level overview of the months to come. It is not a thorough schedule or complete calendar list of everything in that month, it's simply a safe place to pop in future events for months that haven't arrived yet. I like using mine to keep an eye on birthdays, jotting down untimed or vaguely timed events. For example, when I generally like to take a vacation from work and recurring projects like my quarterly newsletter, which don't have set dates. I find the future spread to be really helpful when I'm doing monthly or weekly planning and I want to see if there was anything I hoped to remember for that time period. The next component is the monthly spread, which I've broken into two functions. On the left, I have a log for the month where I note down anything worth remembering that happened. I have the date and the day, as well as the week number because for some reason that's a meaningful number for me in tracking where we are in the year, more so than just the month. My monthly spread also usually includes some form of habit tracker, but I'll talk about that more when I show you mine in the next lesson. The beautiful thing about being a log as opposed to a calendar, is I'm able to cherry-pick the best and most important experiences. When I was using a planner successfully, I was getting a lot of good stuff done but I'd flip through the filled pages and it was hard to get a grasp on what I was actually doing beyond send email, psych appointment, deliver artwork to client. What about the new recipes we had tried or that game night we had where we laughed for three hours straight? I can't recommend the practice of a monthly log enough. But it isn't enough to just write down what we've been doing, the right side of the monthly log is a place for tasks and projects that I want to keep an eye on for the month. When I'm planning my week or my day, I always check out the monthly spread to see if I can make progress on anything listed. Next, we have the daily spread, which is a catch-all place to capture tasks, notes, inspiration, ideas, moments of mindfulness, and any, and everything that's interesting to note down throughout your day. We'll discuss this more later but I actually outsource my daily spread to a pocket field notes book. You do not need to do this. Yours can live right within your main bullet journal, but in either case, you'll need a place where you can title the page with today's date and allow life to happen as it does. The daily spread is special because it often collects things to be migrated to other parts of the bullet journal or migrated to the following day's spread, which you'll see in my journal in an upcoming lesson. Basically, the daily spread is temporary and really most helpful for storing things until they get put away where they're most helpful or relevant. The rest of your bullet journal will be made up of collections and spreads based on what you're adding to your book, which as we've discussed, can be anything your heart desires. The deceptively simple function within each spread though is its title. When I was using notebooks before bullet journaling, I would utilize nearly every blank space to fill with writing or drawings, which meant each page was a hodgepodge of whatever thoughts had felt important enough to jot down. It also meant that I didn't have to take the time to ask myself what I was writing or why I was writing it down. The practice of naming spreads is the first practice in growing our discernment muscles. Now when I have a note to write down, I don't just flip to any old page and jot it down. I consider what it is I'm writing and by giving it a name, I give it a purpose and a place to belong in the index. For example, coming across a recipe before meant simply noting it down somewhere or emailing it to myself and hoping that I would remember to look for it the next time I was meal planning. Spoiler alert, I usually avoided meal planning and never made the recipe. Now when I come across a recipe, I know to name the spread with meal planning. After all, that's what collecting recipes is, and then I can add the pages to the index under meal planning. Or alternatively, I can easily find where I left off meal planning last time and add it to an existing spread if there's space. The point being, naming your spreads is powerful because it both asks you to discern the information you want to capture and also gives you a method to help organize it with in the books contents. Maybe later on, I won't remember any of the names of the recipes that I wrote down. But it'll be very easy for me to find and locate the pages dedicated to food and meal planning in my bullet journal, increasing my chances that I'll find it and actually utilize it. As I've said, I'll show you my spreads in an upcoming lesson so you can see what I'm talking about. But for now, just know most of your bullet journal will be made up of your own custom spreads and notes with monthly and possibly daily or weekly spreads punctuating the sections. One huge warning I would like to give you as it pertains to general spreads in your notebook, is to not get deterred by the absolutely beautiful and ridiculously complex spreads that other people decide to make and then share on the Internet. This is the number one pitfall I see with people getting excited to bullet journal, including myself when I first tried years ago. Artsy spreads are fine. There's nothing wrong with them except for the fact that they can apply a lot of pressure and perfectionism. When in doubt, start with a basic list to get it out of your head and go from there. The system of the bullet journal is what's powerful, not perfectly drawn intricate spreads. Those are the big building blocks of a bullet journal, the index, future, monthly, and daily logs and collections or spreads that contain the rest of our notes and plans, and what have you. In the next lesson, I'll show you how pagination can make moving through our books even easier. 6. Building Blocks: Pagination: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to use pagination in your bullet journal to make finding things and moving through it even easier. The index is great, really powerful in fact, but it's annoying to flip back and forth to the index when you've got a topic spread across lots of pages. Allow me to introduce pagination. It's easiest to show with an example. I'll show an example from my bullet journal of something I have a lot of pages of, which for me is a topic of something called human design. Side note, I am fully obsessed with human design. If you like Woo Woo, anything like astrology, or the angiogram or anything, please Google it. Oh my gosh, it's so good. But for our purposes, all you need to know is the notes take up a lot of pages in my book. If I go to my index, you can see human design has a lot of page numbers listed after it. If I was looking for something, say a course schedule that I know is somewhere in the middle here, I could definitely use the index and take one chunk of pages at a time, flip to see, then flip back to the index and continue on until I find what I'm looking for. Don't think the index isn't powerful. But thanks to pagination, I don't have to do it that way. I can start with any of the spreads. Since I know that what I'm looking for is generally in the middle somewhere, I'll start with Page 160-167. When I get there, I see I'm past the page I'm looking for, but I don't need to flip back to the index. I can just look at the highlighted numbers at the bottom of the page. The arrow on the left says 156, which means the previous instance of human design can be found on Page 156. The arrow on the right has known page number, meaning the human design content continues on the next page. If I follow my pagination along in much less time than it would have taken to use the index or worse, just haphazardly flip through without an index, I'm able to find the course schedule on Page 101. Pagination is amazing and flipping through pages with purpose is very satisfying. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how smart bullets can be a tiny but mighty addition to your bullet journal practice. 7. Building Blocks: Smart Bullets: In this lesson, we're going to go over the smart or meaningful bullets that I use in my bullet journal practice. Reminder, there's a class resource with a quick glance list of these building blocks, including the smart bullets. The goal of these bullets is to help add shorthand context to the information we're writing down. They also enable us to quickly scan our entries and discern undone tasks from completed tasks, from notes and whatever else. Starting with a single dot, a single dot is a task or something that requires action. Once the action is complete, the dot gets crossed out for an x. The nice thing here is, a dot isn't always asking me to fully complete a task. They simply let me know action is required. Sometimes it's a reminder to schedule the task in my calendar or a reminder to migrate the information somewhere else in the bullet journal, all of which result in the dot getting crossed off. For example, a dot with wash the dishes is simply a task that needs to be completed. It stays a dot until I wash the dishes and cross it off. A dot with girls night November 13th at 07:00 PM is a task that needs to be added to my calendar or future spread. Once it's safely scheduled, it can be crossed off even though the girls' night is still on the horizon. A dot with grateful for Stevie Wonder the Dog is intended for my gratitude spread and simply needs to be migrated there before being checked off. The dot is an elegant solution as it can be changed into other symbols and it easily stands out from the noise. Meaning, when I'm scanning my pages, it's easy for my eyes to see open dots and therefore find and migrate unfinished tasks that need my attention. Sometimes in my monthly spread, especially in the beginning of the month when it feels like nothing's actually getting done, I like to circle the dot to denote that it's been started or is in progress. Bullet journaling doesn't demand you be a productivity machine. There's no shame when dots remain dots. To keep things from falling through the cracks, we've got a handy move that turns the dot into an arrow that denotes, I got migrated. Migration just means something got intentionally moved somewhere else, whether that's simply to the next day or to a different spread entirely. How do I know I put off bookkeeping for three months? Because in May, June, and July, my bookkeeping task had a little arrow next to it until August comes in a big satisfying excess, take that IRS, "You'll receive your payment on time and for the correct amount. Thank you." Another type of bullet is a hollow circle, which is an event logged. It's just something that happened. These are mostly written in my daily spreads and can range from things I did, like went for a morning walk to things that simply happened, like test results are back, cholesterol is looking better. These little guys may seem less important than the task dot, but this is a great reminder that life is more than tasks to be completed. It feels great to cross off a task dot, don't get me wrong. But when I'm reflecting in my book, it's those hollow circles that really get all my attention and really paint the story of my life. It can feel silly at first to write down what feels like arbitrary observations and happenings. But as you get used to it, you find literally all of our life is arbitrary observations and happenings. Some of it is even worth noting down and trying to remember. Even the seemingly banal stuff, I jot down conversations I eavesdrop on in public. I note down when bunnies, lizards, and birds appear in our yard and people I talk to on the phone with. They are the details of my life. A dash is just a note. It doesn't necessarily denote anything happened or needs to happen. It's just a note. Sometimes it's combined. So an event will be logged with a circle and some notes about the event will be indented with dashes. Sometimes something seems important to write down, but then it isn't. A sneaky, powerful modifier for these instances is a clean and simple strikethrough. At first, I was viscerally against this idea of crossing off things in my journal, but four months in, let me tell you, strikethrough is a wonderful power to wield. Strikethrough is advanced discernment at play and shamelessly says, "This is no longer important to me," which makes it all the more easier to recognize and focus on what is important to us. If I write a task down over and over month after month, and I realize that there's no urgent need to actually get it done, I just cross it off with a smile. If the idea is really so great and meant for me, it will come up again and I can write it down again. For now, I don't need its dead weight staring at me. Lastly, I have a few modifiers I use to make information even easier for me to take in. The first is an exclamation point. Usually used to the left of the task dot. It adds emphasis and priority. When I complete the task, I cross off the dot and put a slash through the exclamation point. I don't use them terribly often, which helps them keep their power. To me, the exclamation point says, "Girl, I am not kidding, I really want to get this done." I have spreads dedicated to gratitude entries. So I use a heart modifier next to the task dot or just by itself as a bullet to help me quickly scan for gratitude entries. The dot stays a dot until the item has actually been migrated to the gratitude spread. Similarly, I have a shopping list spread and also a running digital shopping list my husband and I use. So a little dollar sign is really helpful to locate items I thought of during the day that would live better on a shopping list. Lastly, I'll use three ellipses when I'm continuing a topic from a previous page, as this saves room and time from having to rewrite entire headings. Now that we've covered the nuts and bolts of the bullet journal, there's just one more element to bring in to tie it all together and that's migration, which we'll talk about in the next lesson. 8. Building Blocks: Migration: In this lesson, we're going to cover migration. The last component of a Bullet Journal is the practice of migration, which we've talked about a little. Migration is when we move entries from one place to another. Some people are religious about their migration schedules and others are looser. But I tend to migrate my daily entry at the start of a new day or at least every few days, and I tend to catch my emotion log up once a week or throughout the month and migrate gratitude and sensory entries every few weeks to monthly. If I let too much time go by, the migration task itself becomes a monster, and it's harder to keep up on my entire journal and things start to fall through the cracks. Migration really only takes a few minutes here and there, but it's what keeps my Bullet Journal practice alive and current. I like it. It reconnects me with myself and all of these things that I've written down and had decided were important to me. In a later lesson, we'll cover use cases for various examples of these building blocks in action. For now, it's enough to simply know their names and that they exist. In the next lesson, we're going to take a closer look at the daily spread. 9. Building Blocks: The Daily Spread: In this lesson, we're going to dive deeper into the daily spread and how it's unique. The daily spread is a real-time live catch-all. It collects whims, tasks, happenings. You've heard me list it before, and whatever else pops up in your day as they pop up. The daily spread is the most active working part of my bullet journal and keeps the rest of the system moving. Daily spreads are also the easiest touch point with our lives. Our days, our here and now. If you watch this course and still feel a little bit overwhelmed by all of it, then simply start with a daily spread and smart bullets. You'll learn a lot by paying attention to what you pay attention to. A daily spread is made by simply dating the top of the page and jotting things down as they come up. The smart bullets we discussed in an earlier building blocks lesson, are imperative for my daily spread as they allow me to slightly organize it all as I'm writing it down. Some things that I tend to capture in my daily spreads are tasks. Of course, our simple single dots that come in handy for entries that require my further attention. I also really love to capture things that happened, the life bits that while they're passing can seem a little bit casual and plentiful, but in reflection, are sweet and rich. I write down who I talk to on the phone with and summarize what we chatted about, I check in and jot down feelings and moments of mindfulness and gratitude, and I tick down what I ate for dinner and funny things I heard or saw out in the world. All of the big things that have come from my bullet journal started as a single note in my daily spread. The daily spread makes capturing my life easier because it lets me do it in little pieces as they come up instead of trying to set aside large chunks of time to do it later. Beyond tasks and life happenings, my daily spread is also a nice small scratchpad for temporary notes, calculations, sketches, or brain dumps. Not everything has to be a bullet. If I just need space to be messy, I can take up space in the daily spread and decide if it's worth keeping and migrating later. As you can imagine, the daily spread then also becomes a filter for the rest of the bullet journal. Some tasks are born, live, and die in my daily spreads without ever going somewhere else in the bullet journal. While other more important entries start in the main journal or are migrated there for later use. This is where the practice of migration comes into play. If the daily spread is a catch-all for our life, then the catch-all needs to be sorted and cleared out every once in a while, otherwise, it becomes an unreliable and unruly pile, like anything else. When I migrate my daily spreads, usually in the morning, I scan my previous spread for Open Task dots, move them to the current spread, altering the bullet to be an arrow to let myself know it's been taken care of or I can move them to their fitting homes in the bullet journal or on my calendar. You'll get to see all of this in action in the future, putting it together lesson but for now, what I want you to know is it's not enough to simply write everything down and keep moving. There needs to be just a little bit of time to reflect, even if it's just a few minutes here and there, and what we wrote down and what we want to do with it. If it's worth keeping, migrating it to its most helpful home is the way to do that. This is discernment in action. Deciding to write things down, then deciding what to do with it, whether it's to act on it, keep it for later, or let it go entirely. In the next lesson, I'll explain why I like to keep my daily spread in a separate field notebook. 