notebooks

Bullet Journals Revisited, And A Defense Of Rapid Logging

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking , , ,

A few weeks ago, I read Ryder Carroll’s book The Bullet Journal Method.

I’ve been using bullet journals for years at this point. Not the pretty art-pieces that you’ll find on the internet, full of scrolling calligraphy and Washi tape, but a series of beat-up journals that are filled with messy handwriting and scribbled notes. Notebooks with no interest in being beautiful objects, but plenty of practical use as a tool. I picked it up around 2012, after being impressed by the way my friend Kate Cuthbert organised her work at Harlequin Australia.

Ten years of relatively consistent bullet journaling is a long time. Over the years, I’ve gotten large chunks of my family into the habit — there’s often a family Leuchtturm shop around the end of the year. I’ve experimented with different approaches, from one dedicated bullet journal for everything to bullet journal by project to bullet journal by context (writing/work/life). I’ve researched and experimented with layouts and approaches, and found stuff that really worked for me (elements of Tobias Buckell’s hacks and showrunner John Rodgers hacks have both been useful).

All of which is really a prelude to saying I wasn’t expecting much from Ryder Carroll’s book. I picked it up because the Bullet Journal method has been a lifeline for me in recent years, and I wanted to throw some cash his way for sharing it so freely back in the early days, but I worked on the assumption I knew what I was doing.

Turns out, not so much. 

Going back to basics on bullet journaling after a decade of using the system has been an interesting experience, because there’s a certain amount of drift. You cleave to the practices that are easy and useful, and let other parts fall by the wayside.

Going back to basics—with a more detailed explanation of why they’re in place—proved to be a transformative experience. There are three big tips that have wildly changed my relationship with my bullet journal notebook, but the biggest has been recommitting to my daily log of activities and making notes.

The log, in my experience, is one of the first things to go as people get familiar with the Bullet Journal system. It feels less transformative than indexing and threading, which change your relationship with the contents and thought processes. The value of rapid logging your day is easily overlooked—certainly, for the last few years, I’ve been more likely to implement a daily plan than a daily log.

The Bullet Journal Method convinced me to give logging another try, and it’s value was proven in the weirdest of places—giving our cat medication. 

Some backstory: we’d been giving The Admiral pills because the poor kitten has a UTI and some teeth issues, and for the majority of that time my spouse, Sarah, has been our designated pill delivery person. Not that I wouldn’t try — I’d give it a go every morning — but my first few attempts were unpleasant for me and the cat, and Sarah would step in and take over in order to avoid distressing The Admiral further.

Fortunately, Sarah had some insight into what I was doing wrong, and would give me a tip after every attempt. Unfortunately, since the pills happen right before I started work, those tips would ordinarily get lost in the sudden transition from “home Peter” to “work Peter”, with slow (or no) improvement.

The cat’s illness coincided with the recommitment to logging, and part of that meant jotting down every event—work tasks, books started, giving the cat pills — and one or two notes about the experience.

So instead of letting things fall out of my head, every bit of advice Sarah gave me got  logged and reviewed. I made my own notes, critiquing each attempt, walking through each step until I figured the point of divergence between concept and practice. I’d create notes to supplement that advice with my own research, hitting up youtube and web pages.

And it only took a few days for a task that I would have flailed at for a week, giving into the option of learned helplessness, to become something I could wrap my head around. Admittedly, right at the end of our three days of giving tablets, but there’s now a record of thinking through and correcting all my mistakes to review the next time I have to do it.

The same philosophy’s started to spread through day job tasks, and publishing tasks. Projects that had stalled for months started to pick up speed, both because I was thinking about them with more clarity, and because taking notes gradually led to building system.

Logging’s become a habit worth keeping over the last two weeks, and one that I’ve stuck to far more consistently than other journaling habits.

That said, it comes with challenges: I’m used to a standard bullet journal lasting me between three months and a year, depending on what I’m doing (faster while researching a PhD, slower when working for places that have their own project management systems). Logging and note-taking on this level is chewing through pages far more quickly than I’m used too, and it’s conceivable I’ll go through a notebook a month if I stick with the rate of pages-used-per-day that I’ve run with over the last two weeks. 

