Book Review/Heather Seggel

Ordering the Chaos

A few years ago I found myself in dire straits. A room rental had fallen through and I managed to find a new place to stay, but it was a short-term situation and I’d already outlasted my welcome. I was freelancing — life was a combination of book reviews, personal essays, and floods of garbage for a content mill that paid one cent per word — and frantically reaching out for housing resources as well as new work. The table I wrote at was just big enough for my laptop, but was covered in paper scraps and sticky notes. A calendar, binder and notebook sat nearby, and books were piled everywhere. It looked exactly how I felt: Desperate and miserable.

I don’t recall exactly where the concept of a “Bullet Journal” for organization appeared at this time, but I remember going to the website bulletjournal.com assuming it would be a sales pitch for something fancy and useless. Instead there was a short video explaining the process. It had a brief bit of stop-motion film showing an unruly pile of notes and Post-Its similar to my own being gently “eaten” by a single notebook. I watched the whole thing twice, taking notes the second time, and to avoid wasting money just converted my existing notebook into a Bullet Journal despite being halfway through it. It would be hyperbolic to say it changed my life, but entirely accurate to say it made, and continues to make, it a life more worth living. That’s only become more important in the last few years, and now there’s a book to help newbies get started and fans go deeper. The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future (Portfolio/Penguin) is out, and it’s where you should point your holiday gift certificates.

Author Ryder Carroll explains how he designed this technique to keep his work and life organized while negotiating the hazards of ADHD. A deceptively simple layout makes room for lists, projects, a datebook, and any other information that needs a place to be, all indexed in the front of the book to make it easy to find. There’s a Future Log so things to come aren’t forgotten, and a few visual annotations for events that make their status plain as it evolves over time (something postponed is “migrated” forward with an arrow, things that are cancelled or otherwise irrelevant get a simple line struck through them). While it’s an elegant design, it’s a far cry from the images you’ll see if you randomly search out “Bullet Journal” online. Many adherents are more invested in making Pinterest-worthy pages full of calligraphy and elaborate stencil work than the more workaday aspect of the system. Both are entirely valid, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of your diving in and giving this a try.

There are other methods that cover similar ground—if you’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or are familiar with the Japanese concept of “kaizen” or the artist SARK’s micromovements (actions toward a goal that take 5 seconds to 5 minutes to complete) — you’ll note the overlap. That’s not a bad thing. What all these are ultimately trying to teach us to do is get information out of our heads, where it’s likely to trigger a lot of emotional alarm bells, and down on paper where it can be assessed and acted on as needed. It’s not a political book, but it’s a wonderful resource to have at hand when trying to respond to our current political moment.

You can still find the basic guidelines for the technique online, but The Bullet Journal Method is a pleasure to curl up with. Full of ideas for how to make it your own, it’s a place to note your next Swing Left meeting, save the date for writing Postcards to Voters, rank 2020 candidates as they appear on the horizon, and also remember your niece’s birthday and your own dental cleaning. Recipes to try, books to read, friends to schedule face time with; get them, and yourself, out of your phone and back into the world.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018

Populist.com