10. A Separate Space for Daily Spreads: Why isn't my daily spread inside of my bullet journal? Let me tell you why I like to keep it separate. For one thing, I wanted to get in the habit of always having my bullet journal on me. I can't exactly write down all of my great ideas if the book is downstairs. I'm lazy, I'm not going to go downstairs to get it and so I needed to have a book that I could have virtually on me all the time. It isn't realistic for me to carry around even an A5 journal everywhere I go. The Field Notes is small enough to fit in the palm of my hand like my phone and also fits into all of my pockets making it simply more practical and enabling me to use it more often. I also really love the design of Field Notes and get joy just from seeing and using them. The big reason I have a separate satellite daily spread though is really for my creative and ADHD brain. My bullet journal essentially holds onto my most important stuff. It has lots of exciting ideas and projects and potential and it is just not helpful for me to swim in the big ocean of my dreams every day. In fact, it's downright overwhelming and distracting. The bullet journal system works as a funnel, allowing you to pour things in at a high generic level and work your way down to the granular next task. We're going to walk through some great examples later, but let's use a single example here to illustrate the life cycle of a project in a bullet journal as well as the power of having a separate space for the daily spread. One day I have an idea to make a class on bullet journaling, so I make a task dot in my daily spread and write Skillshare class bullet journal. Right now it's just a generic idea and the task dot is reminding me it needs to migrate somewhere else if I want it to continue on or be crossed off and forgotten. The next morning when reflecting and migrating entries for my daily spread, I see the Skillshare class bullet journal open task dot and decide I want to keep the idea and further decide the best place for it to live for now is in the future month of August on my future log. I consider these first stages the initial instance of writing the idea and putting the idea into the future log as the widest part of the bullet journal funnel. Once August arrives and I'm making my monthly spread, I'll reference my future log and see that I wrote down the bullet journal class idea as well as some other projects and ideas. My turn for discernment again, am I still interested in these, which of these ideas would I like to say yes to this month. I decide yes to the class, so I write it as a project in the monthly spread. I decide not now on to other ideas like planning a retreat and taking a staycation, I leave them in the future log. When it comes time to plan my week, I'll take a look at my calendar which we'll talk about in an upcoming lesson as well as my monthly log to see what tasks and projects I pulled out. Already, I'm further down the funnel and only looking at what I've decided is important for the month allowing the distractions for my future log to stay far away. I see the bullet journal class on my project list for the month and know the first step is to make a spread for the project in my bullet journal and brain dump my ideas for the course, so I add that task to my weekly plan. I'll show you what my weekly spreads look like in an upcoming lesson. On Monday, I'm making my daily spread a smaller part of the funnel and reference my weekly plan which reminds me I'd like to make a spread for the project in my bullet journal and do a brain dump of my ideas. Having ADHD, I have learned that it's so helpful for me to break tasks down into the next itty-bitty little tiny step. Instead of adding both make spread and do brain dump to my list, I'm simply going to add make new project spread as that's the smaller first task to be completed. By the way, I'll share some of my favorite task management and productivity tips in a later lesson. Now that I've got a task identified in my daily spread, I can put my main journal away and just focus on the daily. Now, instead of my brain focusing on the big overwhelming project of creating a Skillshare class or worse, getting distracted by other projects I already decided were less important, all it has to focus on is the single next step of creating a new spread in my bullet journal. Which I feel much more capable of doing, meaning I'm much more likely to show up and do it, taking me actually closer to my dream of making the Skillshare class instead of just afraid and staring at it or hiding from it. Let's finish out this example and say I didn't end up making the news spread on Monday when I wrote it down. Totally fine, the dot will stay open for me to find the next day. On Tuesday morning when I'm making my daily spread, I'll see the open dot from Monday, turn it into an arrow, then migrate the task to today's spread. Notice how I'm staying low in the funnel, where I'm less likely to get distracted by all the other stuff in my bullet journal. Let's say I followed through and made the spread on Tuesday and added it to my index and not only that, did a little brain dump and started getting some of my thoughts out. I can cross the task off my daily list and move on with my day. If I wanted, I could even add an entry to my daily spread that says, ended up getting some initial thoughts down on the course, re building blocks and benefits. Once Wednesday comes around and I'm making the daily spread with no open task dots to migrate from yesterday, I can then reference my weekly plan, which reminds me I'm developing a class and I also have the class projects spread itself for clues on what's next. I decide the next step is to turn my brain dump into an outline, so I write the task down in my daily spread to be acted on or migrated until it's complete. As time moves on and I move through the project, the project spread may grow and birth its own list of steps and things to remember and other projects and such will probably come up. Our daily spreads will be adding new ideas to the mix every day. The funnel created by the bullet journal helps bring things into focus, starting at a generic high level and working its way down to our daily focus. Lastly, in the next lesson, you'll hear me talk about how I no longer journal inside of my bullet journal because it ended up eating up too many pages. I feel like having my daily spread in the bullet journal would do the same. I'd rather have a casual and more temporary catch-all than clog my main journal with it all, making a separate Field Notes book the right fit for me. But I also encourage you to try whatever method works for you and if you don't even know where to start, then try mine because you'll quickly glean what your preference is. I tend to go through 1-2 Field Notes a month. As of now, I have filled five of them and have kept them numbered in my closet just in case, but we'll see what happens as the pile grows. So far, I haven't needed to reference any of them for lost information, so my system seems to be working. In the next lesson, I'm going to open up my bullet journal and show you what my spreads actually look like and how they work. 11. My Basic Spreads: In the next few lessons, I'm going to open my bullet journal to show you what my spreads actually look like. Not only the basic ones like the index and the monthly views, but the spreads I've tailored to fit my life and enrich my bullet journal practices in an effort to get your wheels turning for spreads you might like to try. We'll also cover some of the spreads that didn't work for me, spreads that have evolved over time, and general mistakes I've made along the way. Here is my index. Mine ended up just taking two pages at the front of my book. A few things to point out is I have some modifiers. So you can see this little AW circle over here, was when I was doing the Artist's Way. It was the thing I was using my book the most for and it was really helpful for me to be able to quickly find where those entries were in the index. That's something you can try out is having modifiers for the things in your index, just like we have modifiers for our smart bullets. The other thing is I have these little arrows here. For instance, my food log, I ran out of room to keep writing the pages and so an arrow means that food log got picked up back over here. Then the ellipses mean that this got picked up from something from this page. Just a little way to make it easier for me to understand what I'm looking at. Also, you can see that I honestly I don't put it into practice that much because I don't have the foresight for it, but you can use sub-tasks. When I first set up my human design section in my book, it was because I was taking a course and so I made a subsection for that course in the index by indenting it with a line and then having those page numbers there. That's another idea. This is what my future log looks like. It is just 12 squares. I keep it really simple. As I've said, it's mostly birthdays, which I'm not sure why I like to have them written down and also in my calendar, but it's just a really nice touch point. I like knowing whose birthdays are coming and I also have all my vaguely dated events that are coming up and I just cross off the month when I'm done with it. This is what one of my monthly spreads looks like. You can see the spread is labeled with the month and the year. On the left side, I've got my log. So I've got my day and date of the month. I've also got a week tracker going down here for the week of the year. I decided when I'm traveling to add that in with I just use a marker and put it in for how many days we're on the trip and I write where we were. I've got the things that I've entered. I have my tracker over here, my habit trackers. For this month I was logging, the 3 stands for three pages for morning pages, and the C stands for cleaning. I was just trying to get a hold of how often am I doing cleaning tasks in our house. On the right side over here, I have my tasks and my projects' list. But the reason I wanted to show you this is to prove a point about how amazing the log is. I'm going to read to you about my month of June, just as it reads from my tasks and projects list. I did not do thank you gifts. I did not do bookkeeping. I did not do bachelorette thank you's or ceremony thank you's. I deposited an important check, I checked my ADHD calendar and I paid June bills. I put off some wedding stuff. I launched a new page on my website. I put off The Artist's Way. I did my spring newsletter. I edited some Patreon calls. I also was a guest speaker in a workshop. That was boring for me and it was my life. I'm sure it was probably not all that interesting for you. That's what it sounds like when we just track our tasks and projects. But here's what my month of June sounds like if I read it from the log. We made homemade grilled chicken caesar salads. I had a date with my friend Emma. I finished the book, The Night Swim. Brooksie had a day off. I did a tablescaping workshop with my friend. I enrolled in a human design course. We took a trip home to Michigan where we got to go boating with my aunt and uncle. We saw our friends. I got to go to Leo's Coney Island again. Brooksie put podcasts. Had a live show in Detroit. I saw my friend's kids production of Shrek. I published a new website page. I filmed parts of a new class. It was the one-year anniversary of my Patreon group. Already that is just so much more rich, such a rich retelling of my life. That's why I really wanted to point out my monthly spread is just to say, I know we've got projects and things we want to get done, and I know they're important to us, but take some time to capture what's going on too. It's so good. Next, I just want to show you a quick example of what it looks like when I need to plan my weeks. On the right side here you can see I have this word web, and that's how I like to start. For my chaotic brain, it's helpful for me to be able to just dump things out and make associations as they come out. I know it's hard to see because things are crossed off but this bubble here said calls and it was all of the things and appointments that I had for that week. I start by writing a word web and then if I turn to Page 187, you can see that that word web then gets turned into a really neat list. So everything that's a bubble on here became a task on here that I was able to order. I don't make any more intensive a weekly spread. I just like having a general list to refer back to and that's the best way for me to make it is to start with a really messy word web and then to turn it into a more neat task list. Then of course there's the daily spread which we talked about in the previous lesson. I keep mine in my field notes book and it changes each day, but I date the top of the page and then capture my day with smart bullets. Those are my basic spreads. In the next lesson, I'll show you my favorite and most helpful spreads. 12. My Favorite Spreads: Now I'd like to show you my personal spreads, the ones that are unique to my life that may inspire a starting spot for your spreads. I was a little surprised that when I started bullet journaling, a lot of the spreads I wanted to make ended up being trackers and ways that I have captured my life. That's the first section of spreads we're going to go through are my trackers. First up is my gratitude list, and it's simple. It's just the list but it takes up a lot of room in my book and it's one of my favorite things to reflect on. You can see that I just use a little heart bullet and then I write the entry with the date next to it. If you had given me a note book and said for the next four months I want you to track everything you're grateful for, I would have been really stressed out about it. I don't know that I would've been able to collect this many pages of things I'm grateful for but since I did it daily, as things came up, it's amazing what I was able to collect. It feels like such a treasure trove to look back on all the things that I decided to write down I was grateful for. Next up is a simple page of just illustration ideas. Again, just a basic spread but the idea here is we get such random ideas as artists all the time and it's nice to have a place to just come and put that thing down. I'll just draw a little thumbnail or I'll describe the artwork. Then if I've actually done something with that piece, I'll put a little check mark or a sticker to let myself know that I did that, but I love having a little scratch pad area in my book so that when an idea strikes, I can write it down. Then when I'm actually working on illustrations, if I'm not sure what I want to work on, I can open this up and there's already these great ideas that I've been collecting. In the same vein is my art practice timesheet. Let me pull that up. Try to make a long story short but as someone with ADHD, I suffer from black and white thinking and time blindness. I just don't really have a very accurate memory to base things on. Let's say it's the middle of the month. It's really common if I'm in a bad mood for me to believe when my brain says, I haven't made any art this month or why haven't you made more art this month? Or why aren't you painting? Or whatever pressure it's giving me. This log has really helped things out for me. It helps me see that I create so much more than I think I do. Do you ever create in lots of different ways, maybe you paint and you draw and you do digital stuff and it all starts to feel like tiny drops in all these other buckets? Well, getting to see it all in one place, getting to see all these ways I spend my time creatively has been really exciting. These three colorful columns on the left just denote drawing, painting, and digital work because that's the high level view I like to take. Then I have a section for the date and a description. Then if I have any streaks of days which in August I actually had a 15 or 16 day-streak going, I'll draw a little bubble and then write the number streak that it is, just as a way to celebrate that I'm doing it consistently even though it never lasts and that's fine. Definitely take this idea. If you are a creative person, it's really nice to look back and see like, oh, I actually created like 20 times this month or two times this month or whatever it is, or I didn't create it all and I really want to. I love my art practice log sheet. Next up is an emotion log or tracker. Part of my ADHD NIS is emotional regulation and emotional intelligence. This it runs down on the left side. I've got the day and date of the month and then I have a check-in for morning, afternoon, and evening, and then a place to name those feelings. For example, on Wednesday, June 1st, that day in the morning I was feeling anxious, in the afternoon I was feeling relieved, and in the evening I was feeling creative. Now obviously, I feel more than three feelings each day, but the whole point of this was to just get me in the regular swing of checking in and noticing and naming a feeling. This is something that I track in my daily book but then gets migrated over into this tracker. Again, from my black and white thinking, it's really great to see that I'm not always upset or always happy like I think I am. [LAUGHTER] It's really great to have a language for my emotions and to have a tracker to see how I've been feeling. Not only that, it's really helpful to cross-reference with the rest of my month. On the day when I had a boat day with my aunt and uncle and I saw my grandma, I can go back and see that I was feeling easy, happy, and loved on that day. That's so sweet. Just another tracker. Similar to that one is I like to check in and be mindful during the day. I started this new thing where in my daily journal I'll just write down what I call sensory entries. If I see, hear, smell, taste or touch something or feel something, feel something, not feel in my heart but feel it on my body, then I'll write them down. Then usually when I get to the end of the feels notebook or it's the end of the month or it's just a good time to do it, I'll make this capture log and I'll make a section for seeing, hear, smell, felt, and taste, or see, whatever tense. I'll just write all those entries down. Again, it's just another poetic beautiful way to capture my life as it's happening. I saw tall, skinny palm trees and the Hollywood sign from our hotel room. I saw people dancing. I saw a positive COVID test followed by a negative COVID test. I smelled clean sheets and apple soap and I