8 Great Lessons from The Bullet Journal Method

Welcome back to the Sudo Science Book Club! In this series of posts, I take a deep dive into books that resonated with me and simultaneously break down what I’ve learned and implemented from them. For the previous two posts from this now growing series, take a look at when I joined the 5 AM Club and how I built my second brain.

During my move to my new second brain, as I discussed just before the end of 2023, I brought up how I was picking and choosing the things I wanted to keep in my new second brain over the things I didn’t want anymore. Out of the notes I’ve transferred, one was the series of notes I took on Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method. Previously, I had purchased the ebook and liked it significantly. I wanted my girlfriend to take a look at it, but she prefers to read physical books whenever possible. This led to me going out of my way to buy her a hardcover copy. That’s right, I bought this book twice and don’t regret it in the slightest.

While she has yet to read it, I found the hardcover edition of the book quite pleasing to hold in the hands. It makes sense, as Carroll brought up his background as a designer in a few different places. Still, once it became clear my girlfriend had other books she wanted to knock from her backlog, I decided to read through it again as a hardcover this time. However, I decided to do what I had previously seen a YouTube video advising and practicing my “active reading” in this hardcover copy. In other words, I decided to highlight and annotate as I went through the book again while making notes that stayed in my second brain.

Despite how I felt parts of the book were a bit padded out (big chunks of the book feel more philosophical and practical rather than pertaining strictly to bullet journaling), I found this worked to the book’s overall benefit much more than Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain did when doing something similar.

Regardless, I still get so much from bullet journaling in my personal life and still reach for mine daily.

What Are the Biggest Takeaways from the Book?

The book discusses everything I would expect, including how to start and maintain a bullet journal of your very own. However, while it is nice to see practical examples within the book on this, it’s nothing you can’t figure out from the bullet journal website or YouTube channel without buying the book.

That’s not to say the book isn’t worth the purchase; far from that, in fact! I’ve derived several lessons from bullet journaling that have stuck with me, and if you already know how to bullet journal, the book elaborates on the rationale behind why some parts of it are designed the way it is, why it’s so effective.

I’m willing to elaborate on some of my favorite lessons from the book, including a few parallels from other examples I’ve observed elsewhere, regarding my own bullet journal practice.

Shorter Notes Can Be More Effective

This is a principle I picked up on while reading the BASB book as well, but this focuses on why rapid logging is so useful compared to writing out things longhand. By keeping notes shorter, you’re forced to distill the information you save down to what is most essential. The book brings up an example involving learning a random fact about animals and shows how to write it longhand versus how to rapid log it without losing too much context, which is a helpful example.

If I had to write my own example, it would be to compare something like this.

The Earl of Sandwich was a compulsive gambler who was credited for inventing the sandwich so he could eat a meal in one hand and continue to gamble with the other.

If I wanted to turn this random fact into a rapid logged line without losing context, I could distill it like so:

Earl of Sandwich invented namesake food re: love of gambling; one hand free

It takes up less space and is easier to read, which forces us to focus on the most important parts of the information. As a result, our bullet journal can be a more effective tool to save and recall information.

I’m using a customized shorthand notation system that I detailed a good while back to make rapid logging much faster and more streamlined, and I’m still adding to it even now. For instance, I’ve added new characters for double letters, I now substitute the Cyrillic alphabet’s “й” in place of “-ing,” and several other little changes that save a ton of time, ink, and paper when used in tandem in the long run.

Our Memories Can Trick Us

The book recalls how flawed human memory can become without a way to properly track it. Carroll conveys this using a story about a guy, an avid bullet journalist, in a relationship who was hit by an unexpected breakup.

Understandably, he was upset in the moment, but once he went back through his daily logs to see details between himself and his girlfriend at the time, he started to notice little signs that she didn’t enjoy being around him. Being able to observe this was a shock for him, as he would have remembered the relationship much more fondly. Because of this objectivity, he was able to get over it much faster than he would have otherwise.

“…the point still stands: evidence is objective, just like what we write down on paper in our bullet journals.”

The main point here is how our memories can be flawed, but writing down details lets us take a true look at the past, allowing us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Another example I can think of is Secret Eaters, a British reality show about overweight people who usually have no clue why they’re overweight. They claim they only consume a small number of calories, only eat salads, never indulge in sugar, and so on. But once the TV cameras and investigators follow the guests around, they record eating habits that were never mentioned before.

All of a sudden, the 1,300~ calories the guests reported eating were actually well above 3,000. The investigators and cameras catch everything the guests on the show eat and report everything honestly. While some guests on the show still don’t believe it, some realize their memories really were tricking them. A woman off the top of my head reported always eating salad, but she was given definitive proof she always ate multiple candy bars in one sitting. She explained that she somehow told herself this whole time that the candy bars were actually salads.

