
The Bullet Journal Method

We honor the lessons we’ve learned by applying them to the next phase of our life. Big or small, migrate only the content and techniques that have proven themselves to be valuable, nothing else. A new notebook is not about starting over—it’s about leveling up. Migrating notebooks is a benevolent reckoning, where you face your responsibilities to se
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One of the most powerful concepts here in this book, and also the most slippery, is how to make your notebook capture meaning that is useful in the future. Clear writing is part of that.
In his beautiful commencement speech “This Is Water,” at Kenyon College, author David Foster Wallace talked about the day-to-day and how “the so-called ‘real world’ will not discourage you from operating on your own default settings, because the so-called ‘real world’ of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contem
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This is where the system can take a lifetime. You can put as much as you want in your notebook, but unless you spend the time being mindful about it, and adding context to it, it's a meaningless log you never get back to.
Our notebook serves as a mental sanctuary where we are free to think, reflect, process, and focus.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
Live inside your notebook and the world will make itself more available to you—this is the promise.
The best way for your radiance to serve others is to challenge yourself to grow. To that end, make deliberate learning an ongoing focus of your life. Being intentional in your pursuit of knowledge will help you engage with the world and open it up in ways you would have never considered, or been willing to, otherwise.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
One simple way to summarize all these tips is this: Keep your future self in mind. Your Notes will be useless if they can’t be deciphered in a week, month, or year from now. Do your future self a kindness and don’t sacrifice clarity for brevity. It will keep your Bullet Journal valuable for years to come.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
Many a great idea, “keeper” thought, or important “note to self” has fallen victim to a misplaced scrap of paper or an outdated app. It’s a compounding inefficiency that drains your bandwidth, but it’s completely avoidable. The Bullet Journal is designed to be your “source of truth.” No, this is not some dubious invitation to worship this methodolo
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"Buy into my entire system and your life will improve exponentially!"Unfortunately, there are limits, at least in how quickly you can adopt. You have to tweak to make it work for you.
As the French film director Robert Bresson once said, “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”21 If you don’t try something, it will assuredly never exist. Not your version, anyway. True, not all endeavors will be successful, but even our so-called failures can be valuable teachers.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
Make it yours—always.
As Joshua Fields Millburn of the Minimalists once quipped, “You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”53 You get to choose who you spend your precious time with. Surround yourself with people who want the best for you. That doesn’t mean they’ll always agree with you or be indiscriminately supportive. No, find
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Find your tribe.
The quality of our time is determined by our ability to be present.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
I need to start working on my meditation practice again. I REALLY like Sam Harris's new app for this—Waking Up.