tasted a cured egg yolk. All these things are such beautiful details that make up my life. I'm glad to have the emotion tracker in this capture log. It's all the best bits of my life. Next up is a simple list just to track milestones and accomplishments. When you hit a new thing in your business or your life and you don't want to go brag to other people or you feel like you can't celebrate it for some reason, let yourself celebrate it in your book. I have a list with just the date and the thing that happened. At first when I started this, it felt a little silly to write down that I hit 46,000 followers on Instagram, especially now because I haven't even been on Instagram. But at the time that was really important to me and I'm really happy that I wrote it down. I also have the day that I got married in here, the day we adopted our doggie. This is a nice safe space for just those milestones and accomplishments that you want to hold onto. Another simple one is just a shopping list. I know a lot of us have wish lists and things on different websites and stores we shop at but sometimes, I'll find a rogue item or a gift idea and I don't have a place to put it down. Having a simple shopping list, I'll use a little dot so that I can mark whether I have bought it or not. In this case, all of these items got migrated to my new book and I'll also write what it is and the amount and what it costs. Again, a simple tracker, but mighty helpful. I've been practicing with Tarot cards as a way to hone my intuition and reflection. I just created this simple Tarot log. Mine's a Tarot log, yours could be an exercise log or a thing other people do log. It's basically just boxes where I write down the card that I pulled and then I have a few other keys and symbols for things that are meaningful to me but again, I love just being able to see patterns in the Tarot cards that I'm pulling, what a cool high level view for me to be able to create in my bullet journal. I do have a food log in here, but I'm actually going to talk about that later when I get to my failures and my failures. But just now I do have a food log that I keep after. Then lastly, this page isn't going to look very exciting, but it actually is a pretty good idea, or at least the start of a good idea. If you are like me, I love taking online courses. I love teaching on Skillshare. I love being a student on Skillshare but then we start collecting courses from all these places and we can forget. This is just essentially a list of a high-level view. I have a checkbox for the name of the course and then a box for me to write down if I have notes for it. This projector course, this human-designed course is the only one that has a number there, but that means that on page 59, I can find the first instance of notes for that course. If I go there, sure enough, it's human design notes. I also have boxes for how many lessons there are in the course. There are seven lessons in this course and I've taken three of them. Again, it's just a nice high-level view. If I'm going to forget that I'm taking courses, it's nice to go back and be like, oh yeah, I bought that one, I want to sign up for this or whatever. There's only one thing on it, but I did start a list of general courses I want to look into. I wanted to see if there are any fun collage courses out there. That was a nice place for me to keep an eye on it. I actually have already remade and migrated this to my new book that I make in this class. It's all very meta, trying to make a class sample on journaling while you're also bullet journaling is wild, but you can see that it's already evolved a little bit and that instead of drawing boxes, I use markers to make the boxes that I can cross off. It just got a little bit cleaner. That's a nice little tracker too if you've got a lot of courses that you take. Those are all of my tracker spreads. Next, I want to show you a few examples of project planning spreads. Our wedding, you can see that project planning like yes, I'm using my smart bullets and everything but things are getting messy. I've got arrows, I've got list pointing to other lists, I've got things crossed off, but that's fine. I don't want you to feel your bullet journal always has to be so neat and perfect or have a template to it because then you're not going to use it. The whole point is it's just a notebook, it's space for you to plan things. I kept list of tasks for our wedding but then also, you can see that if I turn the page, I'm pretty sure what'll be next is vows. I just needed a place to write out my vows, so I wrote things out and crossed it and rewrote it, and it's fine. Now it's all living in here under our wedding planning. Another example is a Skillshare class. In this case, I drew this calendar for this class. It didn't end up being helpful, but I needed to draw it to learn that it wouldn't be helpful. Then I just went into got words. You can see I have a word map here. I've got just drawings and list of stuff. There's no smart bullets on this page. You can see that it really can just become what you need it to be. In this case, I had been planning the class one way and then decided to totally change it. I just wrote myself a little update to say, hey, I've been planning it this way, but now I'm changing my mind. Just another example of how your project planning pages can be, whatever you need them to be. Similarly, when I wrote the book page to turn into my agent, which felt like such a huge idea. It felt like, oh, this is a dream idea, so it's really big. It's going to take a lot of time. It took one page in my book. I know it says two, but this I wrote after I turned in the page. I have to write this like big dreamy project spread. All I needed to do was make one page and get my ideas out. Then I wrote a page and turn it into my agent. Just to show that project planning doesn't even have to be this big thing, it's just literally space for you to meet with yourself on the page. Then in a similar vein of project planning but a little bit different is note-taking. Even when you're not planning things, when things don't have to be tasks. If you just need a place to take notes down your bullet journal is a great place for that. Here's an example of some notes that I took. The subject just says art and lettering, but I was watching all different types of videos. These notes right here are from a Stephen Koons video but then I went and found an Envato tuts video. That was tuts. Is that how you say it, tutorials, tuts? On YouTube and I just started taking notes there, but they all fall under art and lettering. In these notes, it was more helpful for me to use two colors and be able to take up space and to draw. I hope that shows you that your spreads, the rest of your book, is going to be made up of you. It's going to be made up of the trackers and the notes and the projects that you are excited about. I hope that you will take up the space you need to get it out of your head and onto the page. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you some of my failures or things that didn't really go as planned, as well as some spreads that have evolved in my bullet journal over time. 13. My Flailures + Evolutions: Lastly, I'd like to show you some mistakes I've made as well as things that I've tried that evolved to work better over time. When you go to start your bullet journal, you might get all excited and then go, wait, what? What do I do? In an effort to lessen your overwhelm, I want to ensure you from my own embodied experience that you can start anywhere. You'll break it and you'll evolve it. If the idea of start anywhere isn't comforting to you, I've got you. There is a lesson in this class with a QuickStart guide; use it, try it. When things start feeling extraneous or unhelpful, ask yourself why? Can you make it better, or do you not care about that thing and would rather focus somewhere else? Anyway, here's some examples of my flailures and evolutions. My first flailure was incorporating morning pages into my bullet journal. Morning pages are essentially just a personal journal entry where you empty your brain for three pages. Here's why it didn't work for me. For one thing, it filled up my book too quickly. Right now I've got four months in one journal and had I done morning pages every single day, it would probably only fit one or two months. That pace is just too quick for me. Secondly, morning pages aren't necessarily meaningful entries. It's like the dirt and oil I wash off my face each day. The washing is important, but the dirty water less so. Having my cruddy weird stream of consciousness thoughts just one thin page away from my plans and ideas, felt a little risky to me. If I lost my book and a stranger read through my book pitch idea, my human design notes, my taro polls, I honestly wouldn't care, I would give them a reward to give the book back to me. If a stranger read my dramatic ass morning pages, I would make my husband go get the book back and pay extra for them to not copy and share any of the pages. It's just a different vibe. But also, thirdly, I really like notebooks, and having a separate place for morning pages means I get to use all the pretty and cool notebooks I've bought and have been gifted through the years. I'm glad I tried it. Maybe you'll like the idea, but it ultimately wasn't for me. A simple flailure happened actually when I made my index. If I take this paperclip off, I started the index on this page, on Page Number 1. Then when I went to add my very first item, the future log, I added it on Page 2, rendering Page 1 of the index stupid. Also there's all of these beginner pages at the front and it made it super annoying to try and find the index. I have this paper clip now and it hangs out, holds my index, holds the page here for me so that I can always easily find it. An example of how something stupid evolved into something cool. I was so annoyed when I wrote the page on the wrong index page, but it ended up being fine and I ended up needing less than two pages for the index anyway. The next is my first try at my emotion tracker. I tried to set it up. I got the dates going down the side and I knew the general thing. Then when I went to go use it, I messed up just four times in a row. I made one mistake and it was okay and I went with it, made another mistake. But then by the fourth mistake it was like, I've fully ruined this tracker and I was so annoyed by it. What did I do? I put a big line through it and made a new one on the next page that I was much happier with. No, I don't love having this empty crossed out page. But the point was, as I broke the function of the page and so it's fine to just make another one and try again. I'm glad I did. Next is a failed project tracker. I wanted to make a high level view of my projects and I get why I did this. But essentially, I learned that my bullet journal is the project tracker. But I just wanted to show you that it's okay to try things and have them totally fail and not evolve. This was a checklist and I wanted to have this status bar that I could color in how close to done I was. But like, how can you color in how close to done you are? That doesn't make any sense. It didn't work. But what was helpful was, when I was making my projects I decided to tag them with a certain area of my life based on my life pies. Is it business or is it creative? Is it my relationships? What I saw was a bunch of the projects that I would come up with myself were all work projects. I was putting a ton of pressure to always come up with a bunch of business and work projects. This page, even though I never use it, again, really helped me see that and it really helped me pull back and start investing time in other areas of my life. The next one, it's nothing that's wrong with the spread itself. I took the time to set up this awesome spread. These all indicate different parts of the class process. This is filming the demo, transferring the footage, doing a rough cut of the footage, getting the assets. It's all just like a project tracker. I wanted to make a bonus for one of my illustrated journaling classes. I took all the time to set this up and I got exactly as far as transferring the second lesson to myself and I decided I didn't want to do the project anymore. It's a little embarrassing to turn to this spread and be like, yeah, I remember that tracker I set up and then never used because I threw the project away. But that feeling is so much better because I know the alternative would be doing nothing. I'd rather feel a little shady about this and know that, yeah, I didn't continue this because then I went on and did all the other things that I love doing instead. I lost my train of thought, ADHD. But basically I just want to say it's okay to set things up and then change your mind and just not use them. It's all right. Here's an example of losing steam for something without guilt. As I've talked about, I had a lot of success with the 12-week Artist's Way program for five weeks. Once Week 6 came, I made an empty spread with hopes that that would encourage me to continue, but discernment, I didn't need it anymore. I was unstuck as shown by this sad empty spread on Page 64. Honestly now I don't know why I didn't just cross off the name and use it for something else but here we are; flailures, we learn. One word, smears; there a bummer. But it's just a cosmetic and perfection. I tried to focus on the function of the page because it's the function of the bullet journal that's powerful, not the aesthetic. This goes for crooked lines, scratch outs, and messy handwriting. I don't even know what that word is. Lastly, I want to talk about my food log evolution, and I will put a little trigger warning in here for diets and eating disorders. Prior to being diagnosed with ADHD, I struggled for years with binge-eating disorder and extreme dieting. Tracking my food is a sensitive thing for me. That said, I've done a lot of healing in that area. Food and cooking are now huge parts of my life in a really enjoyable way. I decided during this bullet journal that I wanted to keep an easy breezy, no pressure food log, just to see what insights I might glean. When I first started, I used an old tool that was helpful for me at one time in my recovery, which is rating my physical hunger on a numbered scale. You can see part of my log has a 1-5 numbered scale, followed by a section to log what I ate, and a notes column. After a single-page, I learned it might make better use of the space to turn the page design sideways. This is an example of evolving your spreads as you use them and learn. As I move to the next instance of this spread though, you'll notice there are gaps between the days until it trails off in early July and stops being used. When I talk about discernment, this is another great example. When I first started, I thought it was a great idea for me to have a food log, but then weeks later, I stopped using it and it became a chore. It forced me to ask myself why and ask myself if I wanted to continue the spreads or not. At the time I decided to pause them as I was avoiding logging, I'd speed pass the filled pages when I saw them, and couldn't think of a compelling reason for doing it. Fifty pages, and a few weeks later, I wrote a simplified version of the log that better got to my new why. I just wanted to see what food I was eating. I didn't care about tracking my hunger levels anymore. In fact, it made me feel like I was on a diet again, so I stopped doing that. I didn't care about adding timestamps to the entry or describing amounts eaten. I just logged what I was eating, I put the date, and I described the food. This evolution was feeling a lot better than my first try. But still, after a month, I started to get a little lax with logging again. But now my discernment muscle's stronger, I realized I was being black and white about it and feeling like I had to log every little bite I ate, or it wouldn't be accurate. When I reflected on this, I realized the true heart of why I wanted to log in the first place was to capture down the foods that I was enjoying eating, whether it was a chocolate cupcake at lunchtime or a big homemade meal, I wanted to remember what I've been eating lately and really loving. The final evolution as of this recording of my food log is simply a dated list of foods and meals that were delicious or nourishing or entertaining or any other reason for savoring the memory. It's helped my meal planning tremendously as well as I can be more realistic about what I will buy and actually eat, and bonus, it doesn't feel like a chore. There's some examples to encourage you to start by simply trying something and writing it down. Your discernment muscle will be growing in no time, and your spreads will change and evolve as you get more connected with yourself and bullet journal practice. In the next lesson, we'll get into the digital components of my bullet journal system, starting with Google Calendar. 14. Google Calendar: In this lesson, we'll cover the first digital component of my bullet journal system, Google Calendar. The great thing about my bullet journal is it doesn't move along without me. The bad thing about my bullet journal is I can close it and forget about stuff as time passes. If you have ADHD like me, it's actually very likely we'll forget. A digital calendar ensures timely events and tasks don't slip through the cracks. Scheduled events or any type of task or entry that has a date and or time tied to it, either get entered right into Google Calendar or entered as a task dot in my daily spread, then move to the calendar and checked off when I have a moment to migrate it. As I've talked about, sometimes I'll enter an event on my future log that will eventually make its way to my calendar too, but honestly, I usually bypass the future log for the calendar unless the timing of the future event is too vague like spring newsletter. For example, if I'm standing at my psych front desk ready to schedule my next appointment, I don't need to touch my bullet journal or field notes. I can just open my calendar on my phone and see my availability and add the appointment. When the date gets closer, the calendar event will flag me and I'll add any necessary tasks to my monthly or daily spread. In the example of the psych appointment, I might see the event and add a task in my daily spread to fill out the necessary paperwork and put it in a folder. It's also helpful that Google Calendar has customer reminders built-in, whether I want an email before an event or a pop-up notification on my phone. Not to mention when plans change as they often do, I can edit, add, and remove events without the mess of erasing and drawing arrows and all of that. Also, it translates time zones for me, which I really appreciate. Google Calendar is free and easy to use, but there are plenty of other digital calendars to try out if for some reason Google Calendar doesn't work for you. I don't really know what's going on next week or even two days from now, because my calendar knows, leaving lots of precious space for me to consider the more important stuff on my plate, like what's happening today. In the next lesson, I'll go over the second digital component of my bullet journal system, Evernote. 