11 Benefits of Bullet Journaling
Are you obsessed with calendars and to-do lists, and have thousands of post-it notes and notebooks floating around? Or are you looking for more clarity about yourself and what you want to do or accomplish in your life?
With a bullet journal, you now have a great place to store and organize all your thoughts, to-do lists, goals, random ideas, and schedules in a clear and comprehensive way. It frees up your brain space so that your brain can focus on doing the things it does best – analyzing and thinking CREATIVELY instead of remembering things.
The Bullet Journal Method provides a system to track your past, sort your presence and plan your future. If you want to see other kinds of journals, head over to 10 Bullet Journal Ideas – Inspiring Journals That Can Change Your Life.
1. Customizable to your needs
The Bullet Journal combines elements of a diary, a to-do list and a wish-list, while also leaving space for creativity. You can create collections for everything you want to come back to like “To-do lists”, “NOT to-do lists”, “business ideas”, “content ideas”, “books to read”, “accounts and passwords”, “wish list” and many more.
If you’re looking for more ideas, check out my 58 Bullet Journal Ideas article to get some inspiration for your own collections and lists.
2. A Bullet Journal is easy to set up
Setting up a Bullet Journal, also called “BuJo”, starts with getting yourself a good notebook. You can get journals in different sizes and designs. My personal preference is an A5 size journal with dotted pages and a cute artistic design like this one but I also like the black Leuchtturm1917 Journals.
If you want to see how to start a journal, head over to my article What is a Bullet Journal and How To Set It Up in 8 Easy Steps.
3. Everything you need to remember in one journal
You can record all your ideas in one place and on-the-go, anytime and anywhere. The customization allows you to create new pages and lists for the things you want to remember.
The Journal doesn’t just consist of your calendar and To-Do lists, but it has empty pages you can use to create a “books I want to read this year” list or a “places I want to visit” collection. This prevents you from noting things down on different papers which you could lose or writing things down in different notebooks which you might not always have at hand.
4. More clarity and mindfulness through a journaling routine
A Journal allows you to live your life with more purpose and in a more mindful and productive way. Writing down everything that is on your mind will help you to create more head space and free your mind from worries, negative thoughts and stress.
5. Keeps you organized & focused
Journals help us to organize our thoughts, goals and daily tasks. You can record daily events, organize them by setting categories and priorities and keep track of all your “To-Do’s” and “Dones”. This will allow you to be more productive and focused, in your work life but also in your personal life.
6. Productivity
Keeping a journal forces us to engage more deeply with the flood of information we’re constantly inundated with. Sorting and reviewing information will allow you to see what really matters. Regular journaling can help us to set the right goals and priorities. Working on the right things and in small chunks can make you more productive.
Reflective writing can also train our attention and improve critical thinking and decision making. Journals proved to be invaluable tools for examining past experiences, evaluating the own actions, and drawing insights for encountering future challenges.
7. Great for tracking long-term goals
Journaling about your goals helps you clarify what you want and encourages you to consider the why and how. A journal is a good place to set long-term goals and break them down in better manageable short-term goals.
You can note down all your wishes, ambitions, aspirations and new year resolutions and make sure you set the right milestones in certain months, weeks and days to plan and track your progress towards your long-term goals.
8. Inspire Creativity
Your journal is the best place to start exploring your inner creativity. So just take your journal and a pen and write down everything that comes to your mind. Journaling is a great way to unleash your creativity and discover a potential you might not have realized yet.
Bullet journaling has thousands of fans worldwide who like to customize their Bullet Journals in a lot of creative ways. If you look up #bulletjournal on Instagram or Pinterest, you’ll find a lot of fancy page layouts and designs, colorful washi tapes, stickers, and drawings on other people’s bullet journals.
9. Self Reflection
Life can be hectic and pass you by pretty fast. Journaling is a great way to help us stop, take a step back and reflect ourselves and our situation. Are we still on the right track? Are we happy? How are we doing with X? Are we being as productive as we would like to be?
In a journal we can self-reflect on what we did and reached but we can also just stop and think about the things we are grateful for. Keeping a journal, we can look back at our life and think about how we’ve changed and what we can do to improve ourselves.
10. Relieve Stress
Writing down your feelings, pains and frustrations can help you to relieve stress. There are different kinds of pages like the “mood tracker”, “the morning pages” or the “brain dump” which allow you to put down all the feelings, worries, struggles and thoughts you have at the moment.
This will give you more clarity about your daily feelings and allow you to live more consciously. You’ll also get to know yourself better by tracking which things are making you feel down and what you might need to work on to feel better and be happier.
11. Boost your memory
So many things are happening in our lives that it’s hard to remember everything. With a journal you can come back to these memories.
It can be exciting to read through old journals and see how your life looked like at that time and what your thoughts, goals, interests and feelings you had. Your brain is also more likely to store information that you wrote down.
