Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art art starting a new "series" called Productivity Labs here on ProductivityCast. We're going to be discussing tools, methods and research we're experimenting with in our own personal productivity systems (even when they are not what we normally use) so we can report back to you what we've learned. This week, we're diving into how using the Bullet Journal method worked for us.
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In this Cast | Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Episode 035 - What Is the Bullet Journal?Episode 073 - Tailoring the Bullet JournalPatrick Rhone » The Dash/Plus System Going Further With Evernote masterclassAugusto referenced Anything But Idle, Episode 052, when discussing some research on taking notes on a laptop versus by handwriting notesGoodnotesEvernoteOneNoteOneNote Bullet Journal communityThe Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder CarrollWorkflowyRocketbook notebooks
Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto.
Francis Wade 0:23And I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:25I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, what we're doing is we are introducing a new I guess, we can call it a series in which we are going to be talking about different experiments, that is just discussing how we have each experimented with various methods and tools. Today is one of those methods discussions. And we're going to be talking about the bullet journal, we've of course, talked about the bullet journal in the past both what it is in Episode 35. And then again, we talked about really how you can tailor the bullet journal to your own needs. And episode 73. I'll put links to those in the show notes for us. dogfooding. A methodology when you're very used to another is very interesting. And I thought, well, we could do this more often, we could actually try these things out. And since art had had experience with the bullet journal already, I thought, well, let's put this together. And so good stone, I really started ideating. Well, let's do this with other methods over the course of time. And so that's really where productivity Labs was born from. And so let's get into it. Let's talk about the bullet journal in its most basic sense, because like I said, you can jump back to Episode 35, and go deep in to what the bullet journal method is. But let's do a an overview of the system itself. Then we'll talk about our own setup experiences, and then our own experiences actually using the bullet journal. So let's start with what is the bullet journal. And since we're going to consider you the resident expert, what is the bullet journal Just in brief for listeners, the bullet
Art Gelwicks 1:56journal itself, and I'm not going to do writer Carol justice with this, but I'm going to sum it up as best I can. It's a method of tracking activities and tracking notes on a running in daily basis. That is not tool specific. It is platform agnostic. So you can do bullet journaling. In a paper journal, you can do it on a digital pad, you can do it in most productivity applications. The design of it is supposed to be simplified, very simplified and very adaptable uses literally just that bullets and variations on bullets to help you keep track of the different things that you need to do. And we are making notations. There's a lot of detail that you can dig into it. But if you think about taking notes on a legal pad, and then adding some icons to it to make sure you can tell one from another, you're probably about a quarter of the way to a bullet journal at that
Augusto Pinaud 2:51point. For me, it's inevitable when I think on the bullet journal, and even with this exercise of the bullet journal, to think about Patrick Brown dodge Plus system and and we will put a link on on the notes because that's the first time I heard about the idea of not using something digital or not the first time but the first time I saw an implementation that seems robust enough, it really fits really well. Basically, the idea is that you use a dash and you can modify it, you know, they sit in the action is done, or you're waiting for delegates that data point or move. What I like about what I did was a bullet journal is that it's really I can see for certain people how this can be really useful. How can having everything in there, what kills me was a double entry that reentry they're recreating that part, I did not see a benefit on the cost benefit part of that in doing all that reentry. So even that my test was digital, and even that might test supposed to work really well. On the way I did it. I saw benefits. And I see a person who love paper on which brain works in a paper like base way can see a lot of benefits out of this. My concern was if doing this, you will skip the step of processing those notes. Because that's what I found online. You know that now that I can index me to process notes, that was a danger. Because there were things into that system that never made it out of that just because I knew where to find it on the index of that
Art Gelwicks 4:35you're bringing up probably one of the biggest weaknesses I consider in the system. It is not automation friendly. It is not designed or having any intention to leverage streamlining functionality that allows you to integrate if you're going to do this in a digital environment with other systems, tying it to task lists and things like that, and you have to go back to its original core Is that it, it is simplified enough that it can be applied everywhere. But because it is simplified enough, there's a lot of functionality that we would expect within productivity tools. That just doesn't exist because it's, it has to be able to be implemented anywhere. I mean, you could implement the bullet journal in Microsoft Word, you could implement it in Excel, you could implement it hack in a PowerPoint slide, if you wanted to. The concept carries over regardless of the platform. But just like you're saying, A Gousto. That means that labor part of it is on you. It's not on the tool that you're utilizing to manage that. I see that a lot. And I'll talk about the platform I've worked with it in. But there's a couple of different ways that it's commonly implemented on, on my platform. And they all struggle from that same problem is that lack of integrity when it comes to automation and streamlining functionality, and you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be the one that cranks the widgets on this, you're going to be turning that handle, not some other system, or not some other tool rather
Augusto Pinaud 6:12well, and that brought my second shortcoming is how much this is really is a scalable, you know, I pick it for a particular project, not for my whole system. But even in this particular project. And it had been worked great the project start on March 1, it was a great way to do the test to collect the information to have all in one place. Even as the project is progressing, and the complexity and the pieces on the project has been adding, there has been more times that I'm that I've been feeling that it's slowing down the process instead of allowing me and it may be a part of automation, it may be a part of, I don't know exactly. But it felt multiple times that it was clear to me in week three, that this tool will not even be sufficient or sufficient for this project. Even that is not really complex one, it has a lot of input and reports. But it wasn't a complex one, and it was choking by week three.
Art Gelwicks 7:15Yeah, it's not a high velocity system, it's not, don't kid yourself, if you think you're going to do high velocity work through this kind of a system. Because it's not designed for that I wouldn't try and run a corporate project using a bullet journal. I however, would probably maintain all of my own notes about that project using a bullet journal structure, and emulate a lot of that functionality, because I have found that it is scalable at the individual level, it can go up and you can handle personal and professional within the same system and build it up. The one thing I have discovered, though, is you really you have to commit yourself to just using the system, you have to commit yourself to using your bullet journal and making it your trusted and your trusted tool.