15. Evernote: In this lesson, we'll cover the other digital component to my bullet journal system, Evernote. What happens when you want to reference something from an old book? One way is to set up pagination beyond books. If I take more human design notes in Book number 2, the first instance of notes may have pagination pointing backwards that says Book 1, page number, whatever. This is a great analog system for keeping notes together. However, you may remember, I'm lazy. If I want to look up human design notes that I took from months ago and they are somewhere else, I'm not going to get up and go find the book. There are some collections that are helpful for future reference and in those instances I use Evernote as my digital notebook. Real quick, I want to add that this is a pretty advanced aspect of the bullet journal system and if you're just starting out, you can just ignore it for now. I'm sharing it here in the spirit of thoroughness for when you get to the end of your first book and inevitably wonder what to do. If my bullet journal is my living hub, then Evernote is my archival hub. In the human design example, once I finished my book, I'm actually going to scan in the pages of human design notes and put them together in a human design notebook in Evernote. If the notes are really helpful as references, I could even transcribe them, meaning type up a copy of the written notes. Next time I want to remember something I learned early on in human design, I can either reference the actual notes in the physical books or I can pull up my human design notebook in Evernote and scroll through the named pages. Better yet, Evernote, like Google Calendar, works seamlessly from desktop to mobile, so I can access it wherever I'm working. Evernote isn't only helpful as an archive space though, it's also helpful as a next-level digital notebook. For example, the seeds of this course may be planted in my bullet journal, but eventually they were added to my Skillshare notebook in Evernote, and specifically to a note that turned into an outline that turned into a script that informed slides to be made. The project lives in Evernote now, but I'll still keep an eye on my daily tasks for the project in my daily spread. Evernote has a free plan, but I've been using it since 2013, so I've upgraded to the Pro plan. But just as with digital calendars, Evernote is not the only software like this, and in fact, you could probably use Google Docs as a free alternative if you wanted. I wanted to bring this up to show that while the bullet journal may be the hub, it doesn't have to be the forever home for all of your projects and ideas. Illustration ideas eventually become artwork in sketchbooks and pieces in my portfolio. Recipe lists eventually become grocery lists, which become dinner on the table, which become our favorite go-to meals. I encourage you to allow your ideas to grow beyond the bullet journal, but to allow the bullet journal to become the first safe place for any and everything that comes up. In the next lesson, I'll provide a QuickStart guide for beginning your very first bullet journal. 16. Quick Start Guide: In this lesson, I'll provide a quick start guide for getting up and running with your first bullet journal. If you need a refresher on the components discussed here, please re-watch the building blocks lessons. A written version of this quick start guide is included in the Class Resources on the right side of the Projects and Resources tab. Step 1 is to dedicate a notebook as your bullet journal. If you like the idea of trying a separate space for dailies, you'll want to dedicate a notebook for that too. You will also want to dedicate a calendar as your main calendar. I went to my local Barnes & Noble as they always have a great selection, but unfortunately they didn't have any hardcover Black Dot gridbooks, only soft cover or unlined. I went with the wine colored book. I'll be using a field notes notebook for my daily spreads and Google Calendar for scheduled events, both of which are discussed in previous lessons. Step 1A is for total beginners who have never done this before and are feeling clogged with where to start. That's to use a spread in your new notebook or a scrap paper if you feel more comfortable to make a brain dump list of all the tasks and projects you can think of, just let it all out. Then reflect on what you wrote and try to find groupings for like items. These will help inform what spreads might be helpful to create so you can, "put the information away". For example, meal planning budgets and shopping lists might fit together under household, or maybe you want to split it between food and finances. Don't worry about capturing it all, we'll never capture it all, just capture enough to get started. The practice itself will help you evolve as you use it, just begin somewhere. Step 2 is to add any known scheduled events to the calendar. If you made a brain dump for Step 1A, you can use this to scan for dated or timed events. Since I'm continuing on with my bullet journal, I don't have a bunch of events to add to the calendar as I've been scheduling them as they come up. Step 3 is to create the index. I like to use 2-4 pages at the front of the book. Name the page's index. If your notebook doesn't have page numbers, now it'd be a good time to number the rest of the pages. My book does have page numbers, so I'm all set there. Step 4 is to create the future log. I encourage you to Google and check on Pinterest for how other people do their future log layouts. However, I like to keep mine simple with 12 boxes so I can forecast out a full year. As a reminder, I use my future log for events with vague future dates. I also like keeping an eye on birthdays here, even though most are already in my Google Calendar. I'll also migrate anything from the old book's future log that may still be relevant. If you made a brain dump list for Step 1A, now it'd be a good time to check for entries that can be migrated to the future log. If you write anything down that you realize would be helpful to have on the calendar, go ahead and add it there too. It's helpful to get in the habit of adding things to your calendar as soon as you see a date and/or time attached to it. Once you've created your future log, you can add the page numbers to the index. Step 5 is to create the first monthly spread. For my monthly spreads, I like to start by writing the month at the top and the day and date down the side. I'll double-check my calendar to see how many days are in September and what day of the week the month starts on and write it down the left side. As I mentioned before, I like to add the week numbers. I'll use a marker to draw a colorful bar stretching from Sunday to Saturday and add the week number. On the right side, I like to divide the page into tasks and projects. I can start to fill this out based on what's left over from my previous book, what's coming up on my calendar, what's in my e-mail inbox, and by looking at projects spreads. If you made a brain dump list for Step 1A, definitely use this to pull some things onto your monthly spread. It's okay if you don't get it all done, why not try seeing what sounds fun to focus on this month? I'll use my smart bullets to keep an eye on tasks as they get done. For projects, if I'm already aware of subtasks that make up the project, I'll add them on an indented line, though I don't ever try to do full project planning on the monthly spread as it's still a high level view, and project planning itself can happen in a spread dedicated to the project. On the right side, I like to put a habit tracker, and this month I'd like to track showing up for my morning and evening routines. I'll write AM and PM as a note for myself and draw dots for each day of the month. I'll add it to my index by writing the month and the first page of the monthly spread. Then when the month ends, I'll close the page numbers with the last page before the following month spread. If the October spreads starts on page 95, the index will show September taking up pages 6-94. Step 6 is to create a daily spread, whether right in your bullet journal or in a separate notebook like I'm doing. I always start mine by listing the day, date, and weather information from the Dark Sky app. I draw a symbol for the general weather, write the current and high temps, note down wind speed and direction, humidity, and lastly, I draw the moon phase. This is just a nice grounding ritual for my daily pages, but you don't need to do it if it doesn't interest you. After this, I take a look at my calendar and see what's scheduled for the week and allow that to inform any tasks to be written. I also check my monthly spread, the previous daily spread, which you won't have if you're just getting started, and consider e-mail or any new things that have cropped up. I don't make an exhaustive list for myself in the morning, I like to find the day as it comes, but I've found that setting up my daily spread in the morning has gotten me in the habit of checking my calendar and making sure I'm not forgetting about something big that needs to be worked in. Utilize smart bullets to help tasks that need your attention to stand out. Daily pages don't get added to the index as they fall in the page numbers listed for the month, or in my case, the dailies live in a different place altogether. Step 7 is to continue on with your day, using your daily spread and smart bullets to jot things down as they come up. Step 8 is to migrate stuff from the daily spread to where it needs to go in your bullet journal or on your calendar. I like to do this in the morning and some people like to do it in the evening. Finally, Step 9 is to turn projects and ideas into spreads in the bullet journal. If you did the brain dumb from Step 1A and have an idea for a children's book, but no realistic bandwidth to work on it, could you maybe spend five minutes at least making a spread for the book and jotting down your initial ideas, or could you make a spread that contains a list of general project ideas? That way the dream of yours is safely noted for when you're ready to return to it. If you have health issues and lots of appointments, could you make a tracker that makes managing your symptoms and reporting them to your care team easier. The practice of turning things, be it an idea or a project or something you're learning into a spread and adding it to the index is bullet journaling. It'll get better and better the more you practice and try things out. There you have it, a quick start guide for getting up and running with your first bullet journal. If you're like me, you might be feeling a lot of excited energy to just get this thing set up and let it immediately start improving your life, but let me just encourage you that you don't need to start perfect or thorough to start a fantastic bullet journal practice. If you don't have a bunch of spreads or things to add on the monthly project list, that's fine; start with a daily spread and just focus on capturing bits of your life down on paper. The next step always reveals itself. That's the beauty of bullet journaling. In the next lesson, we'll put it all together with real-life examples and use cases. 17. Use Cases: Putting it Together: In this lesson, we're going to put it all together, starting with things that I do monthly, weekly, and daily. Then I'm going to cover some different examples of how you can utilize your bullet journal for the things that come up in your life. Other than making the monthly spread, which I show in the QuickStart guide lesson, there are some other things I do monthly too like making my emotion tracker. I do this right after the monthly spread. I also empty my field notes book for sensory entries from my capture logs and gratitude entries for the gratitude log. These are easy to find and remember because their dot stay open in the daily log until they've been migrated. The heart modifiers stands out for gratitude entries. Doing these things daily would make bullet journaling just a little bit too intense for me, but doing them weekly to monthly is small enough for me to do in batches and to keep up with. I've mentioned it before, but I also like to take care of all birthdays for the month at the beginning of the month. I check my calendar and future log and make tasks for anyone I want to send a card or gift to and add it to the monthly spread. Weekly, especially on weeks where I seem to have just a lot of different stuff that I'd like to get done, I like to make a spread in my main bullet journal and make my word web and neater outline lists that I showed in an earlier lesson, utilizing smart bullets for easy context. Additionally, throughout the week, I'll also add entries to the monthly log to capture the memorable happenings. Daily, I make my spread in my field notes book as shown in the startup guide, I like to start by writing the weather at the top, then check my weekly spread to inform me of tasks I might want to take on for the day. Not only that, but I scan the previous few daily pages and migrate any lingering things that need to be moved. Some tasks get migrated to today, while others get migrated back to my bullet journal for later or to the calendar. It's worth repeating that I do not load myself up with a full day's worth of tasks. I find that it creates a lot of pressure and then I do nothing. Instead, I make sure to write down a few tasks that I really hope to focus on, then let myself find the day as it comes. If I have any scheduled events for the day, I'll write them in my daily book from my calendar as a task, then we'll set an alarm on my phone to ensure I don't miss it as the time comes up. I also like to write tasks that prompt me to check in for my emotion and sensory capture logs. As the day goes on, I'll use hollow circles to log things that happened, dots to log tasks or things that need my future attention, and any space necessary to capture things as they come up. That's the basic rhythm of how I use my bullet journal. The big book funnels down from the calendar, future log, and project spreads to a monthly spread that informs a weekly spread, which informs the daily spread, which then feeds back into the main book in the calendar. But here's some examples of some other use cases you may find yourself in and how I would handle them with my bullet journal. Let's say you're about to watch a course on script lettering and you want to take some notes, simply open your bullet journal and name a fresh spread with the course topic and add it to your index. The spread is now a safe place to jot down notes in any way you like. When naming the spread consider the highest level category for indexing. For example, instead of making a spot in the index for the specific course, like script lettering course, I'd make a spot in the index for art, course notes, or even for lettering as lettering is a broader topic that I explore a lot of. When a client gives me a final deadline for a project, I make a spread for the project in my bullet journal, add it to the index and start by making myself a project plan. I create mini-deadlines for myself, like a due date for sketches, a due date for revisions, etc, and add those to my calendar along with the final due date. That way as I'm doing my weekly and daily planning, I'll see my many dates approaching and know to create tasks that allow me to complete the work necessary. Get an idea for a project while doing a totally different task. Make a quick note as a task in your daily journal to call your attention to it later. Then when you come across it again, add it to your project list for the month or add it to the future log. When helpful, make a spread in your bullet journal for the project, name it and add it to the index. Now you have a place to do any planning or note-taking as the project idea evolves. I'd also like to point out that sometimes there's just a lot of relief in writing an idea down, even if it turns out that I don't want to return to it later. Because the truth is, I have a lot more ideas than I have energy and time to complete them. This is a great time to use our discernment muscle and strike through anything that no longer interests or serves us. If you have health problems that you'd like to track for your own knowledge or to report to a care team, you can create a simple point plot tracker by labeling the y-axis with an intensity scale of 1-10, and the x-axis with dates for the month. You can create a color or symbol key for the various symptoms and plot them as needed. I have a friend who deals with a lot of health conditions and actually has a health tracker like this in her bullet journal. She has said that it has saved her for doctors' appointments, treatment plans, and finding patterns in her own symptoms. If you want to try out analog time tracking, you can do so in your daily spread by setting up the following. Down the left side of the page list each hour of the day. I start mine at 06:00 AM and end at 12:00 AM. Along the top create four sections labeled with 15, 30, 45, and 00. As the day goes on, draw lines to denote when things started and ended and label what you were doing. This isn't a sustainable practice for me in the long term, but on really loud ADHD days or when I really want to have a better idea of what I'm spending my time doing, time tracking is so helpful to see how I actually spend my time versus how I think I spend my time. Meal planning can become easily over complicated and so I keep it easy for myself by taking up space in the daily spread. I usually start by taking a quick inventory of what we have in our pantry, fridge, and freezer so I can use them in the upcoming week. I've been sticking to a grocery budget lately, so I'll usually calculate how much I'm hoping to spend, then look through recipes I've already collected, considering the groceries I have on hand. The end goal for my meal planning is a grocery list. After I take up the scratchpad space, I need to do some planning. I like to write the items in the order that I actually walk through the store and then I take my daily field notes with me and I check things off as things go into my cart. Have a daily habit you're trying to nail down like drinking more water or stretching, utilizing a column on the monthly spread is a great place to do this. Simply write the habit and draw dots for each day of the month. When you make your weekly or daily spreads, you'll see the habit tracker and that will prompt you to do it, or it will at least prompt you to write the task down in your daily spread to get it done for the day. This one is an example from my real life. I had forwarded myself an email to remind myself that we had a utility bill that was due. In the morning when I was doing my daily spread, I saw the email, but instead of writing myself a task to do it, I just took care of the bill and pay it right then. If task take less time to complete than they do to write it down and worry about I just knock it out and save myself the time. This is a reminder that our journals don't have to include every single little thing we ever did or dreamed about. That's just too much. As long as I'm paying my bills and showing up for what matters to me, I'm good. On the other hand, don't be afraid to get things out of your head and onto paper to free up brain space. Maybe be your meds is such a quick and small thing that you ''shouldn't need to write it down.'' But if you forget all the time to take your meds, who cares, what you need to do to get them taken, write it down as many times as you need. The point is, is this is your bullet journal and you aren't behold into doing things in any certain way, including how you may have done it for yourself last month or a few weeks ago. Lastly, let's say you need room in your bullet journal to work out some calculations or some other form of temporary information that you probably won't reference later. Use the space as needed, label the spread for your own identification, and hold off on adding it to the index. This will keep the index clear of any extraneous collections. That was a pretty mixed bag of situations. But I hope you can see that regardless of what's happening in your life or the order that it's happening, your bullet journal system is ready to catch it and help you remember. If you get overwhelmed, the basics are simply to write it down, give it a name and add it to the index. In the next lesson, I'm going to share some of my most favorite and cherished productivity tips for those of you who struggle with chronic procrastination. 