Humpday Grumpday Post time.
Grumpday
So, Mike Coleman retweeted a Jennifer Keegin tweet that led to her latest blog post about a organizational technique called Bullet Journaling.
Bullet Journaling http://t.co/hFOVHFmdD0 via @JenniferKeegin…love this and now time for new moleskine
— Mike Coleman (@iMikeColeman) February 7, 2014
Jennifer’s blog post showed this video, which details the process of bullet journaling and which I have since taken up and am trying to stick with. My desk is typically a mess of papers, task lists, and post-its, and I keep lists, but they often get lost under piles of papers, or thrown away prematurely, or too jumbled to be useful anymore. I have never been able to keep a paper calendar or agenda, I lose interest quickly.
One clear journal rather than rando post-its?
Bullet Journals help alleviate some of those issues, giving you a look at your progression over a longer time period, and giving you the ability to also put your thoughts in the same place in the hopes of drawing out connections that might be there. I live and die by my Outlook calendar to know what is going on and so adding events to the journal also kind of helps me see the larger picture beyond what my Outlook typically shows is going on this week.
We’ll see how long it lasts, I don’t usually keep up with these things, but this one feels right, so it will be interesting to see if it helps me keep vision on the tasks ahead and left to be done.
Jennifer also linked to a past blog post, one of her most popular, and for good reason, about organizational desktop wallpapers, which I loved immensely back when she originally posted. I adopted this method right away, putting a photoshop touch to my favorite desktop wallpaper of Calvin and Hobbes (who I hope can inform later Grumpday blog posts and presentations).
Click to get bigger.
What I like about this is it helps to organize a space that we usually may not pay attention to enough, and may just be a grid of bleh. Ditch the grid of bleh for a system that helps you remember where stuff is and that stuff exists.
Say goodbye to bleh desktops.
My toolbox section, with the tax exempt forms and forms my student organizations always need makes attaching them to emails a couple steps quicker, and I know exactly where they are.
What kind of brought it all together for me though on this organization kick that I’ve been trying to get better at this semester to improve on a poor last semester was a series of tweets from Simon Pegg. He put out some photos from 2011 of the initial plan for the final piece of the Cornetto Trilogy – The World’s End. It was cool getting to see a movie with so many wonderful and detailed elements broken down and organized simply into its bare bones of a story and how to tell it. You have to ensure you have a good system and a good skeleton in place to ensure something can turn into a success, but also so that you are ready and able to be flexible and adaptive to the needs of a situation.
August 2011, me and @edgarwright, one page, whole film. The very beginnings of The World's End. http://t.co/KHU0RIqvNx—
Simon Pegg (@simonpegg) February 10, 2014
