I recently noticed something strange about taking notes. Think about it. It's a standard practice for us to take notes in class or during meetings, even on books that we love.
Why do we take notes? To remember information so that we can use it later. We take this information so we can create things with it, whether it be an essay or a book or integrate skills, start a business. That's why we take notes.
Notes help us to unlock our ability to create the things that are meaningful to us. So why then, when it comes to arguably the most important topic there is, do we not take notes? That topic being our lives.
Hi, I'm Ryder, inventor of the Bullet Journal Method, and in this video I'll show you how taking notes on your life can be a real game changer, even if you journal. It's a simple yet powerful practice that helps you stay grounded, get organized, and focus on what truly matters. And the best part?
All it takes for you to get started taking notes on your life are four sentences. Let me show you how. I grew up with ADHD and tracking my life used to feel confusing and overwhelming.
Over the years, I found a powerful and ancient way to process my life. And that's by naming my experiences. And I used to do this internally. The real magic was when I began to do that through writing, where I could clearly see, return and contextualize and learn from the things that I observed.
Over the decades, I figured out a way to distill all that information into four categories to easily name my experiences. And those four categories are notes, which are for what we think, actions for what we do, moods for what we feel, and events, what happened. Each category is assigned a bullet symbol to help us organize and read our entries. Each one of those bullets is then followed by a single sentence journal entry. This short length helps us not only capture information quickly, but also to distill it.
Now let's take a look at how each one of these sentences work. Let's start with the note dash. This bullet is for capturing your thoughts, which include facts, dates, insights, and observations. Whenever you want to capture a thought, simply draw a dash followed by a single distilled sentence.
Try to keep the sentence short and clear. Too much information and the note gets messy and confusing. Too little information and the note can become unhelpful. An easy way to find the balance is to pretend like you're taking that note for a stranger. Why?
Because they don't know what you know. By crafting a note that's clear to someone else, you're automatically future-proofing it. Because your future self is likely to forget much of what you know right now when they're reviewing your note later.
So take a note for someone else. It forces you to think differently and distill the information in a way that is future-proof. Next is the action bullet. Actions are captured as a dot and followed by a sentence describing the action. This is likely the most used yet unnatural feeling bullet when you get started with bullet journaling.
Why not just call them tasks or to-dos? And why not just use a checkbox like everyone else? Okay, the first reason is a philosophical and the second one is purely practical. Here's the short version of the philosophical reason.
To me, tasks feel like something I have to do. And I don't want my life to feel like a never-ending list of things I have to do. It makes my life feel like a burden.
Actions, on the other hand, feel empowering. They turn possibilities into realities. The word itself slows me down to think about the possibilities that I want to make real. That's how I take accountability for my life, responsibility for it.
This is a big thing that we talk about in my Writing for Being course, and I'll leave information to that in the link below. So why the dot bullet and not more of a traditional checkbox? That also has a specific reason. First of all, it's the fastest and cleanest symbol to draw. which doesn't seem like a big deal, but if you're doing it all day long over days, weeks, months, and years, that really adds up.
And it's also super easy to transform that into other shapes. See, most things that we do have more than two states. Things start, they pause, they get delegated, they get moved, become irrelevant, and so on. We can easily signal these different states using the action dot.
Let me show you how. Turning the dot into a single arrow indicates that the action has been moved to another part of your notebook. either forward or backward. Double arrows indicate when an action has been moved outside of your notebook like into a digital task manager for your team or calendar for example.
A line means that this action is no longer relevant. Last but not least, an X through the dot means that the action has been taken. X marks the spot.
Next is the mood bullet. Whereas the note dash helps us connect with our mind, the mood bullet helps us connect with our body. It helps us check in with how we're feeling.
Those feelings can either be emotional, like sad or excited, or they can be physical sensations in the body like tired or shaky. All these feelings are signals and we want to pay attention to them. We record the mood entries with an equal sign to remind us that our feeling is the result of something, usually what we're thinking or doing.
Right? You feel tired for a reason or you feel anxious for a reason. So rather than getting lost in that feeling, we keep it short.
We keep it to one sentence. That helps us to practice to observe what we're feeling. Simply naming it.
Sad. Frustrated. Excited.
Tired. That way we can acknowledge it without getting stuck in it. We get so caught up with what we're doing, we rarely check in and see on how it's impacting us.
documenting how we feel offers valuable clues into what is and is not working in our lives. And we can use that awareness to start taking intentional actions to either cultivate what is working or prune what is not. And we do this on a regular basis.
And all that information comes to us simply by tracking how we feel. This awareness helps us go from simply getting things done to getting to do things that actually matter to us. Things that we know through experience light us up. bring us down. Next is the event bullet.
We use event bullets to record things that happen outside of us. Examples include a good conversation with a friend or an argument with a co-worker, a dentist appointment. This is what happens.
We record events with an open circle, then add a single sentence journal entry about that event. Again, we're keeping it as short and objective as possible. We want to write down what is observably true so that we can create the most accurate record. of our life possible.
I can't overstate how powerful the skill is of simply learning how to observe something without judgment. It's a core skill of the bullet journal method, and this is one of the ways that we practice that skill, logging what happened, simply observing it without judgment. Okay, so now we've learned about notes, actions, moods, and events. The real magic for all this comes together when you just start using them.
as it makes sense when it's relevant. You can mix and match all four of these bullets in any order. Simply write them down as they come up throughout the day. You can even nest bullets to give one bullet more context. For example, say you have a meeting.
You log that meeting as an event, then indented below it, you can add notes and moods and actions to give it context. This is what I felt. This is what I thought.
This is what I have to do. Documenting your life this way is what I call rapid logging, and it makes capturing what you're thinking. what you're doing, what you're feeling, and what you're experiencing really quick and simple. This is a great and lightweight way to start taking notes on your life.
Of course, we don't just take notes to take notes. We take notes to do something with it. And that's where the rest of the bullet journal method comes into play. How do we process these notes? How do we make them work for us?
So if that's something that you're interested in, consider taking the bullet journal course, which I will link down below. Thank you for taking the time. See you in the next one.
Happy Bullet Journaling.