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If you have been reading about bullet journaling lately and wondered what it’s all about, let’s unpack this concept here and figure out how it can benefit you no matter what you do in life. Whether you’re a teenager coping with the vicissitudes of social media, a homemaker juggling childcare, family finances and relationships, or you have a full time career and are facing immense stress, BuJo as it’s popularly known can be the answer to your concerns.
What Is Bullet Journaling?
Perhaps you wrote in a journal or diary at some point in your life, and shared your deepest secrets within its pages. BuJo takes this one step further and incorporates not just words, but also a space for drawing and doodling, making lists, a calendar, recording your aspirations and goals and plans, and documenting your physical and mental well-being.
Along with the basic journal or notebook, equip yourself with a range of accessories and tools. Most BuJos comprise dot grid paper pages and can be laid out flat on their spines. Get yourself a pack of colored markers, gel pens, crayons or color pencils along with a set of good quality writing pens. You can add stickers, stencils, post-it, sticky tape, rulers, highlighters and more. As you go along you can pick up other interesting things to make your journal as individualistic and personalized as you like. You can find an exciting selection of bullet journals from Rest and Digest here. The underlying principle is “Let your Imagination show you the way.”
Why BuJo?
Documenting your thoughts, plans, emotions and ideas helps you to lead a more mindful and intentional life. BuJo helps you to organize and prioritize your goals, and create a roadmap for the future. It allows you to connect disparate parts of your day and find the common thread or patterns in life and relationships. Planning your day gives you the confidence that you know what lies ahead, and this is a great tool for time management. This journal can function as a tracker of your habits and routines so that you can make changes, modify or improve on them whenever it’s required.
This is a great way to stay motivated, it enables self reflection, promotes gratitude and kindness and gives you the flexibility and skills to negotiate tricky situations personally and professionally.
You can revisit situations that were pleasant and painful and refresh your memory about what exactly happened and how you could have dealt with them differently.
A Mental Health Aide: Bullet Journals For Programmers
Software programmers have to engage in a huge variety of tasks, ranging from the simple to the complex, which could take anywhere between a few hours to months. They include writing code, troubleshooting and testing, working on security and updation programs, making reports, getting feedback from clients, working with designers, other programmers and project managers and attending meetings.
These tasks can become a chaotic mess unless you organize them and give each one the attention it needs.
Coping with multiple tasks can lead to high levels of stress, burnout, physical and mental illnesses, chronic conditions, social isolation, sleep disturbances, sexual dysfunction, dependence on alcohol or other substances, poor judgment, breakdown of relationships and more. The long hours, having to meet deadlines, staying abreast of tech, becoming swamped with work, poor eating habits and being in a constant state of fight or flight can play havoc with your mental health.
Using BuJo to address these issues can greatly benefit software programmers across the world. It helps you to understand, process and save important information that comes at you in the midst of a busy day. Relying on your phone or computer to make a quick note is a good option, but with BuJo, it all stays in one place. Physically writing down something, embellishing it with a quirky graphic and using bright colors makes it more memorable.
Bullet journaling is divided into daily, weekly, monthly and future logs, with a handy index to tell you what lies where. This helps you to stay in sync with your immediate, short term and long term plans and ideas.
You can make to-do lists to help you to stay connected with your responsibilities as a professional and also as a mom or dad, good neighbor or parent, friend, spouse, sibling and an environmentally friendly citizen.
Starting your day with a clean, blank page is a huge psychological motivator that gives you an extra boost to begin afresh.
