Bullet Journal: A life saver?

A depressed mind is a confused and unorganized mind.  Add ADHD on top of that and you have yourself a recipe for a very murky soup.  When I look back at my younger self, I can see times where my ADHD had presented it's self, but I did not recognize it.  Starting sometime after 2001, my depression symptoms began to emerge.  Slowly confusion and apathy became a part of my life.

Now, I have always prided myself with being an organized person.  I love to make to do lists and start projects with a flair.  I usually have a different notebook for each project or thought.  Soon my bookshelf was full of an overwhelming amount of journals.  Slowly I would drift away from each project because it was so very, very paralyzing.  Every year, around new years, I would try and start again with the dozen or so diaries.  Until spring of 2017.  It was then that my wife sent me a link to http://bulletjournal.com/.  Bullet Journaling is perhaps the biggest, newest fad that no one knows about outside of the thousands and thousands of people who use them.

It's really very simple.  You have a dozen projects but instead of using 12 notebooks you use one notebook.  The link above will explain it better than I could but I can tell you this.  It's six months since I started this and I am still at it.  I've joined a face book group and am a bit obsessed.  Very quickly, here's how it works.  You start with dedicating four to six pages at the beginning as an index or table of context.  Make sure the journal is numbered and then write each project, collection or schedule in the index.  You create a future log, a calendar of the year that fits on two to four pages and divide each month into section and note future events in point form.  No detail.  Then you create your first month's spread.  That is a page or two that shows a full month.  You can then get detailed with each day.  Note appointments, birthdays etc.  Also, on an unused part of the page you can create a place for To Do lists, Goals and more.  Next create a weekly view.  Get more detailed about what is happening that week.  After that the sky is the limit.  You can have pages that list your favorite books, movies to see ... anything you want.  Again, if you are interested click on the link above.

Since I began this project I have found that I have more focus and see opportunities ahead.  While it is not the ultimate cure for depression it has helped.  Thanks for your time and I hope to see you back here for my next post.