Future Planning with the Bullet Journal — David-style

Iterating and improving on existing systems

not actually my journal

I love my BulletJournal for day to day planning but as a GTD guy comfortable with OmniFocus, it just is… too… simple! The modules the official website provides are (in my opinion) very limiting and could scare potential power users away.

One of the weakest points of the Bullet Journal is future planning. Out of the box, it comes with a very simple “Future Log” but unless your life is very very simple, it won’t be enough. There are countless blogposts about methods people invented: There is for example the Hope Method, the Alastair Method and this blogpost from Bohoberry summarizing a few other systems. I went through them all and none worked for me. The Calendex / Hope method worked for me the longest but still wasn’t what I wanted.

But what does a Software Engineer do when none of the public tools does what he needs? He invents his own.

The David Method

(hey, if there is a ‘Alastair’ method, there can also be a David method! 😜)

Defining goals

I did what I usually do when designing software and wrote down what I actually wanted the end result to do:

• Whatever the system is, it has to be as compact as possible and not take more than 1 page. A quick overview over what’s happening is very very important and a second page in it’s entire height is often needed for other things.
• Start dates and end dates need to be clearly defined. I often schedule things based on when I can start working on them with due dates being the absolute non-changeable deadline.
• A overview over what’s going on should be as simple and uncomplicated as possible. The system should also be easy to review and filter on what has been done and what not. (The review is the most important part of GTD)
• It should be usable as a calendar and task planner at the same time with clear separation between doable things and events.

Implementation

(I will follow up with how exactly I came to this exact version in a different post)

I picked the system I liked the most, the Calendex, and started adjusting things:

• I want a system that can accommodate a lot of things in parallel, not just 4 so let’s cut the amount of months. But how many months make sense on one page? 6? 3? Nah, that’s weird. Let’s just use 1 month and nothing more. Away with the other 11.
• I don’t want to keep jumping back and forth between pages just to know what’s actually happening, so let’s move the description of things / task names to the same page and adjust the width to half a page
• I want tasks and events clearly distinguished, so let’s add a second color
• I want to work out of daily pages, so let’s add signifiers where a task migrated to. Events don’t have signifiers since they are not actionable
• I want to see exactly without a doubt from when until when a task can be acted on. Let’s add arrows and lines to show the relation of tasks towards dates.

Here’s what my prototype looks like:

first draft. apologies for the bad handwriting

• Each thing is signified as a box. Black boxes are tasks and red boxes are events.
• The task / event description is on the right side of the page to allow direct peaks into what is actually going on. Adding a task is quicker than the Calendex since I can just jot it down on the next free line.
• A black box is always a due date. A black box with an arrow is always a start date. 2 connected boxes signify the start/due date relation. You can flip the default definition of a normal box to start dates depending on what you personally use more.
• Each task has a box / bullet on the right side to signify if this task has been acted on or not. Over time, tasks receive signifiers that they have been migrated into daily pages or cancelled. This allows for blazing fast review of what has been forgotten.
• Using half of one page allows for 13 parallel tasks. If I have more than that, I am probably doing something wrong or not actually finishing things.
• Since this system only uses 1 page and not 2, I can use the other page for other monthly-things like my habit list (that I strongly wanted to be full height and not 2 lines), my monthly goals, notes and other things I am playing with like Habit Feedback (reasons why a recurring task wasn’t accomplished on the date it was supposed to).

Connecting with long-term future planning

“David, this is not real future planning, it’s just 1 month!” I hear you saying and true, it is just one month. My life is very very dynamic. I can barely plan more than 1 month ahead since things are just too uncertain and change all the time.

I am using this approach with a few other things:

• The normal BulletJournal future-log to quickly scribble down things that can definitely come next month but don’t have a start date
• A calendar app to schedule certain events far ahead in the future like birthdays, conferences or a trip somewhere (I am using Fantastical for this)

At the beginning (or right before) a new month (usually when I can predict the next spread the monthly view is going to be on), I am going through my future-log to collect all the things I wrote down and migrate them into the next monthly overview. Then I open Fantastical, collect all the events that are scheduled for this month, copy them into my monthly overview and copy all scheduled paper-only events into fantastical.

This might be bothersome for some people out there but I strongly believe that weekly and monthly reviews of your system are very very important. This is part of my monthly ritual and a great way to do some cleaning.

Let me know what you think!