On the plus side, I’ve got a *lot* of blank notebooks, but I can see a future where I need to think really hard about how they’re all going to get stored once they’re filled.

In the meantime, The Bullet Journal Method‘s a recommended read if you’re interested in trying the BuJo out or revisiting the foundations. Trust me when I tell you there’s more to get out of it than you’d think. 

Notebooks and Process Notes: March 2019

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

One of the side-effects of doing my Quarterly Checkpoint this week is the realisation that I’m going to have very little time for high level strategic thinking on the writing front. With that in mind, I’ve shifted my drafting process back to handwriting in notebooks–a tactic that’s served me well in terms of keeping forward momentum during highly stressful periods.

Since it’s been a while since I did an update about the state of the notebook wodge I carry with me, I figured I’d take a quick look at what I’m carrying and how I’m using it right now. Fortunately, it’s a pretty slimeline wodege of notebooks for me—there’s currently four notebooks in my kit, and I’m only usually carrying two or three of them at any given moment:

The notebook on the bottom is a large, dark green JS Burrows Journal from my local office supply store–essentially, their name-brand knock-off of the moleskine design. It’s a remarkably nice piece of kit for the price, and there are a bunch of little improvements to the design over the last time I’d used one of their large journals. The shift to a creme-coloured paper, for one, and the move away from the larger 8mm rule that made it feel like I was writing in a school exercise book.

It’s also a little wider than most notebooks that size, which makes it a pleasurable thing to hold and work in. It’s currently holding the bulk of my actual writing and brainstorming for the novella-in-progress, which means there’s lots of bits where I write a scene, and lots of places where I stop and braindump everything I know about the story before I write things, like so:

I started using this technique after spotting it in the notebook pages included in the first edition hardcore of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, and it’s been useful enough to justify my tendency to stickybeak in other people’s processes ever since. I do this kind of brain dump anytime I’m about to start a new scene or sequence in the story, but also when I get stuck on something and can’t figure out what.

Above that is the X-Brand A5 Pressboard Spiral Notebook I picked up from Officeworks for about two bucks, ignoring my usual distrust of spiral binding because it had blank pages and the press-board provided a good writing surface. It tends to be the place where more detailed planning takes place for various projects–it’s where I’ll breakdown a scene that isn’t working, trying to figure out why, or where I’ll do a rough-and-ready draft that is mostly an attempt to get the bad (or cliched) way of doing a scene out of my head before I write it.

Basically, there’s lots of stuff like this, where I figure out the relationships between characters in a coming sequence:

And far lengthier bits where I’m working out beats within a scene and working through what I’ve come to think of as a “scene sheet,” stealing bits and pieces from various resources. This usually starts with mapping out the default structure of the scene, trying to figure out how things will change:

Then moves on to asking a series of questions recommended by scriptwriter Charlie Craig in his portion of Linda Venis’ Inside the Room, focusing on the hard questions about why this scene is there, whether every character needs to be included, and how it’s going to do something different or surprising:

Asking the questions about which characters need to be there is particularly sobering, as my rough-roughs will frequently include way more characters than necessary. Cutting things back to the people with conflicts generally tightens the scene and gives me new angle on how to achieve the effects I’m looking for.

If you look hard at those two photographs, you may also spot elements taken from Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid and the petitioner/granter dynamic outlined in Robin Laws Beating the Story. It’s rare that I do deep planning outside of the scene level, but when I go into it I grab from every resource I can think of that may help me solve a particular issue.

Additionally, I keep these sorts of things seperate from the main drafting notebook because it’s a subtle queue to my subconscious about what we should be working on at any given time. Planning and writing are two different parts of the process, and I’m trying to keep them seperate as much as I can.

The pink notebook on the pile is for short-story drafts, which makes it a really piecemeal book since I rarely do more than a page or two before I switch to another idea. I hadn’t looked at it in a while—there’s a stack of half-finished story notebooks in my pile—and I was surprised to see the first draft of Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight tucked away in its opening pages.

No photographs of this one, since it’s the wild west and the place where I do fun work rather than work work. That makes it a relatively protected space in my process.