18. Chronic Procrastination Tips: In this lesson, I'm going to share my very favorite tips for chronic procrastination. Step 1 is to capture it, write it down, whatever you think it is. Your daily spread is great for this practice and can really help strengthen the habit of getting things out of our head and onto paper. Creatives and people with ADHD have thoughts that loop, and writing things down breaks the loop. Step 2 is to define or constrain what you've captured. I like to do this with actionable words and quantifiable parameters. I can guarantee that if I write, check email, down on my task list for the day, I will not be checking my email that day. Why? Because that task is way too vague for my brain. What does check even mean? Go look at how. Will I know when I'm done? What does successful email checking look like versus unsuccessful? Also, email is boring. So no, thank you. The first thing I'm going to do is change the verb to something actionable and specific, which for email is words like read, compose, respond, delete. The next part of the parameters, these are the tidy little containers we create for ourselves, so we know when we're done and how to gauge our success. For the email example, instead of writing check email, I'm going to write, spend 30 minutes reading through email and deleting what I don't need or read and respond to five important emails. Whether through the use of time or quantity, I'm able to better focus my brain on what it will actually need to do when the task time comes. Check email is vague and easy to procrastinate. Spend 30 minutes reading through email and deleting what I need is very clear. Thanks to that clarity, I feel super capable of being able to do that task, making it so much more likely that I actually open my email, read through some, and delete a few that I don't need. The third step is to schedule and trigger the task. How are you going to remember that you wanted to spend 30 minutes reading and deleting email? The task dot in our daily spread is a lovely trigger. We open our spread to see what we're doing today, and voila, there is a little dot waiting to be crossed off. For items that are commitments with other people or timely events or appointments, I love using alarms as triggers. For example, if I have a one-to-one coaching client appointment at 1:00 PM, but it's 8:30 AM when I'm making my daily spread, that's four-and-a-half hours for me to lose track of time and forget to show up. When I make my daily spread and write down that 1:00 PM appointment, I'm going to immediately get my phone out and set an alarm for 12:45 PM as a trigger to help me show up for that appointment. The more you do this, the more you remember to do this. Another way to use alarms is this. Do you ever have to get ready later in the day for something and that thing is hanging over your head and ruining your ability to enjoy the hours leading up to the thing? My friend shared the following trick with me to not waste those waiting hours. Let's say you have a work shift starting at 4:00 PM and you know you need a full hour-and-a-half to get ready and drive to the job. Set an alarm for 2:30 PM and allow yourself the freedom to do whatever you want until the alarm goes off. You've left yourself enough time to get ready and the alarm will trigger you, so you don't have to hold it in your brain all day. Other triggers are reminders on our phones or linked to calendar events. The idea of triggers makes sense. Think about a job where you always got terrible tasks done. There was probably a trigger in the form of a boss or an email or even a deadline reminding you to get it done. The goal here is to create triggers for the stuff that's important to us, not only the things that other people want us to get done. The fourth step is the maddeningly "simple one." Show up, execute, do the thing. All the tips for this one really have helped me show up for step 4 more powerfully. But I won't lie and say that I never faced procrastination. Here are my favorite tips for when you've identified the task and you've triggered the task and you've showed up, and you still don't want to. The biggie here is there is a really good reason you don't want to do it. There is some unpleasant feeling you're trying to avoid and it probably has to do with something you're telling yourself in your head. One part of my job is actually helping creatives and people with ADHD through their daily knots. I get in them myself, I have coaches who helped me through it. Interdependence, we all need each other. But you wouldn't believe the amount of times that someone is applying an incredible amount of unhelpful pressure simply by telling themselves, I should get this done. That's just one example. There are ton of thoughts that masquerade as responsible thoughts that a responsible adult would have that lead people away from the results they want to be creating. Here is some of my top most helpful thoughts to replace your unhelpful thought with. If you're feeling pressure to already know what you should be working on and therefore you're avoiding everything and scrolling through Instagram, try on the thought, I can take this day as it comes or I'm figuring this day out as it comes. If you're in one of those storms where all of your tasks seem equally very urgently important and all the things need to get done and you don't know where to start, try on the thought 15 minutes would make a difference and I have 15 minutes. Then set a 15-minute timer bonus. If you're too focused on how boring or unpleasant a task will be and look, some tasks do suck, there is just no sugarcoating it, and therefore avoiding it with the force of life itself, try instead of thinking through the actual first steps of doing the task. For example, if I know I have bookkeeping coming up, it's very easy for me to start thinking that's really important, and it takes so long, and it's very boring, and I don't want to. Which means I'm immediately focusing on what sucks about bookkeeping. If instead I think about the actual actions it takes to do the bookkeeping, like open computer, open budget software, refresh transactions, I start to realize that even though bookkeeping is evil and terrible and very boring, that I'm actually fully capable of opening my computer, opening the software, refreshing the transactions, and before I know it, I'm doing that and I'm in the bookkeeping swing. This is just classic misdirection. Our brain wants to stare down the thing because it's big and it's scary, and it wants to avoid it. We're forcing ourselves to stare down at the ground at the very next step, which is usually less scary than the thing. If you're procrastinating something that's very important either to you or someone else and therefore have applied ungodly amounts of pressure on yourself to do it right, or do it good, or don't do it at all, try on the thought, this doesn't have to be a big deal or this doesn't have to be as big a deal as I'm making it, because it probably doesn't need to be. It shocks our systems into remembering why we wanted to do it in the first place and that usually calms us down, which is all we need to refocus and get going. Which brings me to the next tip of remembering why you're doing the task you're doing. All things are choices. Parenting your children, paying your taxes. My ADHD coach uses that one all the time. I don't have to pay my taxes. Lots of people don't pay their taxes. But if I don't, I may face the consequences of an audit and fees, prison time, and I really don't want that. I actually weirdly do want to pay my taxes. They are a thing I like to be on top of, but I don't want them eating away my life. So I try to make it as painless as possible. When you're all overwhelmed with what art project to follow or endeavor to try, ask yourself why you want to do it all in the first place. Often this simple question redirects our attention, usually away from fear of failure and back on the fact that trying sounds fun or would be helpful for us in some way. Don't gaslight yourself though. If you have a crap task to do for a crap job just so that you can pay your bills, you're allowed to say, I actually want to get this done so that I can collect my paycheck and go. Thank you. The last thought is from Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. It is, I just want to see if I can. This powerful little thought adds playfulness and takes away expectations from whatever it is we're about to try. I just want to see if I can fill these sketchbook pages today. I'm just going to see if I can sell some artwork to a greeting card company. You aren't making any grand proclamations, you're just dabbling, you're just checking it out. Those are some really powerful thoughts that I really hope will help unknot you. But two other tools that may be helpful are timers and external accountability. I use timers for everything. I use timers to keep me focused on a task. For example, set a 10-minute timer to delete as many emails as you can or to dust as much as your house as you can. You'll be amazed at what you can accomplish. I also use timers to remind me to do things, they are like alarms, but a little more robust. I even set a timer for distraction sometimes, like I'm allowed to hang out in a YouTube pole for 20 more minutes. If you have ADHD, please do not overlook the deceptive power of a simple timer. As for external accountability, this can be as easy as informing someone of what you intend to do. It creates a responsibility to the task that's outside of yourself. You can also try out body doubling, where you have a person nearby, either on a video call or physically, that works alongside you silently. You can create this atmosphere by working in public places like libraries and cafes too. The fifth step after execution, yep, there is a step after you've done the thing, is to revise the plan. This task you just completed is probably tied to a bigger project or at least affects something else in your list. Taking time to update your bullet journal and identify the next step for yourself is a powerful way to round out how you show up for things. It makes it way easier for you to know where to jump back in. Not to mention, you deserve to reflect and celebrate that thing you just did in the next lesson, I'll leave you with a few parting tips and reminders for your bullet journal practice. 19. Parting Reminders: In this lesson, I'm going to cover a few parting reminders and tips for your bullet journal practice. The first is one I picked up from the artist way and that's to do life pie check-ins. You basically draw 4-5 concentric circles and divide it up into different slices of life. You can customize yours, but I break mine into exercise, spirituality, financial, creativity, romance or adventure, or play, friends, work, and community or impact. Then you take stock of each area of life, filling it up based on your satisfaction. This is a really powerful tool if you're feeling disconnected from what matters to you. To me, it's the highest level view and help set the direction for my bigger priorities in life like when I get quiet and take care of my basic needs, when I push myself to express my creativity or put extra effort towards impact on my values in community. The next is a reminder that life is more than productivity. It's okay to cross things off, have gaps between projects, let things go and just sit. You're allowed to choose reading on the back patio over launching something new in your business. My second month of bullet journaling, I got a little bit too focused on the aspect of getting things done and how bullet journaling made that easy for me, and it really sucked a lot of the fun out of it. But by the fourth month, I really found my balance with getting a few things done, but also just capturing and enjoying my life. I encourage you to allow bullet journaling to ease your productivity, but I also encourage you to remember what else matters to you beyond getting things done. My next reminder is that perfectionism is a distraction and is stalling, it's toxic. I don't see it as a badge of any kind of honor, and I allow my bullet journal practice to be imperfect like my life, like me. I hope your bullet journal will help you process and accept your messiness and disappointing times and also celebrate your beautiful life, moments of growth, relationships, and joy. Number four is from Christine Carter and that's persistence is greater than consistency. If you're creative and especially if you have ADHD than the almighty consistency is freaking out of reach. But do you know what's more powerful, persistence. You made a spread for our project you got excited about and then totally blew it off. What if you showed up today anyway? You had a 34 day art streak going and then didn't touch your paints for seven whole months. What if you showed up today anyway? There is power in persistence. Lastly, I'll remind you of writer Carol's quotes in his bullet journaling book. You can't make time, you can only take time. 20. Thank You, Friends!: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for allowing me to share about my bullet journal practice, and why I think it is an excellent life management tool for creatives and people with ADHD. I feel really centered in present in my life, maybe more than I ever have, and I know it's thanks to the time spent growing my discernment muscle with my bullet journal. If you'd like to keep in touch with me beyond this class, you can give me a follow here on Skillshare. I also have a quarterly newsletter that readers describe as a magazine that their art bestie made for them, which is available for sign-up on my website at bydylanm.com. I can't wait to see your journal spreads. Until next time. Putting all those things away? Yeah. I made a mess. 21. Replay: Live Q&A Pt 1: I'm going to share my screen and we will get right into it. I will not be able to see the chat while I'm in here. If something goes wrong, one of you please be brave and come off mute and say, Dylan, things have gone horribly wrong so that I know what's happening. I would really appreciate it. First of all, I just wanted to thank you for being here. I think every class I come out and I'm like, this thing has changed my life and that's great. That's why I teach the classes that I do. But bullet journaling has been something that has affected me so much more deeply than just the art I make or the creative that I am. It has really smoothed out my life. That doesn't mean my life is perfect and doesn't have rocky roads but it just means that things are just, I don't know, feel a little bit easier. I can tell by your incredible reviews that you're starting to feel the same. You're starting to see that even though it seems like a little bit too simple or there needs to be more to it that seriously just showing up and writing things down and implementing a few parts of the process can be really helpful. Thank you for being here and thank you for all your awesome reviews and feedback so far. Today we will be doing a Q&A. You submitted quite a few questions ahead of time, and so I'm guessing that's what will take up the bulk of the call. Then if there is time left over, I thought we could spend some time doing some body doubling, which is when you work with somebody but silently so everybody would be on mute. Or I can do a light demo of me filling out my October pages because I need to catch up. I'm a little bit behind for the beginning of the month, but I'm excited to get my pages set up. That will be dependent on time as I am leading another call starting in about an hour and a half. I also wanted to let you know that the class itself is a pre-req for this Q&A. If you haven't watched the class yet, today is going to be a little bit advanced for you. You definitely can stay, I hope you will. But if that's you, I just want to encourage you to take a deep breath and just sit back and let the information wash over you, and don't worry about taking frantic notes. Wait until you have time to watch the class, and then this stuff will start to make some sense. The very first question came in from Joy, and she said, I feel overwhelmed but really want to do it. How can I break it down so I don't feel overwhelmed? My advice to any of you that are feeling this way is to start with a single thing. Maybe that's utilizing smart bullets, or maybe it's developing a, check your calendar daily habit. That could look like setting an alarm for the