Met a lady at a coffee shop who showed me her bullet journal from 2018

I was sitting at a local shop in Portland last month trying to set up my monthly spread, and this older woman next to me asked if I was into bullet journaling. She pulled out her journal from 2018, and I swear every single collection was still going strong. She had this simple key she made with just a dot, a circle, and a star, and she said she never changed it because it just worked. It made me question if I'm overcomplicating my own system with all these different trackers and color codes. Has anyone else found a setup they stuck with for years without tweaking?

2 comments

2 Comments

morgan9158d ago

Wait, so she never once changed her key in all those years? That's wild to me because I feel like I'm tweaking mine every couple of months when I convince myself a different symbol would work better. What did she say about how she handled tasks that didn't fit neatly into her simple system, like stuff that needed to be split up over multiple days? I mean, I get the appeal of keeping it simple but sometimes I wonder if that simplicity just hides the messiness of real life. Like, my current system has like 4 different symbols just for appointments and deadlines alone.

lily2308d ago

4 symbols just for appointments? That reminds me of something i read, @morgan915, where a minimalist used only a dot for tasks and a circle for events for 10 years. All multi-day stuff just got one dot with a tiny arrow in the corner, which honestly makes me nervous just thinking about it. I'd end up forgetting which arrow meant "done tomorrow" versus "started yesterday" and just drown in confusion.