Finally, the notebook on top is a red, grid-ruled Moleskine that I’ve been using as a bullet journal since the start of the year. It’s my first time going back to the Moleskine after a year and a bit using the equivalent from the Leuchtturm range, and the subtle differences are telling. It’s a little bit more compact as a notebook, and that extra half-inch of space makes a bigger difference than you’d think.

The Bullet Journal gets used for general planning, raw idea dumps, and the occasional blog post or essay draft. Basically, anything that doesn’t fit into the core notebooks above.

Saturday Gloom and Notebooks

PETERMBALL Journal, Works in Progress , ,

So I seem to have lost the ability to just sit down and blog at the moment, because the long stretches of silence means everything seems far to trivial when I finally sit down to start posting things. I want to, say, pop in and blog about the fact that I’ve just spent the day with my inner goth turned up to eleven, listening to songs I haven’t listened to in years while rereading the big ol’ copy of The Annotated Sandman, Vol 1, that I picked up on Friday night, which means it’s now coming up on nine o’clock in the evening and I’m surprisingly maudlin and in a bitter-sweet kind of mood that would totally result in me dying my hair black if there was black hair dye in the house.

Fortunately, there isn’t, so I’ll continue on as a vaguely normal person on the morrow, but you know how it goes. I’ve had a day catching up with a former version of myself, the one that used to gad about looking like this:

For the most part I don’t miss being twenty all that much, but every now and then it’s nice to remember that twenty-two-year-old Peter got a few things right, even among all the enormous cock-ups that I managed to achieve between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. And part of me still wonders when, exactly, I migrated away from the feather boa as a standard look and became a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy for whom a Hawaiian shirt counted as dressing up.

In some ways twenty-two year old me would be so happy about where I’ve ended up, but sartorially, he’d be so very disappointed.

In any case, I read a bunch of stuff and listened to a bunch of albums and ordered a bunch of CDs because the internet made it too damn hard to download mp3 versions of the albums I wanted, and now I’m here, trying to conquer my hesitation to blog, because these days my blogging impulses are all daily minutia or nothing. Every now and then, when the blog lies fallow, I get to thinking about the various ways I’d like to make it over and turn it into one of those valuable tools for writerly promotion that people bang on about, but if I’m honest that’s never going to happen. I can blog with a plan elsewhere, and probably will since work requires it this year, but around these parts the rule is simple: the things I want to share with the world are the things I want to share with the world, and I should probably stop feeling bad about that. 

I also plan on abusing the fuck out of italics, but what else is new?

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When I moved prior to Christmas, I moved three large boxes full to the brim with partially-full notebooks and A4 writing pads, and after getting them to my new abode I sat and looked at them and said “Peter, you do not need to buy any new notebooks at all next year. Just use the ones you have.”

It was a good plan, and one I stuck to for all of twenty-six days. Then I wandered into my local shopping centre and noticed that one of my favourite styles of notepad were being sold for less than half-price, so I immediately picked up a half-dozen in a range of colours.  Then, since I’d already broken my pledge to stay notebook free, I immediately went and bought a new notebook to take to work.

The problem, of course, is that I have too many things in my life that requires writing stuff down, and I like to keep said things in separate notebooks. Scribbled notes for stories end up in different notebooks to the stuff I write for games, and the games are further separated into different notebooks according to rules system and whether I’m running the game or playing in it. Heaven forbid a game actually end halfway through. My friend Colin started a D&D campaign a few years back that ended up falling by the wayside in an unofficial kind of way, and the half-full notebook containing my notes has been sitting on a shelf for the last three years just in case I should need it again. Even now, writing about it, I look over at the book full of warforge stats and treasure lists thinking I can probably throw it out, and yet…

And yet.

That’s always the problem with my kind of packrat mentality. I can throw out enormous numbers of things, and did prior to moving, but some things linger because every now and then I do end up going back to an old notebook and filling it completely. Or I’ll go through one and find half a story I’d largely forgotten writing, which actually serves as my favourite way of writing things since it means half the work’s already done by the time I get around to finishing something.