Trying Bullet Journals

As my post the other day implies, I am someone who easily loses track of time and place. I want that not to be the case, but don’t know how to make that happen.

I’ve found pretty good and continuous luck over the past month doing a clipboard, so I’m hoping that it continues with a bullet journal. Rather than having pages for each thing, I will go back to the method I used when I began journaling: strict chronology. Each day gets one full page, and I have a few other pages for reminders and notes.

Since, for all intents and purposes, my planning ends in a month and a few days, I don’t really care if this method means that I lose track of events that would happen in three or so months. It is very important to me that I get through this thesis, and I realized today that it is also really important to me that it be long. With that in mind, I think that the new method is something that I can force myself to be doing for the next thirtyish days.

Came from a guy with ADHD, has become an entire aesthetic. Generally as far as I can tell the idea is to have an externalization of the brain in one place with dedicated time and space to clean the thoughts into something reasonable.

I’ve got a page where I have the day and day of the week for the remainder of my schedule, when I’m traveling and where, and this week’s goals for habits. This week’s habit goals are: stretch twice, meditation of some sort, blogging, writing poetry, penmanship, typing, and reading. I want to do most of them daily, but penmanship and typing are both effectively every other day events.

Following that, I have a page with my ideas for blogs. I’m currently reading a book about women in science and it’s sparked some great blog ideas.¹

Behind that, list of books that seem interesting, so that I don’t forget they exist

Behind that I currently have a weekly plan/reality log? I’m not sure what this will do for me, and it’s likely that I’ll ignore and or get rid of it.

Behind that I have the daily pen choice, whose main idea is that it will help me figure out when I wrote things based on the pen they’re written in. The six pens I’m currently working through mean that it will be just over weekly that each one repeats, so anything that’s less than a week away is uniquely identified by when I wrote it.

Behind that I have an empty page for each day until next Monday², except for today’s and tomorrow’s, because I’m planning on actively writing those.

Right now that’s my notes on the book I’m reading, an optimistic page for me to write poetry on³, today’s messy page, which has some tasks and a bunch of notes, and the penmanship page, which I’ve done some work to fill. I know that most of the books I’ve been flipping through with a friend don’t just have repetition of letters, because it’s both too much of a task, being multiple actions, and also too little, not being a full word. Still, I think that my e is slightly more consistent and that my “a” is maybe a little better? I realize I don’t know what I want the a to look like or write like though.⁴

Somewhere I’ve also tomorrow’s page, and my hope and plan is to write it tonight and then journal and confirm it tomorrow morning before getting outside.

Daily Reflection 19 July 2025

mostly about the idea of the liberal arts and what it means to be a scientist or do science↩
because I’m traveling R-M, so won’t be able to make the next week in the morning of Sunday or Monday↩
optimistic in the sense that I’m not sure the poetry will go there, not its actual mental state↩
these are shockingly distinct. I think that I want a single stroke, but what that stroke is is important to me almost independent of what the output looks like and vice versa↩
which is above this, so I guess you’ll have already read↩
deep fried (note 7/21/25 typo yesterday, said friend not fried) small whole↩
Note 7/21/25: this said “water” not “rice” in initial posting. Thank you to those who caught↩
maxwell street brand↩
and because I want to add pictures at some point soon, because 12 pages of single spaced text can probably balloon really quickly with many pretty pictures↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩
I feel like this is a past tense of behave? Huh wild, it is actually Old English and comes from “to need”↩
darn 2 hour parking limits↩
oh, that could have been the folly for the day. Alas, I guess↩
read: I have a printed copy which I looked through and made changes as needed, including doing a bit of research because I had some hand waving that I didn’t notice in a derivation↩
burnt out? maybe just lost focus is the better term↩
my main reader expressed a preference for less polished folly writing, and so, at the very least, I’m going to try to have the daily reflection and draft 0/1 of things be so↩
I did not, in fact, delete all the games. Or rather, I did, but then I redownloaded one of them, which is a Majong (sp) roguelite, and it’s so much fun and so addicting and I’m sure that I am absolutely horrid at it↩
my beloved↩
nutella filled dense donuts. As delicious as it sounds, if you can believe it↩
pork, to be as clear as the hotel was↩
me, as it turns out↩
love that this writing site keeps trying to get me to write just a few more words (legitimately)↩
and the chocolate flavored coffee (I don’t know what they mean by this, it came like any other batch brew, but wow there’s an intense amount of chocolate in it) certainly didn’t hurt↩
meaning mostly toe touch and a little bit of shoulders/hips↩
the terrible thing about having a relatively quick turnaround means that you go from ahead to behind in a matter of days↩
thank you hotel!↩
Before latest round of edits, on the current page layout (one inch borders except left, which is a one half inch border for some reason, 12 point font, .5 inch footnote separation) Intro just barely touches (kisses, one might say) the seventh page.↩
I will not go to the arcade. Arcade is the time killer. Last week when I found the arcade and got more than a 1:1 free game ratio on the pinball machines was an exception because that bar set them absurdly low and also I was hot. This will not occur again (and other mantras I repeat)↩
one might say a coordinator, if they were slightly more coherent than me↩
as one might expect when checking into a hotel with the express intention of getting a lot of work done↩
shoot forgot during car swap↩
for some reason my clicker doesn’t really work at all. Not sure if it’s the wireless receiver or if it’s a “when you put a USB-A into a USB-A to USB-C converter nothingn works”↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

Musings

I'm just copying my father

Home

Trying Bullet Journals

Daily Reflection: 20 July 2025

Daily Reflection 19 July 2025