I bought a Bullet Journal to start the year. Let me explain why. When I was in full-time ministry I was involved in so much that one of the things which got squeezed out was the thinking and preparation time for meetings. Now I am 0.5 I do have that space - and I want to make sure I use it as well as I possibly can.
If you are not familiar with the concept, Bullet Journalling began some years ago as a way of tracking not just tasks and events, but as much of one's life as one needed - so some people record their exercise, bodies, hobbies etc, and there are many who seem to get carried away with making their pages as arty as possible. I found YouTubers like Matt Ragland helpful for some simple starting methods, and Jill at Check the Box and Learn really helpful at establishing a workflow that actually worked for me, rather than the other way round. I'd love to do more of her pattern of emails, which is to have two slots each day for checking emails, and then a session on a Friday morning to clear out the inbox bu actioning, forwarding, filing or noting.
I set up a typical Bullet Journal group of pages. A Monthly Log, followed by Weekly Logs and then Weekly Review and Preview pages and have done some adaptation as I went along. My particular working pattern, currently, is that I attend perhaps half a dozen meetings or 1:1 sessions each week, but as we all work remotely or in a distributed way, I also try to make the most of those little time slots in between to go and find a real person if they are in the office that day. Therefore, I need to capture ideas, tasks and queries when in meetings, and process them in such a way that I can then deal with them in the more timely way afterwards.
I have simplified my Bullet Journal already, but have keep Matt Ragland's Weekly Review and Preview concept as the backbone of my one system. Therefore, I spend some time (generally on a Sunday evening) going through the pages of notes I have made over the last week in meetings, mentoring sessions or planning at home and I harvest all the items that have not been completed. I then move them to a new page in my notebook and I try to plan where, when and with whom I can complete anything outstanding. I also spend some time in a non-judgmental reflective journalling of the last week. I am particularly recording how I felt and then dealt with difficult moments, as well as record how I am implementing the values that are important to me in my work. I'll come back to those in another post. I also try to record how my thinking about my Bullet Journalling method needs modifying. It is liberating to know that I do not have to continue pages or content just for the sake of it. If part of the system isn't working for me then I can ditch it or fix it.
Out of this Review/Preview and Reflective Journalling I am also looking to identify changes I need to make to my working practice and time slots in the week ahead which need to be blocked out for a specific purpose. Therefore, at present I Review the week just gone and want to note down;
- two or three "wins" - what did I do that aligned with my values?
- two or three points to "assess" - what didn't work as well as hoped?
- harvest outstanding items from my notebook and migrate them into next week
- reflective journal on the week
- identify and changes I need to implement
I then Preview the week ahead;
- do I need to prioritise any values or things which slipped in the previous week?
- work through my list of migrated outstanding items from the previous week
- what time slots do I need to protect in order to to complete those this coming week?
- are there any actions that come to mind as I do this which I need to add to my list?
I do all this in paper notebooks. I carry a Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebook with me all the time and write using a Kuru Toga 0.5 pencil. Scribbles and crossings out are fine. One thing I now try to do for every note I take is to add the date and who was present. Having read through some reviews of the handling of various complicated cases, it seems important to help my memory as much as possible with these little details, just in case I need to go back and retrieve some information. I have been trying a system for note taking which involves symbols, so
- - means that what follows is a note
- . means an action I need to complete. If I have to move this on, then I can change it to a >, or x if completed
- = means I am about to note a mood or feeling of importance, and
- o means an event
I journal in a separate notebook. Currently this is a Midori A5 notebook and a Lamy fountain pen. I prefer notebooks with no like markings so I can write portrait or landscape, or sketch as needed. That's the beauty of paper over electronic. This is just the date and then longhand journalling. I am particularly wanting to expand on dealing with concerns or anxieties, or handling troubling moments. That is for my learning and then being able to look back on it for future reference.
There is real pleasure to be found in writing with a good pen or pencil on proper paper, but that is a bonus for what I am trying to achieve here. The real win for me is to keep on top of work so that I am effective and add value to meetings, formal or informal. I see one of the soft functions of my role as linking a person with a difficulty to a person with a solution. This system seems to be doing that for me at present.
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