I’m making this its own post because if I’m going to spend two hours writing it, I hope it can help people that don’t follow me as well. Original in response to this post.
I have kept a bullet journal for the past 4 years, which in ADHD time is forever. It’s the only planning system that has consistently helped me, mostly because consistency is not required. Here's my advice:
Identify why you stopped using it, without judging yourself for it.
This is honestly the first step to any troubleshooting with ADHD (and, I assume, without): find out what the obstacle is, but only because you're curious about it, not because you want ammunition to self-flagellate. It's the difference between "why am I so lazy I can't do this easy thing" and "what got in my way so I didn't do this even when I wanted to?" Once you figure that out (and it may not be obvious, especially if you're used to judging yourself harshly), It will be easier to see what kind of solutions are more likely to work.
Here’s a list of some possible obstacles that may have stopped you from keeping a bullet journal, and some suggestions you can try to get over them:
1. I forgot about it
• Leave the journal (and pen!) on top of your laptop/workspace. Or on the breakfast table, right next to the coffeemaker. Or wherever you intend to use it, but like, extremely in the way.
• Use alarms or calendar events to remind you to check it in the morning/write on it in the afternoon/whenever you intend to use it. You can also try post-its, writing on your bathroom mirror, generally anything you normally use for reminders.
• Ask a friend or family member to message you asking about your journal (only do this with someone you will not feel judged by, you don't want to feel shame, you just want the reminder)
• Schedule an email or message to remind you once a day/every couple of days/once a week
• Write a prompt on your journal to do any of the previous suggestions at the end of the day, so you don’t forget to leave the journal on top of your laptop and then forget to use it, etc.
2. It took too much time to set up
• Stop setting it up. Just write the date and what you need to do or what you’ve done. Or use a rolling to-do list.
• Pare it down. If you do yearly spreads and quarterly spreads and monthlies and weeklies and etc... stop doing all of them and choose one (or two) that will be the most useful to you.
• Do less elaborate spreads. If you like a monthly spread because you want to track your habits but writing down the weather and your mood and everything else is tedious... don't do those things. Keep the habit tracker and ditch the rest.
• If you need a calendar for deadline reasons and drawing one from scratch is too much, print one and glue it to the page.
• This is incredibly specific but I've seen people complain about this: if numbering the pages takes too long and it's annoying, get a notebook with numbered pages. Or stop numbering pages in advance. Just number the page when you're about to use it.
3. It was too much pressure to keep it pretty
• Use a shittier notebook. There's less pressure when you're writing on a $1.49 composition book than a beautiful leather-bound journal.
• Unfollow every Bujo Influencer that posts beautiful, elaborate, artistic spreads like it's their job (because it is) and follow people that post simple, basic stuff (I think /r/basicbulletjournals is the subreddit for people not trying to do pretty, just functional)
• Look at the original method and try to follow it with no extra bells and whistles. (Link is to a wayback machine archive of the page because since then Ryder Carroll has removed the barebones tutorial from his website and replaced it with a $250 course. You do not need a $250 course and hours of video to do this thing. The whole point of a bullet journal is that it's simple and quick)
• Intentionally "ruin" a page or two by crossing it out, doodling something shitty, etc. It's silly, but it may remove the pressure of a "perfect" journal
• Don’t post your journal on social media
• Don’t call it a bujo or a bullet journal (also silly but sometimes we attach connotations to words and it’s hard to ignore them). It’s just your journal. Or your planner. Or your commonplace book. Or notebook. Or your prosthetic prefrontal cortex.
3.5. It was too much pressure to keep it pretty but having an ugly journal makes me not want to use it
• Pretty doesn’t have to be elaborate! Find a way to simplify the “aesthetic” of your journal
• Try removing elements. For example: I only use a black pen and a gray highlighter because I find monochrome things to be aesthetically pleasing, and it takes less effort than planning out a whole colorful spread (also it’s easier to carry only one pen and marker than an entire pencil case, so I can use the journal anywhere)
• Use a ruler to make simple tables. Or try a “rougher” style and free draw lines using the dots on the page as a guide. I do this and my lines are not perfect but they have a "doodle" quality I find cute
• Print out templates (or make one) so making a spread is as fast as placing the template on the page and following it.
• Print out spreads and glue them to the page
• If you want graphic elements, find sticker sets you like (a bunch of people sell bujo/planner stickers on Etsy). Washi tape is also good for decoration or separating sections, etc.
• Print pictures and illustrations and glue them on the page to have something nice to look at when the other page is a simple calendar or list.
• Try stamps! Good way to scratch that crafty and creative itch, but without it taking forever
4. I still didn't accomplish everything I wanted and looking at the journal made me feel shame, so I stopped looking at it
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5. I stopped using the journal for whatever reason and now I feel ashamed or anxious to go back after so many days/weeks/months
• Use it as a journal as well! I forgot to do this for the longest time but it’s in the name! If you only have things you have to do written down, your motivation will suffer. In general, not just motivation to use the journal.
• Write down what you did in the day (in few lines or bullets) to find out where your time went. You wrote you wanted to do X and you didn’t. What did you do instead? What else happened? You may find that you got a lot done, but it wasn’t the exact thing you wanted to do. That’s not “doing nothing”. You may find that your goals were unrealistic for a single day (hey, ADHD and time blindness, fuck if I know how long it takes to do dishes, let alone what counts as a "reasonable workload"). You may find that on the days you have therapy, you need an extra couple of hours to process/decompress, or that having an appointment later in the day is worse than early in the morning. You won't know unless you write these things down and read them later.
