We decorated for Christmas this weekend. Yes, it is absurdly early to do so, and in general, I do not like to decorate before December 1. Our son was up for a Thanksgiving visit and we wanted to decorate while he was here.

My Bullet Journal has a note reminding me not to fuss if my husband wants a live tree this year. I didn’t say a word about the tree, figuring I’d be back to vacuuming needles out of the carpet and notes to myself to water the tree again this year. In fact, he brought up the artificial tree. I think he wasn’t up for the Christmas Tree Hunt and was perfectly content to have a Balsam and Cedar Yankee Candle for scent ambiance.

This tree is one of the ones that comes with lights attached. I love this innovation, as it makes tree set up simple. However, one set of lights wasn’t working. My son patiently traced the problem to a missing bulb. He replaced it, and All Was Bright.

As we started to decorate the tree, we took out one of our ornaments – a model of the Enterprise (NCC1701-D) that plugs in to one of the light sockets, lights up and blinks. As my son pulled it out of the box, we all grinned sheepishly, realizing the reason the bulb was missing.

So, I wrote a note in my Bullet Journal for next December that we needed to remember about the missing light. (Or not be so lazy and replace the bulb when we take down the tree…)

I don’t remember things from year to year unless we’ve been repeating it for decades. If I think of something in January, I don’t remember its importance in June.

This has always been a big downfall for me in terms of organizing my life. Make my bed? No biggie. I do that every day. Wash the dishes? Not really going to forget.

But no, it is unlikely that I’m going to remember a tidbit of information that will save us half an hour or so for something I do once a year.

It’s not necessarily trying to be “Perfect” or anything. The reality is that perfect can’t happen and I don’t worry about it any more than I try to flap my arms and fly. Ain’t happenin’.

What’s nice is that when I lose focus or lose motivation, I don’t lose track. If I spend a day not feeling arsed to get something done (hey, it happens) I don’t lose a record of the things I really do want to get done. I can have my down day, and when I’m feeling up again, I can get to the things that are important to me done.

This is an advantage over the habit-based productivity systems that I like a great deal. You know the ones where you try to develop a chain of habit doing something Every Single Day or it’s All Broken? (Or stick to the diet perfectly or eat a whole box of oreos?) I’ve tried those systems and they’re good for some things. But they don’t allow well for the variability of personal energy, mood, or the fact that emergencies happen in life. If you break the chain, sometimes the goal goes bye-bye. (Or, is that just me? I’m far too inclined to binary thinking)

This gives me something to circle back to, whether it’s housekeeping tasks, experiences I’d like to have, or just planning for things in life. With my Bullet Journal, I just plain “get around to it” a lot more because I think about what’s important to me and write it down.

It sounds so absurd, but it’s oddly powerful.

If you’ve never tried using a Bullet Journal, I highly recommend you looking at Ryder Carrol’s video. You’ll notice this isn’t the art bullet journal you see in Pinterest. This is the system I use because I’m not an artist.

Two years ago, I tried a new organization system – The Bullet Journal.

You’d think this is going to help you be all productive and stuff, and remember what you need to do. And so it does.

Oddly enough, that’s not why I love it. Yes, yes, yes, I have a mind like a sieve and being able to refer to things written down, to think and to plan and to have a concrete place where I keep all that planning is awesome, it really is.

That’s still not why I love it.

I love it because it lets me stop being a prisoner of “should.”

I should clean the house.

I should be working out.

I should be productive constantly.

I should make that phone call.

I should…

It’s not that my house isn’t clean (it is). It’s not that I don’t get in my exercise. (I do). What the Bullet Journal has helped me do, however, is focus on what I want to do and let go of what I don’t want to do.

I get a lot more done.

When you have a Bullet Journal, one of the things you’re supposed to do is review the tasks you’ve set yourself. If you didn’t complete a task, you migrate it to the next time period (week/month/year) that you intend to do it. I promise you that once you’ve migrated a task more than three times, asking yourself, “Is this really important to me?” becomes very easy. If it isn’t important to you, it is better not to clutter the journal or your life with it. You just cross it out.