same time every day. Just as a trigger for you to go and literally look at your calendar. That's something that I built before I started bullet journaling. Another habit is to add things to your calendar right away. Just getting used to utilizing a calendar. There are all of these really small steps that any one of them independently will be so valuable and helpful even if you're unable to implement the entire system right away. I used a daily spread and smart bullets for a few weeks before I even got the main journal and set up an index and everything. That was really helpful for me because I got to get in the groove of that without taking on the whole thing. If you want to take a screenshot, here is a reference of those smart bullets. These are the ones that I use and I'll give you a second just to take a screenshot if you want to. On a Mac it's shift command 3, I believe. On a PC it may be shift control 3, but I don't know if it transfers over like that. My challenge to you is if you have been in this overwhelmed state or you haven't gotten started yet, then during this call I want you to try and take notes utilizing smart bullets even if things pope into your head that aren't about the call. Here are some examples. I'm going to take a sip of water really quick because I've got froggy crypt voice. The first bullet, is an event bullet. It's just saying Live Bullet Journal Q&A with Dylan M. Then maybe you had an idea to make a task for a mega brain dump. But then your discernment muscle kicked in and reminded you, Oh yeah, it's not helpful for me to do everything all at once. You crossed off that idea because it has too much pressure and instead made a little task dot to set a timer and do a 15 minute brain dump instead. I have another task dot there to call a friend back tomorrow. Maybe a friend bothers you during this call and you want to make sure you get back to them. You can jot down a little task dot. Maybe when I say later on in the call that persistence is greater than consistency, that's going to really stick with you and stand out. You can just make a simple note about it. Maybe time spent together here on this call is going to make you feel all warm and mushy and you could just do a little gratitude entry. Maybe later when I'm mentioning my very favorite pen, the Pilot Precise V5, you'll make a little dot for yourself to get one and use a little $ sign modifier to stand out. Just as an example, I think it's a really nice light way to see that even just the small parts of the bullet journal system are really helpful. I'm just going to check on the chat. No one is saying anything. It's very quiet. Well, I hope it's going well Someone else is here. Lisa F asks, how do you get past the fear of ruining your journal with false starts and missteps? The first thing I would suggest is to make a mistake real early and on purpose if you have to. If you remember from the class, I messed up my index when I was making it, and then I messed up my emotion tracker. I put a just big old line through it. Then I kept using my journal. You're not really going to be able to get past the fear until you "ruin" it and see that you actually didn't and keep using it. I would also challenge you to maybe think about it in a new way of like, what if there actually weren't false starts and missteps? There's a question coming on later that will echo this. But everything that I've done in my journal, even the things that I talk about as being failures or failures in the class, they literally weren't then things that I regretted, that I wish weren't taking up pages in my journal. It's not like I'm looking at it thinking, Oh, look at all this wasted space. At one point in time I felt it was important enough to write that down. I needed the space to get it out of my head. In that way, I'm just grateful that I did. The second that it became less valuable to me and I didn't want to do it, I let it go. That's a good thing because it means that that's my discernment muscle helping me to focus on what actually matters to me. I just feel a lot of fear coming from this question Lisa. I just want to give you a big hug and just say, just do it, open your book. Go draw an ugly face, go try and draw a self-portrait on one of the pages. Make it really bad. Put an X through it, turn the page and keep going, because that's how it's going to become a safe place. You've got to know that you can make mistakes there and that you can try things because we don't know until we try. I'm going to start going into the other question, but hopefully that is a helpful start. Next step, Michelle asked, I need more help with setting up the journal so it's not just a to-do list. In the past, I got a bit lost with how to set up the journal so that it captured everything from my scrambled brain into a usable layout. I started dumping information anywhere, which basically meant I couldn't find what I was looking for. It became a bit like inside my brain, this scary place no one wants to go. Thanks. Michelle, I think you were just jumping a little bit too quickly from one thing to the other. After you do your brain dump, before you start just putting it in your book, we've take some just even if it's literally five minutes to reflect on what you wrote, and group things into categories. You might find that, let's just say for the purpose of an example, that everything you write down is an art idea. Well, then you're going to need more categories beyond art to help group them. Maybe within all of your art ideas, you have some ideas for future painting exhibits. Whereas other things or projects that you're working on right now or other things are more crafty versus professional illustration or something like that. Or maybe it's things you want to learn versus projects that you've already started. But take a second to look at what you've brain dumped before you just start adding it to the book because those categories are going to be the actual spreads you make in your book. If I am looking at my brain dump and I have a recipe for something, and I have three calendar events or three timely events, and then an idea for an illustration, I'm not going to put those all on one page, I'm going to eventually break those up and put them in different places. Recipes for me go into my general food category and then into meal planning. Usually, I label them as meal planning. The events, the dated events would move to my calendar and move on to my calendar. Then the Illustration idea or the project idea that I had, that would become a spread where maybe I just label the top of the page with the project idea and then I get all my notes out and then I add it to the index under creativity or whatever category. Really just taking a little bit of time to discern what you've actually brain-dumped is really going to help the rest of the process smooth out. Next, I see some stuff in the chat, let me make sure everything is okay. Oh, my gosh. Ohn Mar was saying, Lisa, you should see the first pages of my new journal, it's a hot mess. Jenny said, agreed, I made a mistake in my journal on Day 1. Same, it's awesome. I see Carey had a question. I will check for new questions at the end. Sydney asked, is it one leuchtturm per calendar year? I'm hesitant to start in September, October with a brand new book since it will only be three months. Or is it the little field notes books and you use them until they're full and then move on and don't worry about it being only one month. Yes. The second one is absolutely correct. For instance, my first book, I started in May and I filled it up and it fit four months in it. Then this one I started in October and I don't know how much it will fit. It's going to depend on how big my months are, how light they are. It's great, you don't have to be tied to perfect calendar years. Then the future spread is where we can take a look at things for the year. I have a future spread in my first book that has 12 months. Even though the book was only used for four months, it's like I still wanted that overall view. It just keeps going with you and it is not tied to the calendar year. Next, Ohn Mar asked, I already have several firm dates for some 2023 events. Would these go in the future log at the beginning of the journal? Would you recommend a brain dump just before the beginning of each month before filling in a monthly spread? Here's the thing, I would recommend the future log for high-level planning, and a calendar for hard dates. Ohn Mar, if it were me, those firm dates that you know about, I would immediately put them in my calendar, which for me is Google Calendar, but then I also would add them to my future log because it's helpful when I just flip to that to remember, oh yeah, I have big events happening that month. It might just help with where you are loosely planning where things are going to fall into the future. But any time you've got a very hard date that's important, I think adopting a calendar is really helpful. There are people who use their Bullet Journal as a calendar. The problem with that is you have to be so diligent about checking it every single day, and I'm just not there. For me, having Google Calendar that's on my phone that I can check wherever I'm at, that does time zones and can move things around, it makes my life way easier. Having those things in separate places helps. But like I said, I would still utilize the future log for just visual high-level planning. Then as for your second question about doing a monthly brain dump, the beautiful thing about having a daily spread is it releases the need for bigger brain dumps because your brain dumping on the daily. Every day you're getting weird ideas and things that come up and things that people are asking from you out there, and then those go to the future and the month, they go to your calendar and future spread, which go to your monthly spread, they go to project spreads, they go to the daily spread. I really don't need a huge brain dump at the beginning of each month because I've been collecting it in little pieces as I've been living. However, I think a little bit of reflection time between the months is super helpful, and that's definitely what I do. A good example is, it just switched over from September to October and I like to decorate for Halloween. Sorry, if you can hear breathing and mouth noises, it's because Stevie just walked up to the table. I like to decorate for Halloween in October. That's not something I have written down in my future log, it's not something that I necessarily thought of before the month arrived. When I'm making my October pages, that's probably something that when I'm reflecting, it's going to naturally come up because I'm looking at my calendar, I'm seeing the name October. I'm going to see Halloween on there and I'm going to remember, oh yeah, I want to do Halloween decorating. In that case, those things tend to come up when I'm making my monthly spread because I'm already looking at my future log and I'm looking at my calendar, and I'm reflecting on the things that I've been migrating around. I hope that helps. Here is a little reminder of the funnel. I should probably break it out into its own lesson. It's added on, it's tacked on to the back of the separate space for daily spreads lesson, but if you haven't watched it, definitely go back and watch that lesson because there's a really awesome example where I take the life of a project and show how it would work its way through the Bullet Journal. The Bullet Journal itself works as this funnel, and your future spreading calendar are going to be at the very top. They're like broadest, biggest place that you'll look at. Those things will inform your monthly spreads and as well as any specific project spreads you make. By project spreads I make, I mean if your monthly spread says you're going to make a Skillshare class this month, you might have a project spread for the Skillshare class. Those things are more specific than the future spread in calendar, and those feed down to the weekly, which feeds down to the daily. Then, of course, through migration, anything that gets collected in the daily ends up getting migrated and moved to all of those places. It's a really beautiful system that just keeps moving and keeps itself fresh as long as you are picking it up and doing something with it. By doing something, I mean writing things down, giving them names, putting them in the index, using pagination, that kind of stuff. 22. Replay: Live Q&A Pt 2: Ann asked, "Where do you place your project and play spreads in the journal?" Stevie. He got a bat toy. He is very excited. They go wherever the next blank pages are. We are not fortune tellers. So if something is coming up today, then the place to put it is the next blank page that you have. Drop it. Can I have it? Thank you. Sorry. This is why pagination and the index are so crucial because there's no way for us to know how many pages we're going to need for this course, or how long we're going to be interested in it, or if the course notes are going to lead to a project. The best place to put it is just the next blank page. If you haven't done this yet, then just do it today. Right after your index or your future log, it's probably your monthly log is the next one, just turn the page and name the page at the top with the project or notes and get going. That is as easy as it is. Also, I wanted to add that when you're naming things, I usually ask myself what category it would be most helpful to store it under. Some projects become their own category while others will fall under umbrellas. For instance, when you look through my bullet journal, when I was planning this course and actually producing it, the names of the pages themselves are called bullet journal course, bujo course. But in the index, they are listed with the pages just under Skillshare. If I wanted, then I could have indented under Skillshare and said my bujo or the bujo course, and then listed those pages separately. But for me, I'm never going to be in a frantic enough situation where I need to urgently access my bullet journal production course pages and that having those other Skillshare once in the pagination is going to throw me off. For me, it's easiest to just tuck it all under Skillshare. However, our wedding became its own beast. So it's just in the index under wedding. Within those pages, as you flip through the pagination, there's lists, there's drawings, there's drafts of my vows that I wrote. In that case, keeping it under wedding as opposed to something like event planning or party planning. I don't throw enough parties for that to be a category. Having it just be wedding was its own thing. Whereas you may also on the other end of the spectrum, some things just may be a general collection of things. So name it. What is that general collection? You can have something in your index called ideas and on those pages, it can literally just be lists of your random ideas that you come up with, big and small, no matter the topic. Maybe then when you're monthly planning and you're flipping through your book and you might be like, "Oh, what ideas do I have on here?" You can flip through and you can pick some out and migrate them to the monthly spread, and that will help them work into your weekly or your project spread or however you have it set up. Let me just check the chat really quick. I should assign several double pages for projects like redesign website. Here's the thing. I don't like pre-assigning a bunch of pages because then, what if you need less than that? What if you need more than that? You don't know how many pages you need. So just use the pages you need, and then when you turn the page and write something. Sorry, let's say on Monday I'm writing my bullet journal notes in my course and I need three pages for it, then I will utilize those three pages and then I stop there. The next thing I write down is a recipe. That recipe is going to go on the next blank page right after whatever those bullet journal pages are. Then let's say on Tuesday I'm back to my bullet journal class, I'm going to flip to the next page after the recipe and keep going. I'm going to use my pagination at the bottom, those little arrows that say this topic continues here, just to note to myself like, hey, I just skipped one page and the bullet journal notes continue. That way I'm only using what I need and the pagination is helping me link it all together. If you try to pre-guess how many pages you need, then you risk having a bunch of blank pages that aren't used. You also risk really pressuring yourself to utilize them. If I would have pre-setup pages for this class that I published, I would have set up a quarter of the book and I ended up only using, I think, four or five pages for different lists. I just think it's way more helpful to just roll with it as it comes and really rely on the pagination and everything to work with that. Jana asked, "I noticed you used the same pen, and that gives the journal a lovely visual continuity. Have you tried pencil or other types of inks and colors?" Absolutely. I don't want to carry around a bunch of stuff. I always have my Pilot Precise hooked on to my field notes, they're always together. That's part of it. It's just there together, and so that's what I use. But I've used markers from Faber-Castell and Tombow. I've got a bunch of colorful Le Pen sitting here, then they work great in the book. Yeah, just use whatever you like. For me, color has utility to it. If I need a separate color to stand out from the notes for some reason, then that's when I use it. If I just use a bunch of colors, my brain tends to break when I look at that and I can't make sense of the information. That's why I tend to just stick to one color there. Next question is from Wendy Thomas, "Do you have any experience with Notion as a supplemental digital system or just Evernote?" I do not. I've been using Evernote for nine years. I don't even really know what Notion is, but I know a lot of people like it. I've heard people talk about it. I did see that there is a masterclass on Skillshare by Ali Abdaal, and it looks like a lot of people really loved it. There's a ton of apps like this and if Notion is the one that you want to use, I definitely encourage checking it out. Joy asks, "How do you decide how to log your health? When I'm trying to log many components like alcohol intake, exercise days and type, palpitation, sleep, aches, etc., do you have any sites that you like to tap into that have layouts?" I recommended it in the class, but Pinterest is great. But also checking out, downloading health tracker apps and looking what their user interfaces look like. That could give you some really great ideas for how to consolidate the information that you could