Just recently, I went on one of those late evening YouTube binges. You know the ones, where you just keep clicking funny looking thumbnails in the sidebar? Well in doing so, I made a discovery.

‘Bullet Journalling’ is a particular journalling style developed by designer Ryder Carroll, to allow to rapid logging of information and tasks. Having attained a cult following among the Pinterest crowd, one can now find thousands of iterations and styles inspired from the original idea.

I’m still not sure what the appeal was to me exactly, but at a guess I would say it is the flexibility. There is no particular style one must stick to, and there is no judgement on what can or cannot be included; thus, I cannot have ‘failed’ to use the journal correctly. The journal, my journal, is my personal compendium of tasks, notes, data and creativity.

Having started a journey of trying to be more organised, and ‘adulting’ a little more skillfully, I rushed straight out to David Jones in search of a moleskine. What I collected instead was this Papier D’amour journal.

I started my first page with a drawing of my dogs.

The next page is the Index. This is important, because (for me) one of the appeals of the bullet journal is that you can add pages devoted to certain topics at any point, and simply find them again via the index.

The Future Log page/s create a ‘year at a glance’ where events like birthdays or holidays, which you know about well ahead of time, can be noted for memory.

Next I added a reading list and a weight tracker. These pages I intend to return to over the course of the year. Herein I have created both a record of data, and an instruction for future action, and they are both contained within the journal where they cannot be lost.

The Month at a Glance can serve much like a calendar, marking events on particular days. Indeed, many people will draw a calendar grid as their template for this page. I intend to use the monthly Habit Tracker as both a motivation tool and a data log, in a useful grid form which pleases the visually minded persons, such as myself.

From there on I stated my daily logging, with a small ‘brain-dump’ to start off the week. I will track not only a to-do list here, but also note memorable occurrences and my food diary.

So far I’ve had fun practicing with my new fountain pen. The usefulness of the craft remains to be proven!