Organising the chaos… bullet journalling

Monday was a holiday this week here in Ireland and it’s the day when I usually give some thought to what I might write in my blog scheduled to post every two weeks at the moment. I would like to have a pipeline of content to write about but it just hasn’t happened that way for me and my inspiration tends to come from a variety of sources, perhaps something I’ve read or a previous blog post I’ve written. This week it’s a combination of both those sources.

I was scrolling through my weekly feed of blog posts to read and I came across the catchy title 5 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD START A BULLET JOURNAL (yep, all in caps, but in a prettier font than pasted here). Clearly I had happened across this blog previously and set a notification for new posts to my weekly reading list. Andrea Severson is the author – here’s her Twitter link and this particular post really resonated with me. A few posts back I wrote about my chaotic organisation and I’ll take all the organisational help I can get since I’ll soon be juggling PhD studies with teaching commitments.

I should also mention that I love notebooks, especially spiral-bound A5 size, and have a collection of them in multiple colours. Each semester I usually fill one with all sorts of content demonstrating my dreadful handwriting but I tend to rely on my digital tools for historical reference (freewriting practice hasn’t helped my handwriting become more legible unfortunately!). I have notebook sections for the modules I teach and the modules I’m studying but that’s the extent of it. I’d like to be able to balance my digital / notebook activities better and figure bullet journalling might work for me. Fortunately, Andrea has a YouTube channel playlist where she has created a number of helpful videos. I checked out just two of them but figure they’re enough to get me started.

So, what are my objectives? Well, I want to improve my organisation generally, eliminate duplicate effort and minimise any gaps.

I use iCal on my Mac for scheduled meetings and events and naturally it syncs across my mobile devices. This summer I’ve gotten in the habit of scheduling time in iCal to read research papers and students drafts so that I can account for my time (and RescueTime keeps track of my productivity). So far so good. For each research student I have a ’To-Do’ in Things where I keep progress notes, copies of email communication and the like, but I also have a paper notebook where I jot down items of interest that crop up during a meeting. This is where it can get messy and where I feel a bullet journal will help.

I come across a lot of reading materials on Twitter that might be useful for one of my modules or indeed as a potential research topic for myself. Same goes for materials for academic writing. I don’t seem to have a useful system of saving or recording these. For the modules I teach I might retweet them using the relevant hashtag if I’m not planning on building them into my core module materials. For my research students I keep a Twitter moment of helpful tweets but whether or not it’s actually helpful is a whole different question.

Finally, when I don’t know where to save something I’ll just add to Pocket, tag a bunch of items when I get a chance and then read later (sometimes days, more likely weeks, and months if I’m really truthful!).

I’m not under any illusion that a bullet journal will manage all these objectives for me but I’m sure it will help me along the path from chaos to organisation! Now must go shopping for colourful post-it notes and a fresh batch of highlighters!

Until next time,
Sandra

Featured image courtesy of Pixabay