still do in an analog style. But beyond that, Joy, I really recommend starting simple so that you can break it and learn about what you need. For example, you could do something as simple as just having a list. Let's say you have a spread that says health log and you go in there every day and you write the date, and then you list anything that you knew came up here. Well, I had a headache, no alcohol today, a few heart palpitations, I slept great last night. Maybe that's just the first thing, is just making a log. In case you are worried about not remembering to do it, you could even set up a daily habit tracker in your monthly spread. If you remember in the class on the monthly spread where I have the log, I'll have these little dots for each day of the week or each day of the month. That helps me remember that I have a habit that I want to track. You could have a habit tracker in your monthly view to trigger you to then turn to your health tracker pages and log things as they're coming up. Then at the end of the week, at the end of the month, you could review that to see what information stands out the most. Let's say you're like, "Wow, I had 15 headaches and I also consumed alcohol 10 days this month," maybe you then decide that you want to make a graph just of those things based on what you logged for that month. But then maybe in that couple of weeks, it has nothing to do with your alcohol and you really want to get in on your sleep and exercise tracking. Just to show that it can start with a list so that you can learn, you can get in the habit of doing it, and then you can build it out and break it out into more interesting layouts as you learn what you need from the tracker. Another idea is you could just make a simple calendar of boxes. So use two pages and break it down into small boxes, label them with the day of the month, and then you could use different colored pens for each thing. Maybe alcohol is blue and exercise is orange, and then if those things happen on that day, you'll use that color to write in the calendar. Then again, it's all about reflecting, we can't just collect this information. There's got to be sometime for you to reflect and discern. What did I collect here? What do I care about? What does this mean? What do I want to do with it? Do I want to keep doing it? That's how you saw my food tracker evolve, which I showed in the class, is I started with something, and then that something changed and changed and changed, and it actually became more simple and more simple and more simple. But I would definitely recommend first just starting to look just type in bullet journal health tracker into Pinterest or Google and look at the images, and even if people have different symptoms or they're tracking different things, just look at the types of models that they're using to get that down and it might get your brain moving. Marisa said, "Can you share more details about your emotion and habit trackers? Specifically, what are the numbers you've added in the emotion tracker color squares for morning, afternoon, and evening, and how do you decide what habits you want to track for the month? Do you keep a list of them somewhere in your bullet journal? Thank you." The numbers just referred to the intensity of the feeling. So if I was anxious, but it was a low-grade anxiety, it would get a one. Whereas if I was angry and I was just storming around this place, maybe it would get a three. I actually have evolved that out of my emotion tracker in September. I didn't do any intensity feelings. It's a great example of what I was just talking about. In the beginning, I thought that it would be really helpful because as I was tracking the emotions, I felt a lot of stress about calling two things anxiety when they felt so different. In the beginning, it felt really helpful in my logging just for me to be competent at doing it, to be able to put the intensity in there. It felt good. But as I kept doing it, I was forgetting to log the intensity, and then I would have six days where I would try to go and guess the intensity, and I was like, "Well, what's the point then?" Obviously, I must not care about this. Now I actually don't log the intensity anymore. Actually, for October, I'm going to change my emotion tracker a little bit so that I don't have to color in a square, I'll show a picture. I'll share it in the discussion. It's too hard to explain. But as for the daily habits, I just instinctively pick a habit. I can usually tell something that would be helpful or something that feels good, and it's usually something small and basic. Filling up my water bottle, doing my morning and evening routine, cleaning the sink by the end of the night. Really small things. But you could very easily create a spread that's called trackable habits, where you just keep a list of habits that you think might be cool to track, and then maybe at the beginning of each month you go through and you pick a few of those. I love this question. Luisa said, "Whenever I do a brain dump, I manage to migrate a few things, but 70 percent of them remain in a brain dump page forgotten. Any tips?" Yes, forget about them. That literally is discernment. You took time to write it down and part of you said, "This isn't really interesting enough for me to move somewhere else." Now, if it's important things that you can't be forgotten about, then migrate them. They have to go somewhere, create a home for them. Other than that, you can just really let it go. If it needs to come up again, it will come up again. I know it's really scary. It feels like these things we've collected are really important, but a lot of it isn't. A lot of it is just stuff that we're just holding onto, and it just as clogging us up from other stuff we want to do. I think it is very healthy to make a brain dump and then realize that half of it is just you don't care anymore, and that is just fine. If you're super nervous about it, you can fold up the brain dump and put it in the pocket in the back of your bullet journal, or you can make a project or make a spread that's like projects and ideas or initial brain dump, and you can keep it there and you can hold onto it and you can refer back to it. But let yourself forget about the 70 percent so that you can focus so powerfully on that 30 percent. Patricia asked, "How to coordinate an analog bullet journal with a digital calendar?" In this case, I will recommend just referring back to the class since there are lessons on this, but I did pull out, just as a refresher, as it may help add a point to them, the main touch points where they touch each other. At the very basic level, my daily spread, which is my analog, that's my field notes, and my Google Calendar, which is my digital calendar, they both collect items that need to be scheduled, meaning that have a date and/or time tied to them. Ayoka is on this call, she actually had a great question in the class. She said, "How do you schedule things where you know the date but you don't necessarily know the time or there's not a set time?" In that case, in Google Calendar, I just set up an all day event. If I have someone I want to call, like if I want to remember to call my friend this weekend, I'm just going to go ahead and put it on the calendar for this weekend. I'm not going to write it down in my daily and migrate it for four more days when I can just offload it from my brain right now. Things either get written down in my daily spread to be added to Google Calendar or they're just added directly to Google Calendar. Next, the actual daily habit of setting up my spreads in the morning and checking my calendar is what keeps my eye on timely events that then get worked into the daily, monthly in project spreads. That's the funnel I'm talking about. This is the actual habit of me showing up every day for a few minutes in the morning and writing the date at the top of my daily spread and getting my phone out and looking at my calendar. If you've never had that habit before, like I said earlier, that can be your very first habit you work on building, is just setting a timer and, every day for the next month, checking your calendar even if there's nothing on it. Just getting in the habit of remembering like, "Oh, yeah, I have a calendar and it has timely things on it for me to check." Then beyond that, reminders and alerts from Google Calendar as well as task dots in the daily spread act as prompts and triggers. For instance, I had a little reminder pop up 10 minutes before this call just to remind me like, hey, I know you know this call is generally coming, but you're probably getting ready, you're probably letting Stevie outside. Just so you know, this is the 10-minute limit. Then I also, this morning when I was making my daily spread, I checked my calendar and I wrote down a task dot that says 9:30 Skillshare bullet journal Q&A. I also have an 11:00 AM call. So I wrote both in a 5:00 PM call. I wrote all of those things down, and that's how those things work together. I'm really the glue that holds them together. I'm the thing that checks both things and uses both things. But it's the tiny habit. It's like really not a lot of time spent, but it's that strong habit that I've formed that really helps implement them together. 23. Replay: Live Q&A Pt 3: Angela asked, do you think this can benefit a college student with studying and reminders. He has ADHD. So my first thought, Angela, is that alarms, daily phone reminders and adopting a digital calendar may be helpful first immediate steps. If the college student has zero system right now, then trying to force or suggest a bullet journal on them, it just maybe too much. So starting with getting in the habit of setting alarms for things, or having a daily phone reminder or an alarm that goes off every day at say, 4:30 PM that says, 15-minute study. Something that triggers them in a small way to be like, oh yeah, this is something I need to do. I'm going to do. I do it every day. I'm going to show up for this. Beyond that though, the bullet journal, absolutely, is so supportive for all the various projects and tasks and things that the student is probably facing. Also, for people with ADHD, writing things down is so helpful. I think, it was Luisa who asked, I do my brain dump and then 70 percent of it is not helpful. That's exactly why writing things down is helpful because in our head, they feel they have so much weight to them. They feel really big. But then you put it down on paper and you're, oh yeah, when I see this thing, when I visually see it next to all these other things, it pales in comparison. So writing is super powerful. I will say that for people with ADHD, who are just getting familiar with their ADHD, and building these life skills, it's hard to remember to pick up the tool. So working on conditioning and using them at the same time every day, again, it doesn't have to be a lot, five minutes of checking a calendar and making a list of three to-do items, every single day or as persistently as possible are really going to be beneficial for an ADHD brain. Next, Christine said, more examples of planning projects and deciding strategy. So I can show this when I turn on my overhead for the work time at the end, but I can tell you that in general, my strategy for every single project I ever do is next step only. If there's a final due date, if it's a client project, then I, of course, keep an eye on the end due date, but I really still, I'm only identifying what is next. So you will see in my bullet journal, in my class production spread, when I was actually working on this class, I just have a bunch of lists. At the beginning, the very next step for me, I had already been working on the class when I started this bullet journal, but then when I made the first spread in this book, what I needed to get done was to finish writing the audio visual scripts. I had already written all the scripts for all the lessons. Next what I needed to do was take each and every script and break it in between the audio and the visual. So all I needed to do for that spread was to make a list of every single lesson with a little task dot and as I wrote the AV script for each one, I crossed it off. Then when I got to the end of that list, I was like, okay, the AV scripts are written, what's next? The next step for me was then to create a short order list from all of those scripts. Now, that I know all of the shorts that I'm going to need from my AV script, I can now order them to figure out what makes the most sense production wise. So it really is just what's the next step? Then I take up space in my book and I'll either make a list or if I need to draw a picture or if I need to jot a note down, that's what I'll do. Then for our wedding, our wedding was literally just list after list, after list. I would sometimes make a master list and that would be used for a while and then it would just become too overwhelming and so I would make a fresh one and I would transfer over anything that was undone from that one and add to it. So there really isn't a time when I plan a project and I'm like, okay, there's 12 steps to get this project done, and this is when I'm going to do them and this is the order, because I find that doesn't work for me. It never goes in that order. All of that planning becomes wasted. I focus only on the next step. I put all of my attention there, I give myself space to do it and then I reflect on what's next, and I do it all over again. The last one we have for slides, but we do have some that were submitted last minute, where it's from Hafeela. She asked, how to stay consistent with journaling. My best advice is to start small and to stay small and to adopt persistence instead of consistency. Try to show up for five minutes at the same time each day and practice forgiveness on the days you miss. Literally, right now, what if you got your phone out and set an alarm for tonight or tomorrow or whatever time of day you like, a time of day that you think might be a little bit of downtime, and what if when that alarm goes off, you get your bullet journal or a piece of paper out and you just write some stuff down. Maybe you try to use some smart bullets, and maybe that's all it is for 30 days, it's just showing up and writing stuff down and not knowing what to do with it. But that habit is so valuable, and you can grow so much by doing that. It's really important to see your journal as a good, fun place that can change and not a rigid place, where you must show up a certain way all the time. I'll go ahead and stop sharing now, since that's the end of the slides. When I was making this class, I felt a lot of pressure to keep doing it how I had been doing it in the old book because I was making a class and I didn't want to keep changing things. But I had to remember that this is still my bullet, regardless of the class, this is my bullet journal, I need to use it and I have to be able to change it and use it in the way that I want. I couldn't be worried if suddenly my handwriting looked crappy or if suddenly my lines, I just couldn't worry about it. So give yourself forgiveness for all the ways that you are messy and inconsistent and just keep trying to show up. If five days have gone by and you forgot that you even had a bullet journal practice, say, wow, I forgot I was starting a bullet journal practice, but I was really excited about that and I'm going to show up today. I'm just going to open it up and look at it. Instead of being like, oh, yeah, I set that up and it was supposed to change everything and it didn't and so I suck and I'm broken and I'm just going to go google how to stop procrastinating. What if you just didn't go down that road? What if you were just like, oh, five days, that's fine. I'm going to pick it up again. That's the kind of attitude that can be just so so powerful. So I'm just going to scroll through. I think some questions came across. Kerry said, do you create new icons for different spreads on your daily so you know where things go or do you just go through each single item and make the decision on where to migrate in the moment? Yeah, the second one, which it's really not that much. Like yesterday, for example, the open dots that I have leftover was making slides for this class, which I ended up doing this morning. I didn't pick up a prescription and so I'm probably just going to move that to today. I wrote down unpacking for our trip. I'm actually just going to cross that off. I'm going to remember that I need to unpack and I don't want it. Now, I have decided I don't want it on there. My classes picked as a staff pick, but I need to send assets to them and I haven't. So it's like those things are on there. All those things can move to today. They're small things. I found a recipe on YouTube for a creamy Tuscany chicken. I'm going to move that to my meal planning book. It's not that much. I think when we start we're like oh my god, I'm going to be writing all the time. Go practice. Let me prove you wrong. You got a lot but you don't have that much to write down. It's really not that much. You're going to know where it goes. You're going to know what to do with it. You're going to see that 15 percent, maybe more of what you write down you don't even care about as you write it down. The other day, I was sitting in the airport and I got really excited about the idea, I love sweaters and it's October and I was like, cool, what if I learned how to knit sweaters, wouldn't that be so cool? I reached out to my art friend. I wrote it down in my book to ask a friend because we were boarding the plane. I wrote it down as a task dot to ask my art group what they think about knitting sweaters. So I saw it later on. I go into Slack. I'm like, hey guys, on a scale of 1-10, how hard is it to knit a sweater if you've never done it before? By the time I hit Enter, I had no interest in knitting sweaters anymore. Sweet Norma wrote back with patterns and was like, well, if you can find a good teacher and it depends on the needles. I wrote back, I was like, thank you, Norma. I don't care about this anymore. I'm just going to buy sweaters, and that's fine. Imagine if I had made myself feel bad for that and be like, oh God, I had another dream and I can't stick to anything and it's, no, I guess it was just a whim. I don't want to knit a sweater are you kidding me? I'm just going to buy them from people who knit them. So now, it sounds like somebody got a little unmuted, so let me just mute you all again. Jen said, "Hi Dylan, this course is amazing and I finally feel like I'm creating a system that will work for me. This is great news and I am excited." Yes, it is. I'm finding myself stumbling still on the migration piece. I'm worried about missing things and I do need reminders from my