4 Ways to Organize Your Home With a Bullet Journal

There are few feelings that have the potential to be quite as uplifting and fulfilling as finally getting your home in order, organized, and up to your own ideal standards, after it’s spent a while in a state of mess, chaos, or disrepair. When you organize your home with a bullet journal, it feels good to have a plan, execute it, check off the boxes and arrive at the desired outcome.

Note: This is a contributed post. Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I receive a commission if you make a purchase. Affiliate relationships include, but are not limited to, Bluehost, Amazon Associates, Walmart.com SM, and Etsy.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”96jd1″ via=”yes” ]When you organize your home with a bullet journal, it feels good to have a plan, execute it, check off the boxes and arrive at the desired outcome.[/ctt]

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Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a straightforward thing to actually go through the process of getting your home in order. For one thing, there are likely to be a lot of different parts of the process keep track of. For another thing, motivation will naturally ebb at times.

In recent years, the Bullet Journal Method created by Ryder Carroll – and many colorful and illustrated spin-offs (the original method is very minimalistic and doesn’t involve drawing) – has become a very popular task and life management system, which is interesting considering that it goes against the trend of the digital age, by being an entirely paper-based system.

Here are a few ways that using a Bullet Journal can help you to organize your home…

By giving you a place to track and reflect on big projects

When you have big projects to undertake in order to get your home up to the standard you want it to be at, you will inevitably have to make a lot of decisions, and will need to reflect on the logistics, financial aspects, and time-frames of various projects.

The Bullet Journal Method helps you to note down all of these big potential projects in dedicated “spreads” (think of these almost as “chapters”), so that you can note them down, reflect on them for a while, return to them, add additional notes, and figure out the details and how best to proceed.

It might be, for example, that you note down a particular visit here to-do for a particular website that can give you an overview of what a window installation job would entail.

In any event, if you just keep these big projects filed away somewhere in the back of your mind, you will likely forget about them, and won’t make any real progress on coming to a decision about how best to proceed.

Writing things down, by hand, and revising those notes, can do a lot of good for the decision-making process.

By providing a streamlined and motivational system for “crossing off” your to-dos

There is something deeply satisfying about marking off items on a to-do list, on paper. It’s just a lot more viscerally fulfilling than marking a to-do item complete on a digital task management program.

With the Bullet Journal Method, it’s difficult to bury your to-do items in a pile and forget about them indefinitely. The way the method is structured, you will be constantly called on to review and reconsider your various to-dos, and to decide what you should do about them (with the options being to complete them, defer them, or cancel them).

If you feel like you could really use a boost to your motivation, when it comes to things like getting through a pile of more or less tedious chores around the home, a system like the one featured in the Bullet Journal Method can be invaluable.

Of course, you can also “sweeten the deal” for yourself further, by adding an additional sub-note to various to-do items, stating that you will allow yourself a certain reward once you’ve completed them.

By reminding you not to neglect your projects, thanks to the “migration” system

As mentioned in the previous point, a major feature of the Bullet Journal Method is that it strives to keep you aware of your various tasks and projects, as opposed to just noting them down somewhere, and forgetting about them indefinitely.

With the Bullet Journal Method, your daily note-taking sections are the same place where you will originally record and capture all of your assorted prospective to dos. From there, you will either complete those to-dos where they stand, or you will “migrate” them to different logs within the journal, or you will decide to discard them.

At the end of each month, there’s a process of review and monthly migration, which involves you deciding which tasks to carry forward, which to “file away,” and which to discard – so that on a regular basis, you are forced to engage with the tasks that you’ve accumulated, and to consider why you might not have already achieved them.

Don’t think that you’ve got away with your uncompleted tasks by simply filtering them off to a different log within the journal, either. Because the Bullet Journal Method is entirely paper-based, you will need to fairly routinely migrate journals, as well – which means that you will be periodically reminded of all those other projects and tasks, too, and will need to make a decision on what to do with them.

You might be thinking that it seems tedious to have to write out the same to-dos, over and over again. You’re right, it is. And that’s partly the point.

If you do find yourself writing out the same to-dos time and again, you’ll likely be quite motivated to consider why that’s the case.

By helping you to approach things more mindfully and intentionally, in general

Digital task and project management systems are, as a rule, inevitably going to be faster and more “efficient” than a paper-based system such as the Bullet Journal Method.

That, however, is one of the clear benefits of the Bullet Journal Method.

The fact that you have to write things out by hand, copy them out by hand, and the fact that you have a finite amount of space to do so, all mean that the method will make you much more aware of, and attentive to, what you’re doing.

In fact, research has found that students who write notes down by hand retain information better than those who type their notes out on a computer.

A major stated aim of the Bullet Journal Method is to make you more mindful, in general. To get you paying attention to what you’re doing, and focusing thoughtfully on one thing at a time.

Suffice to say, this kind of focus and intentionality can certainly give you an edge when it comes to figuring out and tracking the nuances and details of what it will take to get your home in order. This is turn helps you to make a simple plan. When you visually see how simple the plan is, you can execute it, check off the boxes and arrive at the desired outcome!

This is a contributed post.

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