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COLUMN<br />
Chloë King<br />
...bites the bullet<br />
It’s late, and small<br />
person is getting ready<br />
for bed, which, in this<br />
instance, means standing<br />
in a doorway licking<br />
the snot from one’s<br />
nostrils for 40 minutes.<br />
This is no exaggeration.<br />
I have been watching<br />
the minutes pass by<br />
excruciatingly as I lie<br />
immobilised by the giant<br />
infant on my chest.<br />
They say time is flexible,<br />
and it’s true that<br />
moments like these are<br />
pretty much the only<br />
ones in my new-found crystalline adulthood for<br />
which the clock slows. The rest of the time, I am<br />
hurtling through hours and days like a slug from<br />
a blunderbuss. This is why the discovery of a new<br />
form of diary-keeping is changing my life.<br />
A friend mentioned the words ‘Bullet Journal’ to<br />
me quietly in the school playground this January.<br />
My interest peaked immediately. What has always<br />
been lacking with previous diaries is a reference<br />
to violence – surely a Bullet Journal will keep me<br />
in line?<br />
A Bullet Journal, it turns out, is first of all<br />
a notebook. A rather expensive, luxurious<br />
notebook with a hard cover available in every<br />
colour of the rainbow. It’s a German design, the<br />
Leuchtterm1917, with bevelled, off-white pages,<br />
corner numbering, a front index and dots. The<br />
‘bullet’ refers to these dotted pages that make it<br />
easy to draw grids and charts to suit your planning<br />
needs, which is the other point of interest<br />
– its brand new notetaking system.<br />
Everyone I have raved to about this has looked<br />
deeply perplexed as I have tried to explain how<br />
the system works. In spite<br />
of holding two communications/colouring-in<br />
degrees, it seems I am<br />
incapable of making a<br />
mind-bogglingly difficult<br />
method seem simple.<br />
Sorry, I meant to say I am<br />
capable of making a simple<br />
method seem mind-bogglingly<br />
difficult. Note to<br />
self: normal people tend to<br />
switch off on hearing the<br />
words ‘hierarchical lists’.<br />
I found the best way to<br />
learn was to spend a weekend<br />
watching YouTube<br />
‘walk-throughs’ by self-styled heroes of timemanagement<br />
and Instagram-friendly calligraphic<br />
script handwriting.<br />
If you can see past reams of washi tape and not<br />
be deterred by the evidence that millennials have<br />
such a luxurious abundance of time they spend<br />
hours decorating charts detailing their daily water<br />
consumption, you will find some handy tips. In any<br />
case, you should certainly watch the summary by<br />
Bullet Journal's inventor Ryder Caroll, at<br />
bulletjournal.com.<br />
I’ve found my Bullet Journal such a boon because<br />
my brain simply doesn’t retain typed information<br />
as well as that which I have written down. We all<br />
know the best way to stretch time is to make better<br />
use of it, and now I can manage more efficiently<br />
my to-do lists; diary and everything I once filed in<br />
my overtired brain, an A6 diary, various notebooks,<br />
my iPhone and on scraps of paper.<br />
In short, it has never been so easy to see how many<br />
small tasks and major life goals I am falling behind<br />
on every God-given minute of the day. I couldn’t<br />
be more pleased!<br />
Illustration by Chloë King<br />
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