I've tried to love productivity apps. I really have.
I haven't tried every single one. But I've tried enough to notice a pattern. They're all good at one thing and limited at everything else. One does tasks. One does notes. One does calendars. One builds beautiful "second brain" diagrams that I never open again.
None of them let me do the thing I actually need, which is put everything in one place. Tasks, half-formed ideas, the plan for the week, a sketch of a podcast episode, how I felt about a hard conversation. My brain doesn't sort itself into neat apps. It all arrives mixed together.
So for years I bounced between tools, always feeling slightly boxed in.
Then, about seven years ago, a mentor of mine at Google showed me his.
The notebook that changed how I work
It was just a notebook. Dotted pages. A short index at the front. A system of small symbols I didn't understand yet.
He called it a bullet journal.
I was a little skeptical. I was working in tech, surrounded by software built specifically to organise my life, and here was one of the smartest people I knew, doing it with a pen.
But he could find anything. His thinking, his plans, his meeting notes, his personal reflections, all in one book, all in his own handwriting. There was no app boundary telling him where a thought was allowed to go.
I started my own that week. I haven't stopped since.
I now have a shelf full of them. Seven years of notebooks, lined up in order. Every plan, every idea, every messy season of my life, captured in one continuous place. I can pull down the one from a particular year and watch myself thinking. You can't do that with an app that quietly updates and forgets.
What a bullet journal actually is
If you've never seen one, the whole system is simpler than it sounds. It was created by a guy named Ryder Carroll, and at its core it's just a fast way to capture anything using a few small symbols.
Carroll wrote a book about it, The Bullet Journal Method, and it's one I keep buying for other people. I've handed it to enough friends by now that I've lost count. It's one of my favourite recommendations on my bookshelf, not just for the how-to but for the quieter argument underneath it, that journaling is a way of living a little more on purpose. If you want to learn the method properly, start there.
Here's the part that trips people up at first, so let me make it plain.
- A dot (•) is a task. Something you need to do. "Call the accountant." "Draft the episode outline."
- A dash (–) is a note. Something worth remembering but not acting on. An idea, a fact, a thought from a meeting.
- A circle (○) is an event. Something happening at a time. A dinner, a call, a flight.
Then, as you work, the dots change.
- An X means it's done. You cross the dot. Few things feel as good.
- An arrow (>) means you moved it forward. You didn't get to it, so you migrate it to a future day or month.
- A strikethrough means it stopped mattering. You cross the whole line out. The task died, and that's fine. Letting things go is part of the system, not a failure of it.
That's basically the whole language. A handful of marks, and suddenly a single page can hold tasks, notes, and events without any of them getting confused.
Three layers: month, week, day
The other thing that makes it work is structure. Three simple layers, zooming in as you go.
The monthly spread. At the start of each month I take two facing pages. One side is a simple calendar of the month: the big things, travel, deadlines, who I'm seeing. The other side is a list of what I actually want to get done that month. It's the bird's eye view, and it takes about ten minutes to set up.
The weekly spread. Each week I lay out the days. Not every bullet journaller bothers with a weekly, but for me it's the layer where planning actually happens. I look at the month, decide what belongs in this week, and spread it across the days.
Daily rapid logging. Then there's the day itself, and this is the heart of it. Throughout the day I just log, fast. A task arrives, I dot it. Something happens, I note it. An idea shows up in the shower, it goes in the book. No deciding which app, no choosing a category. The page takes all of it. At the end of the day I look back, cross off what's done, migrate what isn't, strike what stopped mattering. That five minutes is the closest thing I have to a daily reset.
And because it all lives in one book, it doubles as a journal without me trying. The plan for Tuesday sits right next to how Tuesday actually felt. Years later, that's the part I treasure. I wrote more about why that matters in this post on why most of your life disappears without you noticing. The notebook is my save button.
Why I put a notebook in my clients' hands
Here's what surprised me. I started suggesting it to the people I coach, and it landed harder than almost anything else I do.
We cover a lot together. Values, patterns, the gap between who someone is and how they're living. It's a lot to hold. And most of my clients are exactly the kind of people who'd reach for an app to manage it, because that's how they've managed everything else.
But something shifts when they slow down and write it by hand instead.
The physical journal gives them somewhere to process. To take what we surfaced in a session and keep turning it over during the week. To catch the same pattern showing up again on a Thursday. To track the small experiments they're running. It turns coaching from something that happens for an hour into something that lives with them all week.
They tell me the same thing, over and over. Having one place, off the screen, to think and feel and plan makes the work real. The notebook becomes where the change actually happens.
One book, a few symbols
I'm not going to tell you a bullet journal will fix your life. It's a notebook. :)
But if you've been bouncing between apps the way I was, never quite finding one that holds all of you, the analog version might be worth a try. One book. A few marks. Everything in one place.
Seven years in, I still reach for mine first.
If you want a snapshot of where things stand across your life right now, the Life Report is a good first page to fill. And if you'd rather work through it with someone, here's how I work.
