Fatima Al Owais has a lot to organise. A doctor by profession, she currently cares full-time for her year-old son at home in Sharjah, and is also passionate about art, reading and cooking. She charts her schedule using a mixture of apps like Evernote and FamCal and paper reminders like Post-it notes and a wall planner, but for the past couple of years she has also been using a system that’s a major new trend in the world of productivity, especially among designers, developers and creatives: the bullet journal.
Created by Ryder Carroll, a digital product designer from New York, bullet journaling is a method that can be applied to any notebook. It involves numbering the notebook’s pages, creating an index and jotting down all stray thoughts in short, bulleted statements. These are then given symbols depending on what action they require, and “migrated” to other parts of the notebook, such as a monthly planner. The idea is that nothing gets lost: you give each page a heading and add it to the index for easy reference, and you don’t let tasks slide by without scheduling them in for later.
“A bullet journal is a sort of biography of you in the time frame you use it: plans you created, groceries you purchased, interests you explored, places you’ve visited,” Ms Al Owais says. “It’s a memoir of your life.” She hand-draws layouts that she has customised herself and adds watercolour washes to the pages, a process that she finds “very meditative.” She describes the method as “a system that holds you accountable,” and says that it has helped her realise “how much time we waste doing non-productive things.”
Bullet journaling isn’t the only new paper-and-pen productivity craze sweeping the lives of busy professionals and creatives. As digital project management systems become the norm, it’s become increasingly common for people to start turning their physical schedulers or corkboards into systems that help them set goals, log successes, track time and keep them motivated.
There are Kanban boards, which involve moving Post-it notes with tasks on them along three columns: “to do”, “doing” and “done”; “Day Designers”, which are new Filofax-like diaries that are all about goal-setting and habit-creating; and “Strikethru”, a process that’s similar to bullet journaling.
One success story of recent years is the Passion Planner, a desk diary that helps people focus on their long-term dreams, break these dreams down into achievable steps and get them done. The product was created in 2014 by a young entrepreneur called Angelia Trinidad, who raised the funds to launch the business on Kickstarter, and shipped the books from her suburban garage.
Along with a schedule for each week, the Passion Planner provides space on each spread to note down your weekly and daily focus, good things that happened and a personal and work to-do list. After each month, you are asked to reflect on last month’s achievements and think about what your goals are for the next month. The first pages of each notebook are dedicated to exercises that can help you decide on your wish list of achievements for various time frames. It’s a constant reminder of what you’re working towards as you plough through day-to-day tasks.
There are downsides to using physical objects to track your productivity – you have to lug them around from place to place and they are more likely to get damaged or lost – but there are also powerful advantages. A study conducted by Princeton and UCLA psychologists in 2014 showed that students who used laptops to take notes in class remembered fewer facts and concepts from a lesson than those who used pen and paper: evidence for the idea that we absorb information more fully when writing by hand. We are less likely to get distracted when we’re not a click away from social media, and there can be real pleasure and creativity in writing with high-quality pens on beautiful notebooks.
Just don’t forget, as the Dubai life and career coach Zeta Yarwood advises, that organising workflow can become a form of procrastination in itself. When setting her own schedule and tracking goals, she uses a simple calendar and to-do lists, and advises clients to do the same.
“If getting lost in the planning and making it super-pleasurable are what people need to do to motivate themselves to do the actual action, then absolutely go for it,” she says. “Do spend time planning to allow clarity of thought and to make sure nothing will slip through the net. But remember that it’s the action that’s going to produce the result, not the planning.”
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