I do more things I’ve been meaning to do and just put off or let go. When I started the Bullet Journal, I’d been meaning for years to do some seasonal decorating – nothing big, just some table runners and centerpieces for my dining room with a theme for the month or season. I have that now, and it’s a small thing that makes me happy. Instead of time getting away from me, I’m living through it consciously and deliberately.

Writing down the things I wanted to do in the Bullet Journal let me focus, though, on things that seemed nifty, that I wanted to do, and wanted to experience. It put a value on them instead of just dreaming. Stuffs what are writ down are Important Stuffs, yes?

It allowed my wants to become more important. To become Projects.

To be done.

I have a hobby of making bento. I also have a hobby of going for walks on some really great groomed paths I have in my area. I’d been meaning for years to pack a couple of bento for my husband and I, taking a nice walk and having lunch in some nice spot in the woods or by a river. We’ve done it a couple of times now and we’ve enjoyed it a lot. Is it a big deal? Not really. Just a picnic, really. Not expensive, not fancy. But it’s fun and we enjoy it.

I admire living deliberately. I admire and value choosing how you are going to live and then doing it. For me, the Bullet Journal has been an incredibly powerful tool in doing so.

I spend a little too much time on A Certain Social Media site where someone asked, “Is a Bullet Journal Worth it?” I passed on answering that question because I did not have a clear response. However, as of today, I filled up a notebook that I use for my Bullet Journal and spent an instructive hour migrating the material I still need from the old journal to the new one.

As I am doing so, I can answer an emphatic, “Yes!”

I have a couple of… I dunno if I’d call them flaws, exactly, but maybe… worries? Ideas that gnaw at me from time to time?

I worry that I am lazy. I also worry that I am wasting my life and being too caught up in the pleasures of the present to accomplish anything or move forward in any real way. I also don’t necessarily have the world’s most accurate memory.

This could be a perfect storm for self-doubt and frenetic, but useless, action.

You know how you might have a mental list of things you always mean to get around to, but never do? Little things, but that you think would either be cool to do or might improve your life. You get caught up in the urgency of the day and… well, you don’t do them.

I’m finding that for me, a Bullet Journal is preventing that.

For years, I’ve meant to have at least a few seasonal or monthly themed decorations around the house. Is it a big deal or important in the grand scheme of things? Absolutely not. But it’s a little thing that might make me happy or make me conscious of the passing of the year.

I now have at least a table runner and seasonal theme for each month for my dining room table. I’ve meant to do something like that for years and never really got around to it because I let time get away from me. This year, I’ve spend some time each month thinking about it, and getting a few decorations together so that I will have a different dining room table decoration for each month.

There are also projects of other sorts I’ve been doing or meaning to do. For instance, my Support and Defend series. Because of a tragedy in my life, and finding it difficult to think or write, yes, it went on hiatus for awhile. But I had not only the project in my Bullet Journal, but a clear outline of where I was in the project.

In going through the last nine months or so, I realize that this system is not only helping me keep on track for what I intend to do, but when I feel like I’m doing nothing, wasting my life or anything of the sort, I have a real day-to-day record of not only what I have done, but how much of it was things I’d always been meaning to do, but hadn’t been organized enough accomplish.

I like it better than a work to-do list or even some of the other organizational systems out there because it’s a good system to record the events of the day as well as the accomplishments. It’s meant to have notes about how you’d been doing that day that you can do in a short and easy-to-remember format that might be more difficult to analyze as a whole over a longer period of time than a diary.

Are there things I’d failed to accomplish? Well, yeah. It’s kind of hard to write a book about little girls when the granddaughter you’d intended to dedicate it to dies. So, no, it’s not that I necessarily accomplish everything I mean to. But it keeps me from spiraling and focusing only on the losses or failures. They happen, and they need to be recorded, but what also needs to be recorded are the good things that have happened as well as the achievements. It keeps me from dwelling on the negative or being falsely positive but is useful to get a realistic picture of what my life really looks like.