My Digital Bullet Journal using OneNote

I check social media a lot. In both Pinterest and Instagram, I came across beautifully curated journal entries. It piqued my curiosity. I already do have a working system via GTD (Getting Things Done). But the wonderful photos shared by people made me want to try it out Bullet Journal myself.

My GTD system used to consist both personal and work tasks.  Honestly, mixing the two didn’t work well with me. Plus, I couldn’t consolidate my work and personal emails so I decided to separate my task management system for both. This gave me a reason to join the Bullet Journal wagon!

So what is Bullet Journal or BuJo for short? It’s a system created by Ryder Carroll that is meant to give us a free hand in creating our own diary or to-do list.

The Bullet Journal is a customizable and forgiving organization system. It can be your to-do list, sketchbook, notebook, and diary, but most likely, it will be all of the above. It will teach you to do more with less.

Here’s a video that describes the whole Bullet Journal System:

Initially, I tried doing it in a physical notebook and some pens & highlighters.  However, I failed miserably, haha! 😂 My handwriting is just horrible and I cannot draw beautifully at all! So I focused on my strengths: Go Digital!

Since my personal BuJo is going to be used for work solely. I looked for tools that we use at work. And the application I chose is…. Microsoft OneNote!

Sharing with you my Digital Bullet Journal 😃 Let me know what you think!

INDEX & KEY

The Index is where I put the major sections of my Digital BuJo.  All the sections are clickable and can get me straight to the content. The Key, on the other hand, is a guide on how I mark various tasks in my bullet journal. I only stuck with To Do, Completed To Do, Important and Question. While there are so many tags available at OneNote, I decided to just keep it simple.

FUTURE LOG

I call this year at a glance. It’s a snapshot of the whole year with important dates marked. It’s my way of tracking events. I color-coded the type of events such as country holiday, birthdays, vacation and other important events. I followed our office’s fiscal year so my BuJo starts at July and ends at June. The quote from Steve Jobs is a reminder of my theme for the FY.  The heart icons is of course my personal style ❤️

COLLECTIONS

Collections are a set of things we want to track. In my case, I have four collections that are meaningful to my work:

• Goals – this is where all my tasks for the year are focused on. I want to make sure this is done during the start of the year so that I have better focus and can prioritize tasks in an effective way.

• Books – I listed down the books I intend to read (and re-read) during the year that will help me with my work.

• Lynda.com – I’m a huge fan of Lynda.com. It’s a subscription service wherein you’ll get video trainings on almost everything (but there are lots focused on IT). For this year, I want to brush up on my Microsoft skills.  I must admit that my expertise lies on Apple products and services. But since we use Microsoft products for work, I need to understand the features of MS products so I can leverage them and can help with my efficiencies at work.

• Passwords – I love how our office are so efficient that there’s not a lot of passwords to remember.  However, I jut have a bad memory and we tend to change our passwords regularly. So I opt to have a collection solely for Passwords so I can refer to it just in case I forget.  Also, important to note that I put password protection in this section (yehey for MS OneNote Password Protection feature!) 👍🏻

MONTHLY LOG

The monthly log is my overview for the whole month. I use them mainly for looking at the month at a glance, a reminder of my inspirational quote for the year, listing down my monthly goals, tracking habits and a summary of my days.

The habits that I want to make are the following:

1. I should use the stairs in the office. Our parking space is located at the 7/F while my workstation is located at the 12/F. I want to use the stairs as a form of exercise (to reach my fitness goal too!).
2. Making use of the work from home benefit. I intend to stick with wednesdays and fridays as my WFH schedule.
3. I want to stop working long hours. My personal goal is to work only 10 hours a day. Will I reach it? I don’t know. But I want to track it to see how far off I am in reaching that goal.

The summary is mainly my diary for the day. Did I feel happy? Did I feel productive? Did something happened? Anything I was thankful for?

DAILY LOG

The daily log is the page that is always open on my iPad. I want to make sure that all the tasks I allot for the day are being completed. A lot of people track other things in their daily log. In my case, I’m sticking with to-dos/tasks.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

So basically, the index & key, yearly log, monthly log, collections and daily logs are what comprises my Digital Bullet Journal.

The way I arrange my Digital BuJo is the Index, yearly log and monthly logs are my major sections. Then the collections are mini sections under the yearly goals while the daily logs are under the monthly log.

If you’ve started the bullet journal process like me, let me know how you do it! While I have established my personal BuJo, I still browse through hundreds of BuJo spreads online, it’s very inspiring! 😍