Why I Replaced Bullet Journal with Notion

How Notion beats the simplicity of a bullet journal while juggling writing, tasks, notes, and meetings.

For the past several years I have been keeping on top of myriad tasks, goals and notes in a paper bullet journal. I drank the cool-aid. I bought the book by Ryder Carrol. Day after day, week after week, I filled the pages with the things I needed to get done — ticking them off, migrating them, crossing them out, and doing all the other things you might do while following the “bullet journal method”.

Luckily I escaped the insanity of decorating the pages. Don’t get me wrong — I’m always tremendously impressed when I look at Pinterest images of carefully curated bullet journal spreads filled with illustrations and embellishments. I’m always impressed until I read their content and realise they are works of fiction — the days filled with “Starbucks with friends”, “Mid-morning Yoga”, “Meditation”, and other such activities.

Along the way I have flirted with all manner of digital bullet journal replacements — among them Evernote, Wunderlist, Microsoft To-Do, and Google Tasks. Nothing quite worked. Nothing was as easy as a bullet journal while sitting in a meeting taking notes. Nothing was as flexible as a bullet journal while stirring together tasks, notes, and meetings.

And then I tried Notion (notion.so).

It’s worth pointing out that I had been using Notion on-and-off throughout much of the time I had been using a bullet journal — but before explaining how Notion caused me to finally put the bullet journal away, it’s probably worth exploring the benefits and drawbacks of the magical little books full of dots.

Why Bullet Journals Win

The real secret behind the bullet journal — in my opinion — is Ryder Carrol’s method. The habit it forges. At the beginning of each day, you write a heading for the day and check previous pages for unfinished tasks and events. The concept of migration — the repeated process of moving unfinished tasks forwards — is perhaps the cornerstone.

It’s all about forming habits. It’s about planting seeds in your memory at the start of a day; reminding yourself, and nagging yourself about unfinished work. The process of migrating tasks forwards is a clever psychological hack — guilting you into “clearing the decks” of unfinished work.

Why Bullet Journals Fail

Bullet journals work well when plans don’t change. If your working day unfolds more or less as you had planned, you tick tasks off and move forwards in an orderly manner. Unfortunately, the world isn’t neat, tidy, or orderly. When wholesale changes happen, swathes of tasks get pushed into the future — only there’s not enough room in the future log to temporarily park them. You end up writing pointers to pages and quickly descend into the depths of software development hell.

Bullet journals are really difficult to search. You know you wrote the URL of a test server somewhere last month, but without carefully reading back through page upon page of notes, the chances of finding it are slim. You start trying to figure out when something happened purely to give yourself half a chance of finding your notes. In short, the paper has no search functionality.

Reducing the Method

Over time, I have been using a bullet journal, I have refined “the method” to my version. This is a common story and is mostly encouraged. By “refined”, I mean “threw out all the parts of the method I didn’t need”. Events snuck back into Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. Notes snuck back into Google Drive, Evernote or OneDrive. In the end, the bullet journal became no more than a daily log of the things I had done; an aid memoir when filling in timesheets.

Notion (eventually) to the Rescue

As noted earlier, I had been experimenting with Notion throughout much of the time I had also been writing notes in bullet journals. If you’ve not seen it, Notion is a website that allows you to record collections of “things” — be that tasks, bodies of text, images, or whatever else you might imagine. Each item of a collection can contain further collections, and so on. Each item can be related to any other item too. An endlessly navigable, searchable, and connected rabbit warren of curated content.

Given the enormous flexibility of Notion with its ability to represent data as kanban boards, lists, tables, Gantt charts, galleries, and so on, perhaps the biggest problem is figuring out how best to use it — and that didn’t occur to me for a very long time. Until this week in fact.

The guts of the “rapid logging” in my bullet journal has been replaced by a single table in Notion; recording the meetings, tasks, and notes of each day — as they happen. I check my work calendar on a morning, along with any long term project kanban boards, and sketch out the day. Throughout the day the page stays up — adding notes, ticking boxes, and adding more as required.

Did I mention that it’s searchable?

Curating the Future

My use of Notion has steadily increased over the past couple of years; slowly taking over from Evernote, Google Drive, Keep, OneDrive, Dropbox, and countless other repositories of information. I use it to keep on top of writing projects, technical research notes, professional development topics, and assorted collections such as books, movies, and video games I would love to find time to read, watch and play at some point (like that’s ever going to happen).

The more I use Notion, the more I realise it can help me, and the more worried I become about it disappearing tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

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