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Found out my bullet journal was basically the same as one from 1802 and I laughed for 10 minutes
I was poking around an online archive of old diaries from a library in Dublin and saw a merchant's logbook where he drew little boxes in the margin to track whether he paid his debts, which is exactly what I do with my habit tracker. The guy was marking his ledger with the same squares I use for my water and laundry, just with quills and ink back then. Does anyone know if Ryder Carroll ever mentioned finding old logs like this when he came up with the system, or is it just a wild coincidence?.
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jordan_patel591h ago
That merchant was using a system that goes back even further than 1802 if you dig into it. Benjamin Franklin famously kept a little grid in his journal to track thirteen virtues, and he was doing that in the 1700s, so the box-in-the-margin habit clearly is not new at all. What Carroll did was package an old human habit into something with a name and a set of rules people could follow step by step. The funny part is that people have been marking squares in ledgers for centuries because it just works for the brain, not because someone invented it recently. Your archive find is basically proof that the "system" is way older than the bullet journal brand, and the coincidence is probably less wild than you think.
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