Digital Bullet Journal: Flexible, Customizable, Searchable

Today, I am very excited to share with you the productivity system that has changed my life!  No really, I mean it! It is a system that is flexible, customizable, and searchable.  

Digital Bullet Journaling has enabled me to get not only the daily tasks of life done but to do long range project planning- something that is really hard for me.

Why Did I Need a Bullet Journal?

I’m great at calendaring appointments and making sure my family gets to where they need to be on time.

I am absolutely terrible at managing tasks and long term projects.

Just ask my husband.  He will be very patient in letting me plan our vacation activities. (that is when we get to take vacations… ) Invariably, I will get distracted with super important life things like house cleaning, homeschooling, and reading new books.  And the vacation activities don’t get planned.

Eventually he takes a few hours, makes me stop what I’m doing, and we actually plan the trip.  I hate those 2 hours because of the pressure, but I love the results!

A New Idea!

Is there a way that I can manage my daily tasks of home management, virtual school supervision, and still make progress on some big projects or goals?

YES!

I found out about Bullet Journaling in summer of 2018. I was in one of my productivity kicks, and looking for a new system to try when I found a book called “Dot Journaling- A Practical Guide” by Rachel Wilkerson(Affiliate Link). It explained the principles of dot journaling, and in the course of reading the book, I realized her system was a derivative of Bullet Journaling.

I did some searching and was excited to find the Bullet Journal website which included blog posts and tutorials by the method creator, Ryder Carrol.  I purchased his book (affiliate link)once it was released because I was so excited about what I was learning.

Let’s learn about Bullet Journaling, and then I’ll discuss how I use my iPad to take my Bullet Journaling to a new level.

Affiliate Note: I use affiliate links in my posts.  For more information please read my disclaimer.

What is a Bullet Journal?

Your Bullet Journal is a notebook you use to capture all the important things in your life.  You use it to write down your daily to dos, your goals, any notes you have, any ideas for the future, and also project plan.  It is how you keep track of your life.

The best way to learn about it is to watch the tutorial here .

It is a handwritten system.  Whether you do it analog or digital is up to you.

Each day begins with a fresh page for you to write out your things on.

You begin to notate things with a dot.  That dot (or bullet) is then transformed to indicate the progress of the item.  

Here are some of the symbols:

• X means a task is complete
• > means you’ve move the item to another day
• < means you have calendared the item
• ^ means you started the item
• / means you decided not to do the item.
• New day, new page.

This method means there is no endless scrolling through tasks.  You begin every day fresh.

To be able to search the analog notebook for important things, there is an index at the front of the book which you fill in as you go.  Let’s say you start to plan a vacation and you have information scattered throughout the notebook.  You would place “Vacation Planning” on a line in the index page, and then mark down which pages vacation planning happens in the notebook.  Maybe you have information on pages 6, 34, 170.  But because you have indexed your notebook, you are able to easily find the information.

When you fill a notebook, you buy a new one.  The old ones remain as archives should you need them another time.

If you’d like to learn more about this method, beyond what I wrote here, please pick up the book on Dot Journaling, or on Bullet Journaling.  Or do a search online.  There are so many ways that people have adopted this system. I enjoy using the official Bullet Journaling Notebook when I’m using my paper journal.  The paper is nice and thick and the pages are already numbered.

Digital Bullet Journal

In November 2018, I got my first iPad with an Apple Pencil.  It was a game changer for me, and I switched over to Digital Bullet Journaling.  I absolutely love the way I can use my handwriting to log my tasks, but have the power of search because it is digital.

I use GoodNotes for my Digital Bullet journaling on my iPad.  They have iPhone and Mac apps as well, but I find that I primarily use the application on my iPad so that I can write down my plans every day.

Check out this post to learn more about why GoodNotes is excellent for  Digital Bullet Journaling 

Why do I love Digital Bullet Journaling?

Here are my top three reasons:  Flexible, Customizable, Searchable. 

1. Flexible

With my Digital Bullet Journal, I can have notebooks be as long as I want.  If I want an entire year to be one Bullet Journal, I can do that.  My 2019 journal was 540 pages long.  If I needed a new page, I added one.

Flexibility also means I can create separate notebooks for different areas of my life.  When I was collecting breast cancer research, I made a notebook to hold the .pdfs of what I had found.

You can have as many or as few notebooks as you’d like.  They will sync across your devices and back up to iCloud or whatever other service you connect.  

2.  Customizable

When you use a paper bullet journal, you are limited in your ability to customize.  And, if you come up with a template you like, if you want to use it on another page, you need to draw it again.  This makes creating monthly and weekly spreads much more time consuming.  

  With my digital bullet journal, I can make my page be whatever template I want.  I can have a dot grid, blank, lined page, checklist, graph paper, music paper.  I am not limited to what the printer produced.  I can also design daily and weekly pages that work just for me.  They have seasonal themes and are already in my own handwriting.  If you’d like to see some of my templates, please sign up here for my newsletter. I have some to give you for free!

I absolutely love being able to choose between different types of paper every day.  It adds just a bit of flair to my daily planning.

3.  Searchable

With a paper bullet journal, your search options are constrained by how thorough your index is.  If you forget to notate that your vacation planning is on page 56 or 68, you might not know where to look.

That is never a problem with GoodNotes.  The app automatically uses character recognition to make even your handwriting searchable.  This means you can look up a word and it will show you which pages that word shows up in your notebooks.  It even works with cursive!  

Because my notebooks are so searchable, I don’t index my journals.  If I need to find something, I just use the search bar.  It works wonderfully!

So, there you have it, my top 3 reasons why I think digital bullet journaling is an amazing way to plan.

What about you?  How do you keep track of your goals, to-dos, routines, and appointments?  I’d love to hear what is working, and what isn’t. Drop me a line in the comments and share how you keep your days organized!