Waste of time!
I spent too much time drawing and trying to make things look pretty! I was being creative, using coloured pens and drawing bubbles and clouds around all my thoughts!
Every day I needed to set up the pages and it felt like I was starting from scratch each day, which screamed waste of time!
There wasn’t any order of function. I ended up with my thoughts on paper, and it didn’t look very pretty in the end as I am not creative in that way. To me, it looked like a mess!
On top of looking like a mess, I didn’t have a way to actually get any of the things done that I had written about or implemented any of the ideas that came up as I was writing.
Beauty vs Function
I LOVE to use different coloured pens, in fact, I have so many that there isn’t enough room on my desk for all the pens I use.
The problem is that when you have a blank slate every day, you are wasting time getting started in the morning.
I need to have a structure to work within that I can also beautify. I have tried so many different ways of becoming more productive, and the key has been having a structure that allows my creativity to flourish.
One of my habits is that I love to doodle. It drives my husband nuts when he is sitting beside me, I swear I use up a lot of ink, by drawing patterns as I think or wait on the phone.
I incorporate doodling in my planner, journal and on my project sheets, but it isn’t used to help me organize. I use it to help me think.
Your journal isn’t your planner
Journaling is very important, but it isn’t your business planner. Journaling is to help you get creative, get your thoughts out of your head so that you can make sense of them and put them into action.
When you sit down to journal your mind isn’t in planning mode, it is in creative mode. This is a completely different way of thinking. When you are creatively thinking you aren’t planning.
The question becomes how do you take your creative journaling and create an action plan to put it into practice?
This is where the Rockstar Business Planner comes in for me.
I start by journaling in the morning, to get all my thoughts out on paper, to get creative and dream. Then I mark an A with a circle around it to indicate an action that I need to take. I spend time dreaming of what I want my life and business to look like, and sometimes I write notes to my clients too.
After spending time journaling, I take the actions and place them in the Rockstar Business Planner so that I can take action on the journaling. It might be something that I write down for today, or it might be a task that needs to be done in the future. Wherever it belongs in the planner is where it gets written in.
Now that it is in my planner, I can take action.
My Ah Ha Moment with bullet journaling
I was doing some research for this article when I stumbled across an article about an experiment that a freelance writer did with bullet journaling. In this article, they linked to a YouTube video explaining the basics of bullet journaling.
I thought it was going to be a silly video showing me how to draw and make my journal look pretty. I was mistaken!
The basics of the bullet journal were things that I was doing already, but in a different way!
This wasn’t some tutorial on how to draw and make things pretty, it was a great tutorial on the functionality of the bullet journal method.
This leaves me wondering why I never found this information sooner!
Now I see the bullet journaling from a different perspective.
Rockstar Business Planner and Bullet Journalling
As mentioned above, I journal every morning before placing my important action items into my planner.
Journaling also gives me the opportunity to “get my head on straight” before jumping into work.
Taking time to focus on what is important for the day, is the best way to not only get started, but it becomes the centering that I come back to if I drift too far away from the focus of the day.
Without that centering activity, first thing in the morning I am not nearly as productive.
My current journal is almost full, and for the next one, I am going to set it up like a bullet journal. I like the idea of indexing the information within the journal so that I can easily find the information within the book after it is full.
