A bullet journal is a great idea. My first-impression took the book by Ryder Carroll, “The Bullet Journal,” and read through about a third of it to the order of taking a single template I found most useful and applying it. That template is mainly something somewhat similar to how a good agile stand-up disclosure should be structured.
In the agile stand-up update, the discloser should mention to the team what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, and any hinderances to his or her goals. It may seem overtly short-term in nature, but with proper planning from project managers and the team before a sprint, its implementation should flow into a dynamic yet integral conversation.
The bullet journal template I’ve found most helpful outside the structure of a working team that implements agile stand-ups is the three-column list of: what I’m doing, what I should be doing, and what I want to be doing. Believe it or not, that simple template has both elicited a rich diversity of content from myself and helped me to recurse back upon my behavior later in the day or the next day to analyze how my real-time intentions affect what I end up doing with myself, either consciously or subconsciously.
What’s most fascinating about my observation of my real-time mental inventory is that behaviors that would have otherwise seemed random to me before, sort of like unravellings of a well-bound sense of routine, make more sense if linked to my inventoried motivations, sometimes as far as a week prior.
The core advantage of coming to such a realization is that I can become more motivated about making goals for myself. Sometimes in our modern society, we become disillusioned with setting goals for ourself because they don’t seem to actualize. For example, we might set out to lose weight and begin running extensively and eating more healthily, only to our dismay some months down the line to see that it has not proved effective.
What we might fail to realize, though, is that goal setting starts small, and it starts mainly in the subconscious. When I began to write down my thoughts about what I want to be doing, for example, I noticed that those thoughts tended to dictate my behavior in very subtle ways. At first glance that fact might intimidate, but with proper perspective I see now that I can directly control my self though setting my mind, thoughts, and finally written goals on those outcomes that I both want and need.
Top comments (0)