While one could argue that the people on the show may have practiced intentional self-deception, the point still stands: evidence is objective, just like what we write down on paper in our bullet journals.

Intentionality

Carroll has attempted to reclaim the word “intentionality,” an archaic term that used to mean something else, as a word now describing how intentional our plans or actions are. If there’s anything in the book I could point to as the main theme, it might be this one: the idea we need more intentionality in our lives to design a life worth living to the fullest.

The book illustrates this best with the example of a family planning a vacation, a rather timely example for myself right now, as my girlfriend and I are planning for a vacation ourselves this summer, albeit to a different destination.

Within the book, we see examples of a bullet journalist planning out a Hawaii vacation itinerary, budget, and schedule. It’s a rather elegant and exciting example that demonstrates the potential of the bullet journal in our lives, but there’s something a little interesting that I didn’t expect Carroll to cover: Some of the destinations and activities were crossed out after the fact because they seemed less exciting or worthwhile than the other plans on the list. In other words, his rationale is that life is too short for things that are just mediocre. Why spend your valuable time and money on an activity and destination that you think would be just fine, but not truly thrilling?

As an additional example, I run Linux. As any reader here knows, using Arch Linux cured my urge to ever distro hop again, and I think I can really see why with Arch’s minimal nature. Instead of having so much thrown on my lap like I would with fully-featured distros, or having Microsoft tell me “this is how we intend for you to use Windows,” I intentionally install and use what I want. Consequently, I’m much more satisfied with my computing experience.

When we track tasks or make decisions in our lives, why waste our time with things that aren’t really that rewarding or fulfilling for us? Another example Carroll brought up dealt with a student deciding whether or not he should work on an extra credit assignment for a class he was already acing. Was it worth the time and effort in that case?

The intentionality comes from “designing the life” you want to really live, mapping out the path we truly wish to take. It’s a lesson I’m already keeping in mind for our vacation planning endeavors, but it can apply to so much more.

Implementation Intentions

Wait a second, you might be thinking to yourself, ‘implementation intentions’? Are we still reading the same book here?

If you realized that this term comes from a different book, Atomic Habits by James Clear, then congrats! Rather, Carroll does cover something that matches the idea behind Clear’s implementation intentions, but without using the same words. Instead, Carroll brings up the concept of “sprints” in goal-setting, writing down specific details on where and when in order to guide us.

For example, we could use Carroll’s example of somebody who has the long-term goal of learning to cook. They would have to have smaller goals, or “sprints,” in place to help them get there. The example list includes “learn knife skills,” but the idea of making everything more defined and intentional includes having no major barriers to entry, having defined and actionable tasks, and having a fixed and short time frame for completion.

“Needless to say, what’s a better place to write our implementation intentions than our bullet journals?”

Having read Atomic Habits, I saw at least some parallels here. In short, James Clear argues that goals are easier to accomplish if they are clear, specific, actionable, and time-defined as well. An example of this, going back to Carroll’s example on cooking and knife skills, should look like this:

At 5:30 PM, after I get back from work, I will walk into the kitchen and practice properly peeling and dicing with a knife.

Notice how the goal has a specific where, when, and how. It fits the requirements that Carroll set as well, the goals being defined, actionable, having no major barriers to entry (ambiguity, one could argue), and using a fixed time frame.

I know Carroll doesn’t directly bring up this concept, but he came so close to doing so, and I saw enough of a parallel that I felt the need to mention implementation intentions, which are proven to highly increase productivity. James Clear has sung the praises of implementation intentions helping participants achieve goals. A specific study cited three groups of people where one group merely tracked how often they exercised, another group did the same, but was given motivational pamphlets before doing so, and the third group was asked to write specifics on how, when, and where they would exercise.

In the first two groups, under 40% of participants exercised regularly. In the implementation intentions group, however, a staggering 91% managed to keep their exercise routines on track. Needless to say, what’s a better place to write our implementation intentions than our bullet journals?

The Power of Curiosity

Carroll gets a bit philosophical and praises the role curiosity can play in the world. He argues that curiosity is the “exciting electricity we feel in the presence of potential.” The example he gives on curiosity being a strong motivator is how it can be used to help us with our aforementioned goal-setting as well as coming up with useful tasks. An effective example deals with not writing down “Lose weight,” but instead writing, “What one unhealthy thing could I remove from my diet?”

Curiosity can spark a problem-solving mindset we probably didn’t even know we had. It can be a strong ally when we encounter what would otherwise be a brick wall standing in our way. Next time we’re confronted with an obstacle, we can activate our innate curiosity and ask ourselves, “How do I…?”

