Bullet Journals

When busywork is easier and less scary than real work

Are you familiar with bullet journaling?

At its core, bullet journaling is a “productivity system” designed around taking simple, quick, analog notes to sort your tasks, thoughts, and reflections.

So why does the Google Image Search results for “bullet journal ideas” look like this?

Or this?

A few years ago, I had started a bullet journal, and fell down a rabbit hole of “visual design ideas” and fancy layouts and making beautiful pages and spending lots of time arting and measuring out my pages and buying special pens to achieve An Aesthetic—ironically slowing down and filling my “productivity and mindfulness” system with extraneous and empty work.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with dedicating time to doing something if it brings you joy. There is nothing wrong with decorating an analog journal.

But for me, I realized that I was hiding behind the work of looking busy, rather than making effort to tackle the busywork.

In my personal practice, bullet journaling fell into the same bucket of habits as over-researching a writing project. I was doing “work” that felt productive, rather than actually being productive in my work.

It is easier (and less scary) to procrastinate with performative busy-ness than to tackle the difficult work of tasks that are hard, or carry creative or personal risk.

Good process should clarify and streamline work, and clear your path of clutter and distractions. But sometimes it is more comfortable to hide behind that process—to move cards around on a kanban board, or to spend three hours color coding your bullet journal, or find new art for your slide deck on the approach you’d like to take on the project, than it is to just fix the bug, do the task, and start the project.

Most often, you just gotta put away the fancy watercolor markers and just write the email newsletter do the thing.