In late 2016, I hit a roadblock. I was finalizing my application for a year abroad, which was due the next week. This was my last chance to participate in an exchange year and I knew it wouldn't cut it. And if that wasn't enough, a few months before I had given notice to my landlord and still hadn't found a new place to stay. This meant I would be homeless by the end of the month.

Up to this point, I never truly felt the need to organize myself. I simply did the things I enjoyed and ignored the rest. I like math, science, and programming, so this strategy brought me successfully through school and university without much effort. The things I didn't like and couldn't ignore (like presentations, papers, and everything organizational) fell victim to procrastination until they became unavoidable. Whenever I reached this point, I half-arsed whatever it was I didn't want to do for the minimally acceptable result. Sometimes, this went exceptionally well. More often than not it failed miserably. And when it failed, I hated myself for doing it. Still, it didn't stop me from repeating this strategy over and over again. I knew it wasn't a sustainable long-term strategy, but the pain wasn't big enough to change. This time it was. Doing an exchange year was one of the two reasons why I had started to study. And with my rushed and haphazard application, I just had lost the chance to do so. My habits of procrastination and avoidance were getting in the way more and more. I needed to change.

Since then, things have gotten a bit better. As always, I found a place to stay in the very last minute. I became better at organizing myself and confronting the uncomfortable (starting this blog was a big achievement in this regard). But I'm still not good at it. The biggest problem I currently face is to find focus. There are many areas wanting improvement and while I feel like I'm able to tackle each one in isolation, in combination I'm missing the discipline to focus at one thing at a time. I experimented with journaling, meditation, productivity apps and more to help me in this. They all worked to some extend but especially since I started working full-time, I fell back into old habits. In the last few months, however, I have found a system that might finally work for me.

The Bullet Journal method is an analog productivity system, and all you need for it is a notebook, to track everything you care about. Instead of going into how the system works (you can watch this four-minute video for that), I want to explain why it works better than any app I have tried so far. Spoiler: It comes down to the inefficiency of writing by hand.

Before I came across the Bullet Journal, I tried to organize myself using GTD (Getting things done) by David Allan. The idea behind GTD is simple. At the core of the system you have an inbox, a place where you can put everything you want to keep track of, be it project ideas, tasks and the nice restaurant where I ate before Covid started. Then, once a week, go through this pile and organize it. Discard irrelevant items, make the things you are currently working on actionable and keep the rest for later reference. In my case, the inbox was one large text file. I most often used it to get ideas out of my system, to focus on the thing at hand. Otherwise it's easy for me to work on something, have an idea about something else and be lost in thinking about the new idea without getting anything done for the thing I was actually working on. The inbox was (and still is) a simple way to regain my focus for the task at hand. And while most of the ideas I wrote down were irrelevant for at least in the next 5-10 years, I had a hard time sorting through these ideas.

During the week review, I found it extremely difficult to delete items from my inbox. What my past-week self found relevant, I rationalized, shouldn't be ignored. The solution in GTD with which I tried to evade this was to put everything in a file for later reference. But the ideas I wrote down were rough sketches at best. Most often they consisted of a mix between bullet points and paragraphs and the same thing expressed from multiple points of view. It would have taken a long time to actually make them actionable, which I never did. But because I kept every idea I had, my reference file became bloated and unusable. I tried to bring order in this by creating multiple files for different topics, with the only result that I now had multiple files that became bloated and I never looked at. In short, I used the inbox to offload the work of planning and organizing to my future self until it became so much that it was overwhelming and I stopped doing it. And when I actually worked on my system, most of what I did was to unsuccessfully fight its continuously rising entropy. Much of this went away when I switched to the Bullet Journal.

It might seem counterintuitive that a system works better because it's less efficient. But this is exactly the case here. The reason being is that keeping your lists digitally isn't less work. It's different work. When you are typing on a computer, editing is the easiest thing to do. You can copy and paste as many times as you want, and rearrange whatever you wrote however you like. This means, your work isn't in the editing. It's in the choosing. If you want to add something, you can add it. If you can say something in two ways, you write down both. Choosing what to cut is the hard work that paralyzed me when I wanted to clear my inbox. When writing by hand, in contrast, editing takes a large amount of your time. If you want to shorten a rambling about the most recent idea that is possessing you, you have to rewrite it from scratch. This incentivises you to create notes that are as concise as possible, simply because they are less work. It also gives you a simple filtering criterion. If you feel like something isn't worth writing down again, it probably wasn't that important. In other words, removing distractions from your productivity system takes energy when doing it digitally and saves energy when doing it on paper. This becomes especially relevant in your notebook migration, when you transfer everything important from your old notebook to a new one, and can leave everything else behind. It may seem like an exaggeration, but this is the single most important reason why my digital system became bloated over time and my Bullet Journal still is lean and clean.

Looking back at the last years, it seems to me that I made astonishingly little progress. And while I'm aware that this feeling is inflated because I tend to dismiss the small wins on the way (I'm already working on that one), when I reviewed my Bullet Journal in my first notebook migration, there was no indication for progress on my most important goals. Seeing this in front of me made a big difference. While it was easy to suppress my thoughts about it in the years before, seeing the lack of progress right in front of me changed the way I felt about it almost immediately. Since then, I started to address one of those goals and made more progress on it than I did in the last ten years. This wouldn't have happened with the cluttered system I had before.

To conclude, the Bullet Journal Method is awesome. It doesn't work because it's better to track tasks in it than on a digital system (because it probably isn't). But if you want to become clear about what you are doing (or avoid doing) and why you are (not) doing it, the Bullet Journal Method might be a game changer for you. At least it was for me.