phone. Can you talk a bit more about how you integrate digital and analog? Yes. It's literally as soon as I see a task dot or something in my book that I know I can't trust myself to remember, I'm in the habit now of setting up that reminder immediately. As soon as I realize that I cannot be held responsible, I hand it over to something that can be held responsible for me. So again, that can be one of those micro habits. Maybe for the next week, that's all you focus on is like I'm going to learn how to use Siri so that I can ask Siri to set reminders up for me and you just get like, Siri does everything for me. Siri, please remind me in an hour to do this. Siri, please set an alarm for 9:30 PM called this. Every time. It's so, so helpful. Jen, I would also reflect on when you say I'm worried about missing things, get real specific. What things are you talking about? What things have you missed in the past that you're worried you're going to miss because that will inform you what you need to do with it? If you're worried about missing appointments or being late for appointments, then maybe the habit is I put the event in my calendar for a half-hour before it starts so that I get going ahead of time. If you're missing things just because you're not seeing them when you're migrating. Maybe making the icon something different is going to be helpful. I would get specific, what are you scared about missing? Look at what that is because you'll learn so much just by looking at what that is. Then Laura said, "I'm struggling with the monthly log. Is it treated like a calendar where you write things down that are to come, or do you go back later and write down an event or something that happened that day?" She has another question. So let me start with that one. It can be whatever you want. Mine is a log, meaning mine is not a calendar. When I'm going to set up my October thing today, I'm not going to go look at my calendar and then write down the events that I see coming into October. They're already in my calendar. They're already in there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the calendar and I might see, oh yeah, I have a client project due at the end of the month, and I wanted to get my fall newsletter out. So I'm going to write those two projects down on the project side of my monthly spread. I like the actual dated part to be a log because it's so small and things change, so like my brain would break. If I wrote, I have an appointment on this day, and then the appointment changes and I wrote it in pen. Well, that just took up half the spot for that day and it just doesn't work. So that's why I have the calendar. Also, if you go back and watch the lesson, I do a read-through of the example of me reading through my month based on my completed tasks and projects versus reading through based on my log of the things that I wrote down and it's night and day. One is a beautiful happy poem of life and the other is a sad list of some things that I got done and other things that I didn't. So that's how I really like to do it. So I'm not very good at keeping that log updated every single day. Like when I was just in Michigan for a week, and I totally fell off of updating it. But I had my daily log, and so, when I was at the airport, I was flipping through and I would go each day and I'm like, anything memorable or does it does anything stand out from what I wrote down that I want to put in the log? If there's not, I leave it blank and that's fine. Not every day has something that I want to write down. Then other days it's like, three things happened and I'll try and fit them in there. Or I'll put one on there and then two of them will go to my gratitude entry, and so things move around. But I find that the monthly log with a calendar is way more helpful as like an overview of what has been happening and also a high-level view of the tasks and projects that you've migrated from your future log, from other daily logs as they've come up. If it's already in the middle of the month, let's say so today it's October 7th. If I had something come up in my daily spread today, that I know I'm not going to do today or tomorrow, I'm not going to keep migrating it along in my daily spread. I'm just going to go and plop it in the monthly spread because that's the next highest view-up that I have. If I had a weekly spread for this week, then maybe I would put it there because that's the next highest up, but I don't have a weekly for this week. Then her next question. "If, for example, it's a Monday and you have a task that you need to do later in the week. Do you note it in your daily log and just keep migrating it daily until it gets done?" So in that example, if the reason I'm not doing it today is because it's scheduled to happen. Like if I have a call on Thursday or it's due on Thursday, I'm going to put that on my calendar. So that way, the calendar and the daily checking, that's what reminds me, and that way I don't have to keep writing it and moving it along. That's a waste of my time. But if I just know that I generally want to get it done that week and it's not because there's a time tied to it, then I would put it in my weekly or monthly to keep an eye on because I'm going to check those. But if you're worried about it, you can also just migrate it along. So it just depends. I would probably put it in my calendar, though. Then last question. "Say you're writing your to-do list for the next day. Do you write it all out in your daily log for the current day or start the new day with your to-do list? Sorry, I got so bogged down with the details." No, that's why we're having this Q&A. That's exactly it. You watch the class and you're like, I love this, this is great. Then you sit down and you're like, wait a second, what do I actually do with this thing? So I'm so glad you asked. For the question of next-day to-do lists, usually if I do this, like I did this the night before our wedding party, I will start setting up the next days in my daily spread because otherwise, I have to just like migrate it the next day. If it's a lot of things, then I'll just set myself up for success. I don't do this often because I really don't want to get in that groove of like, I start my next day is tomorrow and then I run out of space today. So I only try to do that if it's like the end of the night, and I'm like, I know right now five things that I need to do tomorrow and I'm not going to be able to sleep if I can't get them out of my head, then I'll just go ahead and date for the next page and I'll set up my dots, and get them ready to go. Similarly, if it's for one project. When I was producing this class, I would wake up in the morning ready to go, and I'd have 12 things that I knew I wanted to accomplish for that day. In that case, I did not write all 12 of those down in my daily spread because all of them fell under the project of my bullet journal and so I was keeping track of that in the bullet journal spread in my bullet journal. Sorry to use bullet journals so many times, but in the class planning pages. So I would actually have my list of 12 things on there, and I would know to check it because that was the only thing that was my main focus. Like I didn't need to write it in my daily because I know that my day was going to be working on my Skillshare class, and the best place for me to work from there was the list that I already created in the project spread setup for that. I hope that is helpful. 24. Replay: Live Q&A Pt 4: I feel like this is supposed to be obvious and maybe you mentioned this somewhere and I missed it. What do the numbers 1,2,3, signify on the square in your emotional tracker? We did go over that. That is the intensities of the emotion which I no longer am doing. I would love to know about your continued bullet journal experience in here, any helpful tips you discover along the way, you have an awesome way about you that makes people want to learn from you. Thank you so much. I literally was making this class up until like three weeks ago and so [LAUGHTER] I'm not much like not a ton. It's not like I've gleaned a ton of experience from them, but things have evolved. A few things that have changed. Like I said, my emotion tracker before I would color in the box, which meant that I had to have all four markers with me, in order to do that. Now, instead I'm going to do more similar to my art practice time sheet, where I'm going to have four colorful columns that represent each color. Then that day if a feeling falls into that category, I'll just mark a little dot in it and then I'll write the names of the feelings still. That way I can still utilize the color-coding system, but I don't have to have the markers on me in order to be able to fill out the emotion log. Another thing is I have really simplified my index. When I transferred over my book to this book, I really looked through and tried to consolidate bigger categories because I found that I wasn't struggling to find things. It's really easy for me to find things. But when I would go to the index, there was a lot of redundancy and so I ended up just cleaning that up a little. So far my index takes up a lot less room, but it's still covering the same amount of stuff that was in the old book. That has definitely evolved a little. I've also gotten more comfortable with just waiting before I add things to the index. For example, my friend hired me. She's got a really big craft room and she does costumes for all of her kids, like theater productions. She hired me to help organize her craft room. I've never done that before. It's not a part of my business I'm opening. It's just something I'm doing, but I do. It's a big project and I've needed space to keep up on it. In my bullet journal, I have pages that are just named with their last name and organization. Again, it's just lists, like some of them are lists of things that like ideas I had before the project that I just wanted to get out of my head that are no longer useful, that will never be referenced again. Other things are like the list of the craft categories that I pulled out and everything. That's really helpful pages, but I haven't added them to my index yet because I haven't needed too. There's not a ton in this book. They're easy for me to find. I'm not sure if I'll need to reference them again or I'm not sure if I'm going to put them under another category yet. I want to be careful in saying that because I'm not saying like just get plaza with not adding things to the index because the whole point is the index and pagination is so important but I've used mine enough, I'm confident enough that I know that I'm not just getting away from that. My discernment muscle is actually in action right now by me waiting to see if I want to add it to the index, to see if it's something helpful. Because maybe this is actually just going to fall in the index under project plans. Maybe now I'll have a bunch of spreads where it's like cool when I just need space for a project to brain dump like, but it's not a project that falls under Skillshare or client or something that I want to reference later. It can just go in this random place and I'll be able to find it with all the other pages later. That's definitely something that has evolved. Also, just letting myself really use the space as I need. This is an example of that organizing project. This side is just a list of categories and things of like her craft categories versus her decor categories versus her costume categories, but I know that there's still more I need to write down. I left myself space but I started to come up with an idea for how I could store her fabric. I needed to get that out of my head. I'm not going to go put it in a different place. It's still part of this project, but I know I'm going to need more space here. It's like you can work with yourself to figure out how you want to use it. It's not like every space needs to be taken up before you use the next one but you also don't want to set aside a bunch of space that you're not going to end up using. Then you've got these empty weird pages that are already labeled. Let me keep going through these amazing questions. [LAUGHTER] That's okay Sydney. Sydney said she asked her question before going all the way through the course. Well, I'm glad we could double down on it. On Merissa says, we went through that one, the double pages. Sydney said, I added a little light bulb symbol for all my random ideas. Is it normal to add symbols as we learn more about our bullet journal practice? Yes, do it. There's one if you read writer Carroll's book, there's a little icon that looks like a little burst of lines that he uses for ideas. Actually, I tried that out when I first was using my daily spreads but I found that for me ideas are things that I want to do something with. In that case, they're just tasks that need to be migrated somewhere else. Having the idea modifier stand out, it wasn't helpful to me but yes, absolutely use your little light bulb symbol, and then if it stops being helpful, get rid of it. Then if you want to use it again, use it again. That's exactly right. As you use it, you will break it and evolve it to be more of what you need and that's the best. Questions. I did a separate daily notebook like you, how do you deal with note modifiers and things that happen to modifiers that don't get migrated from the daily? They can just live in the daily but in my mind, I want to move them to a spread, but then I feel like I'm rewriting everything. Yes, so this is a great question. Yes, when I'm done with my field notes, when I've migrated all the helpful stuff. There are absolutely events and notes and things that I wrote down that then only live here that I didn't feel were helpful to migrate anywhere else. In that case, Janelle, I would really look at like use your discernment muscle and go to each one and say, "Okay, do I want to keep this or I'm I okay to let this go?" If you're going to keep it, it's got to go somewhere. Where can it live in the bullet journal? Where can it be most helpful? What is the point of keeping it? Asking yourself that will help you inform where it could live to be its most helpful. Because it can then start to feel like you're rewriting everything. The other thing is to either incorporate your daily spreads into your bullet journal so that you have it all together. So that if you want the memory of it, if you want the stuff that maybe didn't get migrated other places, but you wrote it down and so you want to see it, you can just hold onto it. This is also why I'm still holding onto my field notes like I haven't thrown them away because I know all the important stuff is out of them. I haven't had to rush back to any of them and look at them but at the same time, they still feel like treasures because they have gone with me everywhere. I think that it's just fine to handle it however you want, but definitely use your discernment muscle to let yourself let go of things that you wrote down that are no longer important. Just because you wrote it down doesn't mean it's still important. You wrote it down because it was important at that time. That's really important. Is this still important to me? Ioka asks, I end up putting things that come to mind that I can't do today into my monthly log but then this becomes like an overwhelming task list. These things are too little for my future log. Where would I put them to remember them but not overcrowd my monthly log? I would break them into different spread, like find categories for them. What are all these things that are clogging them up? If a bunch of them are say like things that you have to do obligations for your family and your children. Let's say it's like a bunch of these are just like family things. Maybe that means you have now constituted your own spread of family stuff that you check and now you have this other family spread and in your monthly log, you would just put a task dot that says check family spread and something to remind you there. As soon as you see that your monthly is becoming obese, look at it and find what things do I still want to collect, but I actually don't need right here this month? Where could they go or what are the categories of them? Merissa says, if you are going to partner a paper planner with your bullet journal, do you have a suggestion on what would be the most efficient approach so there aren't too many redundancies? No, I would not do that [LAUGHTER]. That breaks my brain. I would just put the planner or the only thing that comes to my mind is like size-wise, they would have to fit together so I can easily or I would tape them together. I don't know, I wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't do it. If I needed a planner, maybe I would just draw the calendar or I would just draw the planner that I need. I'm not trying to just be like no, I wouldn't do that. I have no ideas, but this does replace the planner for me and so I don't. For me it's like, why would you use the planner? Just use the bullet journal. I guess Merissa would ask, what is the specific functions of your planner for you? What is it doing for you and what is the bullet journal doing? If you look at those things on paper, I bet you're going to see some answers that will enlighten you of how you can find those things. Maybe you'll see that like anything that's got a date or time or hard thing attached to it, gets immediately moved to the planner and you try to really limit the amount of things you write in the bullet journal that are just going to get ping ponged over to the planner and vice versa. I think that strengthening your discernment muscle before you write things down is going to be helpful so that you know, does this go in the planner or does this go in my bullet journal? That will be, of course, based on your reflection of what does the planner do for me. If you find that you just really love planners, like you get a joy from planners and getting to pick one out and see it. Then maybe your planner then just becomes like the final draft of your schedule. It requires you to spend extra time to move things over because that's the cost of having a beautiful planner, but it will definitely depend on your reflection. Those are all of the questions that you guys submitted ahead of time and in the chat, but other than that, thank you for your time today. Thank you for your wonderful questions. Thank you for watching the class and for taking a chance on a bullet journal. I truly hope that you do practice and try it because any little bit is just so helpful. I hope to see you around. This recording will be added to the class shortly just when I added it. In the next few days. If you want to reference it, you can. I love you all. Thank you so much. See you around.