Assumed Audience: people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies.

I have tried bullet journaling as a full-on way of tracking and planning my work in the past. It never stuck. The system I’ve landed on instead—making heavy use of Bear and a pomodoro timer—has been fantastic. However… I realized yesterday that the way I take notes during the workday in a notebook already has a lot in common with bullet journaling. So I’m trying something new, and we’ll see how it goes.

For my daily task logging, I’m still going to use Bear in exactly the way I have been already. However, I’m writing down notes in my notebook in the bullet journal style:

• dots for to-dos
• putting an ‘x’ through the dots when I’ve done them
• turning them into an arrow if I move them into Bear to tackle later (the next day, the next week, the next month, etc.)
• dashes for information I learned

I don’t need to bother with all the things that never actually worked for me in bullet journaling, like keeping an index, various kind of date logs, collections, etc.: my logging and note-taking system in Bear already handles all of that in a way that I like much better. But stealing the lightweight notation and the idea of pulling incompleted tasks into a place where I can use them later? That’s worth stealing, I think. We’ll see how it goes.