Chances are, if you’re interested in the Today System, you’ve checked out other productivity systems. You’ve probably even used some of them, or still use one currently.
I’m in the same boat. I have used many productivity systems over the years. I continue to research and experiment with all sorts of different systems, methods, apps, and tricks. I keep what works, and toss away what doesn’t.
One system I tried a few times over the years, and really liked parts of, is the Bullet Journal Method. Created by Ryder Carroll and shared with the world in 2013, BuJo (as some call it) is a series of logs that capture your past, present, and future in an uniform and user-friendly way–then help you reflect more effectively on them.
The pillars of the Bullet Journal are collections. And there are 5 basic types of them:
- the daily log – a running list of what happened during the day, including notes, events, ideas, and tasks.
- the monthly log – a list of the things you need to do and events that will take place this month (a combination calendar and task/project list)
- the future log – a list of the next 6 – 12 months, along with major events or projects that fall under each month
- the index – your way (usually only for a physical notebook) to keep track of where all of your logs are
- custom collections – pages of your notebook you use for any other productivity-related stuff. These can be habit-trackers, brainstorming lists, project plans, and anything in between.
I like to use portions of the system–especially the daily log and custom collections. And I’ve found I can do both of those effectively within the Today System.
The Daily Log
The daily log is the cornerstone of the Bullet Journal system. Taking notes about your day is vital, both so you can capture tasks to do later, but also to be able to reflect on what happened that day. The Daily Log is fairly flexible. There’s purposely not much structure to it. You simply put in items that you want to remember or keep track of in some way.
Carroll recommends using signifiers to separate the kinds of things in your daily log:
For tasks, there are signifiers to let yourself know what you ended up doing with the tasks:
Integrating this into the Today System is easy. The back of your card is your daily log. Use the signifiers to separate events, notes, and tasks on the back of your card.
You can then use your cards to help you build your S3 list, by marking it with a > migration signal. If the action isn’t ready to be scheduled, you can put it in your projects list or wherever unscheduled actions hide. And that’s a great segue into the next logs that you can integrate.
The Monthly Log & Future Log
The Monthly Log is where you store both things you want to keep in mind for the current month, and also the tasks you want to complete. Carroll suggests breaking it up into a calendar section for events and a tasks section. So in a notebook, it would be 2 separate pages.
Integrating the Monthly Log into the Today System is fairly easy. If you have an S3 list, that’s already at least half of the monthly log. The S3 covers this week, and then anything else is lumped together in the “next week and after” category.
You could simply add 2 categories to your S3, and make it:
- Today
- Next Few Days
- This Week
- Next Week
- Rest of the Month
- Future Months
The ‘rest of the month’ section is a great place to drop things if you already think in terms of months for your tasks & projects. That is BuJo’s cycle, so those who already use BuJo methodology, this would be the easiest way to integrate.
The ‘future months’ section allows for quick and easy integration of the Future Log–which is where all the tasks and events outside the current month go. So for things that are far off on your horizon, this section can be a great place to drop them until you’re ready to do more with them.
What’s great about the ‘future months’ section is that you can then nest specific future months under it, then place items that are far out in the future, but belong in certain months. It would look something like this:
- Rest of the Month
- Future Months
- Sept.
- Annual Sales Meeting
- Oct.
- Trip to Baltimore
- Book trips to Juarez
- 2nd round of pricing for Big 3
- Nov.
- Create Christmas list
- Dec.
- Strategic planning with Erin for 2022
- Sept.
An Easy Integration
What’s great about BuJo is that, like the Today System, it centers around your day, and moves out from there. So the basic unit of capture in BuJo (the daily log) matches up nicely with the Today Card. Connecting the two systems is easy:
- Use the back of your Today Card as the daily log
- Migrate tasks from the back of your card to your S3 as needed
- Add two categories to the bottom of your S3 list:
- Rest of the Month
- Future Months
If you’re a BuJo user, and you’ve integrated it into the Today System, I’d love to hear how you’ve done it!