i'd better not lose this notebook

As a kid, I was obsessed with my assignment notebook. Sure, I wrote down the homework (often after I'd completed it) but mainly liked making lists and lettering headers in fonts and styles. I fell out of using it after college, because classtime was the best time to work on it. In fact, one of the first things I did when I started this blog, was participate in Hundred Things meme.

The Hundred (or something like it)

More than a decade later, everyone has become obsessed with planners. Ri has the equivalent of four CD-cases full of pretty stamps for every possible occasion, as well as a variety of washi tape and watercolor pencils with which she colors in her stamped images. Her planner pages are called "layouts" and she has a following on Instagram.

I'm nowhere near as fancy. Work has pretty much taken over my life for the last five years, so I have kept a running list of to-dos in a notebook. Sometimes a personal task would sneak in. I fill it out during the more mind-numbing conference calls or meetings that require my attendance. Then I realized this was my assignment notebook all over again.

Juggling work meetings/deadlines, grocery shopping, birthday presents and events was getting tricky now that I was permanently braindead from birthing children. If I didn't write something down, it would simply evaporate, never to be found again. I tried several methods to wrangle reminders and tasks. I bought an old-school assignment notebook, fancy day planners (stickers! inspirational pages! birthday logs!) and even got in on the initial Passion Planner kickstarter.

None of them worked for me because I'm just not regimented. Sometimes I would religiously fill it out for a couple weeks, then just carry it around in my bag, unopened. Some days I had a LOT going on, and others, nothing. The only thing that I religiously went back to was my unending list of work tasks: Nothing beats that satisfying rush from crossing something off as completed.

I'm not sure how I stumbled upon the Bullet Journal, but it had me as soon as I saw that the book is BLANK; you don't have to make your life conform to preconstructed boxes. If you google or YouTube "bullet journal," there are hundreds of ways to set it up, and no way is "wrong." I was sold.

Each person needs to do what works for her, but here is how I have mine set up: bare bones. No decorations, all business. I have a monthly page with a line for each day/date. I write events there or big deadlines. On the page next to that (the two comprise a "spread") is a list of monthly goals, split between personal and work. The following pages are a running list of to dos with the date at the top. I don't bother moving tasks to the next day--unless it's been a long time--because I just keep working on them until they're done. Some days go on for pages, and some days are skipped entirely. In between are all kinds of random things, like a page with book/tv/podcast recommendations from friends, gift ideas  for holidays coming up, meeting notes.

The genius about this is that everything is all in one place. I haven't bothered indexing anything because I tend to take notes with drawings and symbols and groupings of notes, which creates a visual that I remember. If I recopy those notes later, I mysteriously cannot find them.

Jon has made it his mission to find a digital platform for me to accomplish all this. Nothing has worked. Not even the special pen/paper you can download and microwave clean (I don't like the feel of the paper and the pen is too "slidey"). I can't do drawings/arrows/circles or doodle on my phone/tablet, so that doesn't work for me, either. I think I just like things the old way. Hell, I'd still have a flip phone if it weren't for my husband pulling me into this century.

It's been time to move to a new notebook for a few months now. I've been putting off starting the new bullet journal for almost all of my maternity leave, because it means I will soon have to jump back into the circus of the workplace. I'm thankful to have a job to go back to, but I'm dreading the petty office politics. I prefer my drama in the form of a tiny dictator bellowing for milk at 3 in the morning.