Bujo is one of my favorite four-letter words. If you aren’t familiar, “bujo” stands for “bulletjournal,” which is basically a straightforward yet flexible system for tracking tasks, activities, and goals. The core design includes a layout for the year, followed by the current month, week, and day. One of bujo’s biggest benefits is that it’s pretty easy to learn and maintain. What I also like is that the format is readily adaptable to accommodate your goals and needs. This means that once you’ve got the format down, you can change it up to maximize the system to work best for you. If you’re curious to see more, check out this really cool (yet brief!) video from bujo creator, Ryder Carroll.
I started my bujo to keep better tabs on all the to-dos floating around in my head. After more than a year of bujoing, I’ve come to appreciate these specific bujo benefits:
- Tasks, activities and goals are centralized in one location. No more keeping multiple systems to handle all of these different things!
- Bujo works for all areas of your life. You can use the same bujo for work, home, and personal information if you choose.
- Bujos are a great outlet for creativity! There are all kinds of ways to have fun with color-coded systems, doodles, lettering, or illustrations.
- Bujos are popularly used to prioritize self-care. Sample habit trackers and online self-care challenges are easy to find.
- There’s a vibrant online bujo community. Not only is it fun to connect with fellow bujoists (bujoers?), but they’re also great resources for format ideas, trackers, and visual and artistic layouts to help you customize your bujo.
- The bujo system accommodates as much or as little commitment as you choose to give it. You can stick to very simple and short layouts or elaborate with designs, trackers and colors. You can work in it for hours a day or you can ignore it for months.
- All you need is a notebook and a pen. Yes, people get all fancy with their bujo supplies (myself included), but seriously this is all you need. Although, I might suggest you spring for a graph-ruled notebook if you’re bujo shopping, as graph paper will keep your bujo tidy.
As an avid bujoer, here are the things I love about it:
- It boosts my productivity. By physically seeing and organizing all of my to-dos, I can better schedule my time.
- Along those lines, my bujo also helps me set realistic goals. Because all the things are laid out in one place, I can easily identify when I need to reschedule, delegate, or ask for help so I don’t end up running around like a crazy lady trying to actually do all those things myself.
- I feel more successful. Not only does my bujo allow me to literally check items off my to-do list, but it tracks rescheduled tasks and activities. Because of how bujos are formatted, when I reschedule an activity I don’t lose sight of all my other accomplishments. As a result, I no longer gauge my achievements based on the number of boxes I checked off any particular day.
- I can easily make time for my bujo. I spend about a half hour setting up each month, 5-10 minutes setting up each week, and literally only 1-5 minutes checking in per day. I love reaping all the benefits of journaling without having to carve out big chunks of time to receive them.
- I use my bujo for mindful activities, like lettering and doodling. Since I’m already working in my journal to track my activities, it takes next to no extra effort to practice these other hobbies.
With summer quickly approaching and your family’s activities inevitably increasing, now is actually a good time to challenge yourself to bujo. You will (hopefully) be pleasantly surprised!