• Stop pre-drawing your month/week/day spreads, so you don't see the gap of "empty" days when you don't use the journal. Just slap today's date and keep going! The reason I like the bullet journal as opposed to planners is that I don't have my time mapped out for me, it's flexible!
• Slap a lil' doodle of the SpongeBob screen going "1374754 years later...." and then keep going with it. Humor can help.
• Write a couple of lines of the important things that happened in that gap. Again, it’s not time wasted, it’s time when other things were going on, it’s good to remind yourself of that
• Write down why you think you stopped using the journal for that time, and then keep using it as normal. Practice being curious instead of judging yourself
6. Got bored of it
• Change up the spreads you use. Nobody is forcing you to keep using the same format for any amount of time. Want to start using a different weekly thing in the middle of the month? Do it. Want to go back to the previous one immediately because the new one didn't work for you? Do that.
• Change the pen colors you use, or your handwriting style, or the things you track. Or how you decorate your "collections"... or everything
• Stop using it and come back later. Seriously, go try out Notion or a new to-do app or a planner or post it notes or whatever else until you get bored of that thing, and then keep going with your bullet journal. It doesn't matter that it jumps from March to September. It doesn't matter that it's the middle of the year or the month or anything else. It's not a premade planner, it's fine if your journal doesn't fit perfectly into one year or even if your journals all cover the same amount of time (mine never do).
• The greatest advantage of the Bullet Journal is its flexibility, you can change it to fit your life at any time.
• Try out the pretty spreads. If you've been doing the barebones utilitarian method and you're bored of it and you want it to be pretty... make it pretty! Try out aesthetic spreads, try drawing on it, try using watercolors, try printing templates and glue them (or copy them) on the page. Use stickers, do a collage, have fun with it... and then if you no longer have the energy, go back to basics. It's fine if you could frame your artsy "July" spread and hang it on your wall because it's so beautiful, but your "August" is all in ballpoint pen and barely legible.
7. My collections took too much space/I didn't have enough space for a collection/I didn't update my collections enough and it made me feel ashamed or anxious
• I'll keep banging the flexibility drum, but it's truly the main advantage of the bullet journal and the main thing the “Aesthetic Bujo” crowd did away with
• Don't make "collection" spreads in advance. When you need a collection, flip to a new page, title it "collection of whatever you want" and write until you're done. Then keep writing your daily lists and etc in the next page. Need to expand after the fact? Flip to a new page, title it "collection, part 2" and keep going. (Tip: Index both pages, obviously, but also thread them: in part one, near the page number, draw a little arrow and the page number of part 2. And vice versa.)
• Create less collections. Is your bullet journal the best place for you to track that thing or keep that info? For example: I used to track books I wanted to read but I stopped using it because it was annoying for me to flip to the page and scan the titles to figure out which one I was thinking of and what genre/topic they were about, etc... so now I track the books I want to read on The Storygraph (which I like better than Goodreads), which is specifically made to do that, it's easier, quicker, and I can filter my "to read" pile by tag/genre/etc. I was trying to use my journal in a way that didn't serve me and making my life more difficult for no reason.
8. I kept forgetting to track the things I wanted to track
• Write prompts to yourself in the journal itself. On your weekly spread, have a little note saying "track your billable hours!". When you start the day, write "btw remember to write if you had lunch today." As a bonus you'll probably see the prompt through the day and remember to do the thing. Also if you do it daily, you'll see it when starting your next day, so you'll remember to write yourself a new prompt.
• Use post-its to remind yourself to track/do the thing. Stick 'em on the bujo, in the bujo, on your laptop, wherever
• Every once in a while, (weekly, or monthly, if you plan your time like that), do a review of what worked and what didn't. Again, no judgement here, just curiosity. "This month I tried tracking my exercise and I forgot after two days. I think the tracker was too out of the way. Maybe next month I can try writing 'Exercise?' on my dailies, and then transfer that to the tracker to see the overall trend". "This week I wanted to track my water intake and I didn't. I don't think I care to track this, maybe I just need a reminder on my phone to drink more water." "This month I didn't write on my weeklies at all, maybe I don't need them for now."
• Track less things. I know ADHD people are especially susceptible to this, but there's no need to do everything right now. You can track only one thing until you get the hang of it and then add a new thing to track.
• Ask yourself if the reason you're not tracking the thing is because you're not doing it perfectly and it makes you feel ashamed/anxious. If that's the case... stop tracking the thing. Leave yourself reminders to do it if you want, but don't attach a number to the thing. The goal should be for you to do the thing you want to do, not to keep a perfect record of you having done the thing.
• Related to the above, if you're not tracking the thing because you're not doing the thing... why not? Is it that your water bottle is hard to clean so you clean it rarely, so it smells kind of weird and you don't want to use it? (Get a bottle you can stick in the dishwasher). Is it that getting up early to go running is the worst? (Try running during your lunch hour). This is a good opportunity to use your journal as a journal. You didn't do X. What got in the way?
• If you are tracking something but only leave it at “yes/no”, try making space for you to write down how you felt doing the thing. What you think helped you, how you felt before vs after, etc. If you only pay attention to the thing when it’s going poorly, you will not like the thing very much.
I can't think of anything else right now but if you have a different problem with your journal, tell me and we can brainstorm solutions for it!
The whole point of a bullet journal is that it's supposed to make your life better in some way. Help you remember stuff, organize your thoughts, plan your projects, or anything else. If it's not, if it's making your life worse, more complicated, with more dread and anxiety... then it's not worth it.
The good thing about it is that you can change things up, iterate on your process, try something new, try something old again, stop, start again, make it more complicated when you're bored and simpler when you have less energy. But if you have truly tried every which way and it is not working for you, no matter what? Stop using it. Try something else.
You can always come back.
