One Trick That Will Help You Stop Following the Path of Least Resistance

Uh-oh, the “M” word. Don’t worry, no sitars required. When we talk about mindfulness, we’re typically talking about a heightened awareness of the present. Productivity is all fine and good, but BuJo isn’t designed to help you spin faster on the hamster wheel.

We live in an age where technology promises us near- limitless options to occupy ourselves, yet we’re left feeling more distracted and disconnected than ever before. Like when flying, we watch the world speed by at 600 miles an hour with no idea where we truly are. If we’re lucky, we may glimpse some ocean glinting below or lightning ripping through dark distant clouds. For the most part, though, we’re semiconscious passengers, killing time before the unnerving descent.

If the journey is the destination, then we must learn how to become better travelers. To become better travelers, we must first learn to orient ourselves. Where are you now? Do you want to be here? If not, why do you want to move on? Mindfulness is the process of waking up to see what’s right in front of us. It helps you become more aware of where you are, who you are, and what you want. This is where BuJo comes into play. The act of writing by hand draws our mind into the present moment on a neurological level unlike any other capturing mechanism. It is in the present moment that we begin to know ourselves. Joan Didion, a famous proponent of writing things down, began doing so at age five. She believed that notebooks were one of the best antidotes for a distracted world: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. . . . It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.

And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”

For you digital natives out there, fear not. Banish the image of some hunched, squint-eyed Dickensian figure endlessly scrawling away in a garret by failing candlelight. No, here you’ll learn how to capture thoughts quickly and effectively. You’ll learn how to journal at the speed of life. This is where BuJo comes into play. We’ll explore various techniques that help us form the habit of asking these kinds of questions, so we stop getting lost in the daily grind. In other words, the Bullet Journal method keeps us mindful of why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Published with permission from The Bullet Journal Method.