Have you heard it bubbling from amongst the work cubicles of the western world? Are you hearing all your colleagues using a bullet journal for work? What is a work journal? What is it good for? How exactly can it be used for work?
All of this and more today, as we explore together the concept of bullet journalling and its myriad uses in the modern workplace.
What is Bullet Journalling? What is it Good for?
This is no small thing - this actually has the potential to revolutionize your work and personal life, enabling you to juggle all of your commitments while still respecting your mental health (unbelievable, we know).
It might be better for you to think of bullet journals as diaries and planners that have been taken to the next level, opting to eschew blank or lined pages in favor of sections dedicated to things that are going to be important to you.
This can be anything - hence why every bullet journal is a personal bullet journal. How to keep a journal, you ask? If it would be useful to have a to-do list there, then have one, and if it would be useful to have a monthly log of activities, then let it be.
In this way, a bullet journal system is one of the best ways to compete with the sheer pace of modern life. Some of you might simply need a place to throw out the proverbial trash, a brain dump if you will. This is something that the bullet journal method can offer, enabling you to categorize and compartmentalize all of this raw mental information into a more useful form.
Surely you can see how such a future log of your thoughts might help you to take control of your own life - this is truly one of the most important types of journalling for our crazy times.
Even if it is just a work bullet journal, you are still going to be left with so much free time from the very beginning. For this reason, many of you might opt only to use one bullet journal, using it both as a habit tracker and a tool for managing your work schedule.
With such a tool, you can be as free as you like to be who you want to be, personalizing it all to your own whims and wants.
Some Ideas
Here are just a few ways you might implement such a powerful tool into your daily log of life:
1. Tracking Work Schedule
No matter whether your hours change regularly or stay the same, you can make use of a journal such as this to keep all these things in one place. This will save you from having to keep referring to digital tools like online schedules for your work hours and such.
Try dividing your week into color-coded segments and highlighting the parts where you will be working. This will help you visualize how much time you have at work and away from work.
2. Managing Projects
Thanks to the flexibility of a bullet journal, you can give each project you are working on - no matter how large or small - its dedicated page which you can refer back to whenever.
Measuring all your ideas in one place can be incredibly useful when it comes to dividing it all up into manageable bitesize segments that you can then pass on to yourself and others on the team.
3. Scheduling Events and Making Deadlines
There is a place for everything in a bullet journal - past, present, and future.
The best part is that you can customize this completely to your liking. Some of you, for example, might prefer to use a nice 2-page spread to capture everything that is happening in the coming week.
Some, on the other hand, might prefer rapid logging of things that are planned for the next few days on one page of the leather journal.
Make it your own and be yourself with it - that way, you will get the most out of such a creative exercise.
4. Note-Taking
Many ears will now be perking up, as many of you will be tired of taking notes digitally. It simply tires out your eyes to use a screen for too long.
With an entirely blank notebook - by Moonster, for example - you can be sure to find a dedicated place to quickly and easily make notes during meetings, as well as there being a place for you to index them all after the fact.
Being able to completely dedicate yourself to the meeting at hand without worrying about your phone or computer chiming away before you sounds pretty great, does it not?
5. Expenses
Whether you run your own business or simply work at someone else's behest, it can be a job in and of itself to keep track of your finances and expenses.
Enter stage left the Bullet Journal, lapels undone and revealing on its breast an organized and color co-ordinated list of expenses for the day, week, and month gone and to come.
There is infinite space to make it your own, so if you would find it valuable to have the specific budget of each project in one place, then let it be. Equally, if you would rather keep all your budgetary concerns in one place, go wild!
6. Time Tracking
If you are wanting to get properly down to it, you even track your time hour by hour.
Why not try highlighting the work projects in separate colors that are coded to their relevance?
You might be wanting to stress yourself out a little bit, and thus would color code my commitments based on a gradually more alarming scale of colors, from green to red.
Make a row for each day and highlight how many hours you spend doing each task so you can better assess how much time you will need for similar tasks in the future.
7. Codifying Learning
It can be difficult for something new to fully grip onto your synapses and not let go. Thus, you can use a refillable leather journal as a bullet journal to personalize your own learning experience, using the kind of methods that you know will work for you.
In an age where technology is still developing so rapidly, you can now easily keep your own tutorials to hand wherever you go, indexing them so that they are easily and quickly available to you.
Last Words
So, there you have it!
Hopefully, any questions you had about using a bullet journal for work have been answered above or below. If not, do not hesitate to drop a question in the comment section below and we will answer it for you as soon as possible.
FAQs Bullet Journal for Work
Can I use a bullet journal for work?
Indeed you can, and in fact, this is precisely what they are best at. Of course, you can use a bullet journal for your personal life - especially if you happen to have a rather busy one - but a bullet journal works best when it is either being used for work or as a way to help you divide work and play. In many ways, a bullet journal is a perfect way to codify all of the things that can feel ephemeral in the workplace, allowing you more time to work on yourself and your personal life.
Should I have a separate bullet journal for work?
This is a perfectly natural question, especially since it can be easy to feel like the needs of both our personal lives and work lives are incredibly different. Bullet journals, though, seem to work best when they are being used as a divider between both. This means that you can keep track of your personal time at work while also being able to bear in mind your work commitments while enjoying some free time. All of this, on top of the fact that you are given more time to practice sound mental health.
Is bullet journaling healthy?
It certainly has a number of health benefits - if only on mental health at first, then certainly on your physical health later (for they are both intrinsically linked). In the sense that it allows each person to precisely divide their personal life and work commitments in a way that is personal to them, bullet journalling cannot help but do good to whoever seeks to use it. However, our suggestion that it should not be used as the sole medication for your problems, but rather as a method through which you can have more time to work on yourself.
