Garrett Pierce 
Fri Feb 07
Initial thoughts on bullet journaling
Written by: Garrett Pierce
Hey all. It’s been a bit since I’ve written anything but I’m diving back in with some updates.
After spending the last four years solidly in therapy, I’ve started working with a new therapist/psychologist and have been learning a lot about myself and how my brain works. I don’t want to get super deep into the details because we are still very much in the midst of the process, but it’s been quite a bit to wrestle with.
As such, I’ve been looking for ways to better manage, well, my entire life. I’d been feeling like I needed a sort of operating system for my life and my mind. I am a rather disorganized thinker, able to remember a lot and accomplish a lot, but sometimes struggling with basic things. I had been wondering if perhaps I started to put some of my thoughts elsewhere and allowed myself to think on other things and reflect more often, if that would allow me to have more mental space for other things. In my search, and partly on recommendation from my wonderful girlfriend, I decided to read into Bullet Journaling.
To be honest, I’m only a few days into bullet journaling. Three days, to be exact.
So I’m not really any sort of an expert on the topic.
The best introduction would be on the website for Bullet Journaling: https://bulletjournal.com/. Additionally, I can wholeheartedly recommend the book by Ryder Carroll, the founder of the bullet journal system: https://bulletjournal.com/pages/book.
The best intro I can give is that, in my early evaluation, it’s the kind of life operating system I was looking for.
My thoughts are very fast, and often very brief. I find myself moving from topic to topic mentally very quickly, easily forgetting things that I thought of only a moment before. That’s not always the worst thing, as a lot of those thoughts can be unnecessary and unhelpful. I often felt like my mind was cluttered, a mix of incomplete tasks, unexplored curiosities, and lost intentions. At best, it was disorganized. At worst, I’d be figuratively paralyzed and mentally exhausted by the amount of things on my mind, and spending most of my spare time just sitting there trying not to think so much.
I also would call myself somewhat of an abuser of Apple Reminders, frequently putting off simple tasks for weeks just because I felt overwhelmed by the amount of things I had to do.
All this is to say, I was kind of a mess.
But now that we’ve established where I’ve been, I’d like to tell you a bit about where I’m going.
Bullet Journaling for me has simplified a couple of things. It’s helped me with task management, thought organization, and planning.
One of the key things about Bullet Journaling (and the reason for the namesake) is task management, represented in the journal by bullets. Tasks can be completed, migrated, or scheduled depending on what happens during your day. But I’ve found myself feeling better and more energetic to tackle the tasks I have on my mind. Those tasks are all written down in the Monthly Log, and can then be brought into individual days. Like most, I have a lot of things I do during a given month, both small and large.
But all those things would be floating around my head, frequently being missed or put off for far too long, causing me a lot of anxiety, such that I would find myself incapable of doing any of these tasks.
I feel a lot more at peace with those tasks being written on a page, and with those tasks being parceled out into individual days, where they (mostly) get completed.
One of the nice things about the bullet journal so far is it has not only helped me do better about remembering and completing tasks, but has also helped me be better about judging myself for not completing tasks. See, the bullet journal does not judge when a task remains incomplete. There is a mechanism for moving tasks to a different day or to a backlog, that is entirely neutral in feeling. This has helped me to break the cycle of not completing a task, feeling bad about it, judging myself, and letting those feelings keep me from completing further tasks.
I have always had a good memory. So much so that my girlfriend calls me her memory, because I remember many things that we both need to know but she may have forgotten.
But I have to say, it is mentally taxing to have a memory like that. There is a lot swimming around up there, and sometimes important things might be forgotten. Bullet Journaling has helped me with that as well though. Another great thing about Bullet Journaling is that it encourages its users to jot things down as they come to you throughout the day. They don’t have to be long, detailed screeds on the minutia of an event (although they could if you wanted them to), but it helps to just throw a few notes down during the course of the day on things that happened to you. It also makes it easier to think about things related to these things that you may want to explore further or follow up on.
For example, on my first day of Bullet Journaling, a close friend from college that I’ve fallen out of touch with somewhat came to me with a big life update. I jotted down the important pieces of this life update in my journal, and added a task to my monthly backlog to follow up with him about one of those pieces. This is something I likely would have forgotten to do otherwise, but the Bullet Journal has made it so I will remember not only to follow up, but exactly what I wanted to follow up about.
One of my goals for 2025 was to be better about planning my days out. The intention was to have a list of tasks and intentions for each month that I could point to and use when I was looking at how I would structure my time in a given day and make sure I was living in the way I actually wanted to.
Well, I’m only a few days in, but Bullet Journaling has helped with that too. By having broad categories of things to do when I have downtime, I have started re-developing my connection with my musical abilities. I’ve been putting more time into practicing guitar and even spent a bit writing out a bit of a song for the first time in quite a while.
Furthermore, I have also been a lot better at making sure I get something important from my task list done each day, something that couldn’t be said for most of the last year. By having these things in one easy place, it makes it super easy to dig into and think about what you’d like to get done in a day.
I guess I need to add more frequent writing to my list of intentions, since I actually found myself really enjoying this time of reflection on my first few days with the Bullet Journal. I’ll be back in the near future with another update after I’ve gone a bit further down the road.
For now, thanks for reading. Hope all is well.