10 reasons why you should _NOT_ start Bullet Journaling (III)

Do you still keep your structured daily journal? Or even worse: are you still keen on starting one? Obviously you didn’t read parts one and two of this series.

Wait, you DID?? And you’re still convinced that you should start with Bullet Journaling pretty soon? Then here are two more arguments that should finally stop your endeavours…. 😉

  1. Unloading your mind…. doesn’t free cognitive capacity make you cringe (at least a bit) inside as well?
  2. Personal development and growth? Pah, completely overrated! And if they even come bundled with ease or joy something must be wrong.

Unloading your mind

Free cognitive capacity makes you cringe fearlessly… what on earth should you do (next) with that free capacity? Then part one with ‘starting small, moving evolutionary’, ‘avoiding to overprepare’ or part two with sections on flow and ‘being organised’ could come handy on your path to focus, flow and flexibility. 🙂

Or maybe it just sounds unbelievable that you can free your precious cognitive capacity only by WRITING down e.g. events, tasks or even thoughts in a structured way? Then I suggest you to ask & listen to experienced journalers and they will confirm that freeing cognitive capacity with the help of structured writing actually works great.

Here are just a couple of my very own experiences for inspiration…

Tweet from 11th May 2019

Keeping lists in your mind also gets superfluous when maintaining a Bullet Journal: you can e.g. start Custom Collections for:

  • books to read
  • movies to watch
  • things you lend other people
  • podcast episodes you listened to (which contained special nuggets you’d like to keep of track down later on)
  • … and many more …
Tweet from 23rd of July 2019

Personal development and growth

You believe that personal development, responsibility and growth is overrated? Also they need to be hard to achieve… in fact they can never EVER come with ease or joy (or even both!), can they?

Personal development coming almost “for free” with your journaling practise could mean e.g.

  1. growing your emotional literacy and increase your empathy skills
  2. learning to respect/accept, inspect, adapt AND celebrate
  3. upping your priorization skills

Growing emotional literacy

Growing your emotional literacy is e.g. enhancing your emotional vocabulary, it is learning about your needs… and with that increase your empathy literacy. For this I use a suitable handy overview (e.g. feelings and needs from agile-living, available in German and English) as a bookmark in your Bullet Journal:

Tweet from 1st Aug 2019

Respect, inspect, adapt – and celebrate

Furthermore, keeping a Bullet Journal provides you with regular retrospection possibilities…

  • possibilities to respect (or accept) the things that happened in the past,
  • possibilities to inspect honestly if there are patterns to keep or change
  • possibilities to adapt your actions (and maybe also your personal growth guide, the journal) accordingly.
  • and of course also: possibilities to celebrate big and small achievements

In short journaling supports you to practice respect and acceptance which frees your capacities to inspect; it fuels you with energy to adapt AND finally, of course, you add celebration energy to the mix.

Tweet from 15th Sept 2019

Prioritize – say NO to almost everything

Also a structured journal (like a Bullet Journal is one variant of) provides you with the space to plan and prioritize. In fact: a journal is a great tool to learn priorization in a playful, lightweight way.

Still not persuaded? Then, Warren Buffet can surely convince you that prioritization is a more-than-essential skill for successful people:

Tweet from 18th Nov 2019

Now what?

You liked what you read? I’d love to hear, which parts were especially valuable to you!
You longed for something? Let me know so this blog can improve.
You are also writing a (Bullet) Journal? Please share YOUR views why others should definitely (not ;-)) start one!

Curios for the last of the 10 reasons? Here you go: 10 reasons why you should _NOT_ start Bullet Journaling (IV)