Radiance

This is an old concept that I never really thought of as having a specific name until I read this book, but it reminded me of when I read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In said story, the narrator starts off as a rather temperate, stable fellow. After receiving a letter, he visits Roderick Usher in his home, and he decides to stay there for a while in order to try and cheer him up in his worst times.

Roderick, however, proves to be unstable due to his overtly-sensitive senses. He can’t handle anything but the blandest of foods, the dimmest of lights, the gentlest of sounds, and the feel of specific fabrics. Roderick is also rather excitable, easily thrown into a state of panic over small matters. It also doesn’t help that he is a hypochondriac, and the gloomy, claustrophobic feel of the home only amplifies the negative emotions.

The narrator eventually realizes, after spending weeks around Roderick, that he, too, had some of that same behavior rub off on him. The narrator comments, “it was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.”

In short, the narrator spent so much time around an unstable person like Roderick that he started to become unstable just like him. I can’t blame our narrator in the slightest. When he spent enough time with someone unstable and sensitive in such a dreary home, he was bound to become more like Roderick.

The real idea is how we become like the people we spend the most time around. If we spend time around low-achieving adults who scroll social media all day, don’t want jobs, and eat fast food daily, we might find ourselves complaining about being “unlucky” instead of doing anything to improve. Conversely, if we spend more time around people who constantly want to grow, who have ambitions, who eat more healthily, then we’ll find success knocking on our door that much more.

Carroll states, “bettering yourself leads to bettering others and the world.” In other words, a great side-effect of improving ourselves and being around better people who influence us, by also “radiating” this inspiring energy, can lead us to improving the rest of society, even if it’s just slightly.

In other words, life is too short to waste on romanticizing or humoring toxic relationships. If people around you are making your life worse, see if it’s possible to cut them out like calories in a weight-loss goal. We should spend time around better people if we expect to become better people. But speaking of goals…

Dealing With Inertia

We can all start out with the best of intentions when it comes to our goals. However, just like the guy who signs up for gym membership each year on January 1st, motivation can fade over time before a goal finds itself on the back burner.

If this has happened to you, join the club, because this is inertia as Carroll defines it. How do we handle inertia and get our goals and ambitions back on track? While many different solutions out there work better than others, Carroll suggests a note to self in the form of a hypothetical letter to dissolve demotivation.

Specifically, he suggests writing the problem with the goal, what isn’t working, why it isn’t, what you tried so far, what you haven’t tried just yet, and what you would like to have happen next. Just like in a good relationship, communication can “bridge the gap between information and understanding.” Once you are able to see what you’ve written to yourself, you have a handwritten guide on how to get yourself back on track.

Attitudes Toward Imperfection

Carroll doesn’t mince words in this section when stating how imperfection is “one of our biggest sources of self-loathing.” It’s easy to see why considering how we’re taught by society that imperfection is a bad thing in and of itself. However, all of us are imperfect in some way, so what gives?

We need to take a look at the idea of wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of how beauty of an object can be found in its imperfections. A great example I had seen that resonated with me dealt with an example I had seen in a YouTube video somewhere. There was a Japanese craftsman who broke a ceramic bowl, but instead of trying to replace it and throw the broken one away, he opted to fix it. But it wasn’t enough to just repair the bowl; he pieced it back together with the kintsugi, filling the cracks with a glittering, golden filling. As a result, the natural imperfections of the bowl emphasize its beauty and nature.

The idea is how beauty can be found in natural imperfections. With this in mind, the Japanese put an emphasis on mastery over perfection, a key concept found in wabi-sabi, as even the greatest masters can remain devout students in the skills they practice. In other words, they don’t let themselves plateau or think that they’re “good enough” already; they always want to keep learning and improving. There’s always more worth learning out there. The chapter reminds us how “true nobility is being superior to your former self,” a quote I always have written down on the first page of my pocket notebook for instant inspiration wherever I go.

I Feel Better Already?

These were the biggest takeaways I got from reading Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method. In short:

• Shorter notes can be more effective in terms of time and space saved without sacrificing information.
• Our memories aren’t as reliable as we may think they are, which is why it’s good to write things down.
• We should design a life worth living for ourselves with intentional decisions.
• There really is something to implementation intentions when it comes to getting things done.
• Curiosity can invoke a problem-solving mindset that can carry us further than we thought possible.
• We become like the people we spend the most time around.
• It’s always possible to get ourselves back on track when it comes to a goal.
• There’s nothing wrong with imperfection as long as we focus on always improving ourselves over achieving perfection.

I would highly recommend it to anyone, even those not interested in starting a bullet journal themselves, as the life lessons within the book are impactful and moving.

Did you read the book as well? What did you think of it? Are you interested in reading it yourself as well? Let me know what you think!