Growing up with ADHD, my life often felt really overwhelming. I always felt like I was behind or falling short. There was always something I should or could be doing better or more efficiently. So I started trying to find a perfect app, spread, or productivity hack to finally feel organized and productive. But the more stuff that I added, the more scattered and disorganized I felt. I was spending more time managing the tools and actually living a productive life. That's when I made a simple but powerful change. I replaced all these complex and disjointed tools with one simple and unified notebook system.
Today, I feel more organized and present than ever before. Hi. I'm Ryder Carroll, inventor of the Bullet Journal Method, and I've helped over a million people write a better life. In this video, I'm gonna walk you through how exactly the system effectively replaced the productivity tools I thought I needed to live a better life. From task management to habit tracking, we'll explore not only how you can do this in your notebook, but what gets lost when you don't. Let's dive in.
Let's start with the most fundamental and important productivity tool, the to do list. The power of writing down what you have to do can't be exaggerated.
That's partly why the market is flooded with different options to do just that. I've tried dozens of to do apps, and they're great. They're beautifully designed. They're incredibly efficient. They sync. They're searchable. They make capturing your to dos effortless.
To me, though, that ended up proving to be a bug and not a feature. See, the less friction there is to capturing your to dos,
the more likely you are to add.
The more you add,
the less you do.
For me, I ended up creating and then abandoning
these never ending list of chores. In bullet journaling, we avoid task hoarding by taking advantage of friction in one of three ways.
The first is by name.
We don't call them tasks or to dos. We call them actions.
Why?
Because a task list usually gets in the way of the life that you want.
An action plan is the way to the life that you want.
We create our future one action at a time. It's a tiny semantic moment of friction that can help us be more discerning,
which brings us to the second way, writing by hand. No. It's not as fast as having your tasks auto populate or typing them out like you can in other apps. That said, I found that that bit of added daily effort in the short term often results in immense time savings in the long term. How?
Well, if something isn't worth the moment of effort it takes to rewrite it or to write it down in the first place, it's probably not worth your time in general.
That's really what sets this system apart. Rather than finding a way to hack our time to get more done, we wanna focus on hacking down what we're doing to have more time for the few things that actually matter,
which brings us to the third way that we use friction,
which is to write a daily to do list. This is how it works. Every morning, turn to a blank spread
and write down the day's date. Scan through the previous days to see if anything has now become urgent.
Then write down what you need to get done that day
as clear single sentences.
Now number the top three in order of importance.
Really think about what is the one thing that would make today a success.
That's what gets number one. Everything else is a bonus.
That's it.
Digital calendars are another cornerstone of most people's productivity stack. I still use them all the time to block out and schedule things that I need to do.
They're great because they're flexible and collaborative,
but there is one core feature they often lack, and that has more to do with behavior.
When we use our digital calendar, we usually plot out what we think will happen.
Very rarely do people update their calendar based on what actually did happen
after it happened.
So we're often left with an incomplete or inaccurate record of our life.
This is why in the bullet journal method, every month we set up a timeline.
The timeline is part of our monthly log. To set up your monthly log, all you have to do is open to a blank spread.
On the left hand side, you put the month followed by the dates of the month and then the first letter of all the days.
That's it. This is your timeline. On the right hand side, you'll create your action plan listing all the things that you wanna get done and act on this month.
As opposed to a calendar that tracks what you thought would happen, the monthly timeline is a reflection of what actually did happen. Each day offers you just one line to log the most noteworthy thing that happened that day. It can be a good thing, it can be a challenging thing, but by the end of the month, you're left with an accurate record of how your life unfolded.
Our memories are terrible. It can be really illuminating to see an accurate representation of how your life unfolded over the last thirty days. We can use the timeline to help us spot and break patterns, establish new ones, and make much more informed decisions about what we do and do not commit to, which brings us to the next tool.
Another popular tool in the productivity world is some kind of habit tracker.
We use habit trackers to help us become who we want to be. Again, this is a place where apps can be really compelling. They have all sorts of wonderful bells and whistles that make tracking habits fun and seamless.
So seamless, in fact, that before you know it, you're tracking ten, twenty, 30 habits. I see this all the time. I've done it myself. The truth is that real behavior change is really hard.
It requires consistent practice over time.
And the more behaviors we try to change at the same time, the less likely we are to change any of them.
Again, the trick is keeping things really simple.
In fact, it's setting the bar so low
that you'll actually do it. The way that I do this is by limiting myself to no more than three small actions that I can commit to for at least thirty days for a month. To make things even easier, I piggyback on that monthly log layout I just showed you before to track these new actions. Below the timeline, I write down the actions I'm tracking so I don't forget them later on. Then I place the first letter of each behavior up on the right here across from the days.
Next, I assign when I will do what for the first week only.
Why? Because the first week for me is always a test run to see how much effort this commitment really requires.
Chances are, I don't know. Then after a week,
I can start to gauge. Then week after week, I can dial in a sustainable plan of action.
That's it. Now if you've been watching this and thinking, I wanna try this out, but I don't know where to start, you really don't need much. In fact, any notebook you have lying around will do the trick. However,
I found that having the right notebook, the one that you actually enjoy using, can make a huge difference. That's why I designed the official bullet journal notebook. It comes with everything we've been talking about already built in, an index so you can find anything later, numbered dot grids to organize your pages, three bookmarks so you can easily jump between your daily, weekly, and monthly logs. It's designed so you spend less time setting up and more time actually writing a better life. I'll leave a link below if you wanna check it out. Now let's keep going.
One space that's been getting a lot of love in the last few years is mood tracking, which I think is absolutely fantastic.
If you've been following this channel, you know why I think tracking your mood is so important.
If not, consider subscribing now. In short, the way we feel influences
everything we do. When you don't pay attention to how you feel, we end up doing a bunch of things we don't understand
or care about. My challenge with a lot of these trackers is that they lack context.
You simply tap
when you felt something. That's super simple. But in this case, think it might be a little bit too simple. For us to understand our mood, we need more context.
What were you doing or focusing on when you felt this thing? What was happening not just that day, but that week or that month? Though some mood trackers do allow you to add that kind of context, it requires yet more energy we may not have, especially when we're feeling low. With BuJo, we don't have to do any of that. Remember that daily log we were talking about before? In addition to just our actions, we're also jotting down notes, which are our thoughts, events, and moods, which are our feelings,
as they pop up throughout the day. All of this as single sentence journal entries. Over time,
is
created organically
as part of your practice.
There's no need to add that context later.
You can see what you were doing or experiencing
around the time that you were feeling certain things. What you're left with is not only a mood tracker, but a super lightweight way of organizing your thoughts, actions, moods, and events in a sustainable way.
This is the foundation of a bullet journal practice. As you can see, this approach streamlines and unifies a lot of tools into one manageable system.
Best of all, it reduces your screen time. Every minute you spend in your notebook is a minute you're not context switching between apps, not getting pulled into notifications,
not falling down the next digital rabbit hole or doom scrolling.
It removes temptation of endless content and rewards you with clarity and presence of thought and action.
That's something that no app can really give you. If you're ready to try this for yourself, just grab any notebook you have lying around. The tool doesn't matter so much as the practice.
However, if you'd like to use the notebook that you've been seeing throughout this video, the one that I use, check out the official bullet journal notebook. I designed it from the ground up for exactly what we've covered today. To me, it offers the perfect Goldilocks zone of structure, freedom, and quality.
Check out the link in the description or scan this QR code here to grab one for yourself. What we just covered here is my core OneNotebook system that I use every day. But if you like using more than OneNotebook, check out this video next. Thanks for taking the time and see you in the next one. Happy bullet journaling.