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My first week with a handmade Bullet Journal and how I’m reconciling this practice with a love of plain text, with musings on not-New Year’s resolutions.
Not a system to copy, but principles to guide your own journey of discovery, with my experiences and perspectives as the backdrop.
I don’t do new year’s resolutions. Every month, week, and day are better intervals to check in and see what kind of avalanche all those tiny choices are heading me towards.
There’s no point to attaching a new habit to the fresh feeling of a new year, because the newness inevitably wears off, and then where will you be? A consistent practice of introspection and seeking to make daily micro improvements will bring more progress than most New Year’s resolutions.
Your will is nothing more than the muscle of character. Every time you flexed your will, you either strengthened the muscle of decision toward good and selflessness, or you strengthened it in the opposite direction — toward evil and selfishness. Even the tiniest choices made their mark. Every choice matters — whether an unkind comment or the smile at a lewd joke or taking the time to help one in need. Taken together, they exerted a cumulative effect. All your life, you were gradually turning yourself into a better and more selfless [person], or into a more self-centered [person]. — Hell and Beyond, by Michael Phillips (The Beyond Trilogy).
If I was into New Year’s resolutions, this is a list I’d be happy to pick from.
Something I started working on last year is to give more empathy, less advice.
How does your productivity system support the progress you are hoping to see? Does something need to change?
Anne Laure Le Cunff’s membership site, Ness Labs, is holding a live session on replacing New Year’s resolutions with the practice of designing personal experiments. It’s almost certainly over by the time you’re reading this, but the event will be available to rewatch for all Ness Labs members.
New Year’s Eve was quiet at our place. After a church service filled to the brim with fellowship and goodwill to all, we came home and feasted on a range of delicious snacks (shiitake mushroom jerky is so good!), and a simple evening meal. In the nourished calmness that followed, I finally welcomed the urge I’d been feeling to explore bullet journaling and set to making myself one before bedtime.
Success! I used a combination of machine and hand sewing to wrangle 120 pages (30 leaves) of 100 gsm paper into a coverless but functional book. It slots well into my Paper Saver cover.
We have a monster guillotine that can trim a 2-inch thick wad of paper with relative ease, but it’s important to line things up properly before you lower the 3-foot long blade. Unfortunately I trimmed off a centimetre (or so) more than I intended to, so the book is now Moleskine width instead of the A5 I was going for!
It’s okay, though. I am content with it.
(Another of my not-New-Year’s-resolutions is to detach my sense of wellbeing from the results I’m hoping to see. To greet what happens with curiosity rather than fear, self-recrimination or resentment.)
Observing my bullet-journal-holding-self as an outsider might, I have questions. Tough questions.
And the answers thus far are: “Have you got half an hour?”, “A significant one”, “No”, and “I don’t know”.
What I’m looking forward to discovering, once the honeymoon phase is over, is which things will naturally gravitate to text files, and which will feel better on paper.
I’m telling you, this is a very intuition-intensive process! I feel like someone who’s been on a longterm detox diet, now cautiously rediscovering some of the foods their newly-healed body couldn’t handle for a time. Stay tuned.
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