April 24, 2017
A Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal notebook in action!
We live in an age where speed and ease are prioritised and technology is the first route we take to manage this. When faced with the task of producing a piece of writing, I’m certain that most of us would make a b-line for the laptop and start stabbing away at the keys. We generate text, but do we produce thoughtful work?
There are some obvious benefits to typing; it’s quick, easy to edit, and largely reliable. We can save work with the click of a button, share it and back it up. But what happens if this fails; we accidentally delete or publish our efforts before its ready to be seen or someone (definitely not me) accidentally spills their latte on the keys and busts the hard drive beyond repair? Where the lines between convenience and permanence are beginning to blur, the lines of your trusty notebook will continue to glisten.
Here at Noted in Style, we believe everyone should write more. Our school teachers devoted hours to helping us learn how to form the curves and slashes of each letter, to hold the pen correctly, to elegantly join the letters to into seamless words – we should be using these skills before we all forget how to sign our names! Richard Branson claims that the one thing he always carries with him is his notebook – we may not all be the next greatest entrepreneurial genius, but the link between note scrawling and success may be closer than you think.
Let’s consider the Bullet Journal notebook. It’s a notebook with a logical note-taking system called Rapid Logging that claims to be a more effective way of recording and organising our ideas, tasks and events as bullet-pointed notes. For someone whose idea of organised note-taking is a flurry of Post-It notes with numbers and words scribbled onto them, hopping from page-to-page in my journal throughout the week, a bullet journal could be a necessary education.
Bullet journaling has been edging its way into our lives more and more recently, popping up behind retro photo filers on social media, with its trend of coloured inks and embellished underlining putting most of us other scribblers to shame. Leuchtturm1917 have even introduced their own purpose-made Bullet Journal notebook, with dotted pages to accommodate the symbol-based code, all of which are listed in a useful key on the inside cover of the hardback notebook. The code requires neat layouts, page numbering and uncluttered print to help you organise your months and days into different categories of notes. For example, an event is marked with an empty circle, whereas a task can be identified as a simple dot, which either gets crossed off as done with an ‘X’ or migrated forward to the next day if it not completed. Once you’ve been going for a few months, your journal becomes littered with orderly markings and sentences, and when encased in the Emerald or Black debossed cover of the Leuchtturm1917 model, this results in quite an impressive browse!
If you’re still not swayed into picking up a pen by the stylish canvas that is the Bullet Journal notebook, then take a moment to consider the psychological benefits of the productive writing it promotes. Besides the improvement of memory recall and creativity, the neurosensory experience of committing your words to paper and feeling the writing surface while holding and steering the precise movements of a pen, will focus your mind where the disconnected and repetitive process of remembering key placement on a keyboard will not. The effort involved in writing and re-writing items here is intentional, encouraging you to consider the importance of each and, in the long term, helping you discover how and what needs prioritising in your personal and professional life. As a filter for useful information, the Bullet Journal notebook could prove an advantageous requisite in the workplace.
So why not try it out for yourself and see if you can get your staff or colleagues to embrace the pensive penmanship of the Bullet Journal?
PS. If you’d like to know more about the origins of Bullet Journaling and get some tips for using the system, take a look at the inventors site.
Below are some great photos from Mae, whose wonderful bullet journal entries show just how useful and beautiful the Bullet Journal concept can be. You can see more of her journals here.
