And that has continued. They have always been cheap dollar store notebooks or gifts. Days were always drawn out in wobbly colored pencil. Despite my best efforts to appear organized and orderly, the contents of my commonplace book - and, of course, it is also a planner - reveal me to be a disorganized, chaotic wretch. The basic format has not changed:
- standard weekly planner format, always Monday to Sunday, six boxes with the weekend sharing the last. Deadlines and events and flights always immediately populated because I can't trust myself to not forget about them
- blank pages for whatever else: lists, brainstorming, drafts for presentations, information, questions, pearls collected from the wards, steps to induce and emerge from general anesthesia, how to close a fasciotomy, wardrobe planning for autumn/winter 2019, etc
- in earlier iterations of the CPB, there was one of each section, but I found it more convenient to have a few months of planner, a section of free pages to be used while that planner section is active, and then the next planner section, then the next free pages, etc
A sample of pages from past books loosely in chronological order: exams, deadlines, lists upon lists, course material, sketches, information, information, information, etc, etc, etc. When I went home last, I flipped through the old CPBs and took these photos, and tossed the books themselves into the recycling.
I don't know if this has increased my productivity or my focus because I have never been without it. I don't have any interest in buying a pre-made planner or improving the aesthetics or adopting any other system of organizing information at this time. Inevitably I will make a Google calendar for flights and interviews for residency applications, and will likely be subject to a shared calendar for residency, but for my personal use, I am happy as is. As much I admire the bullet journal movement, it is not for me. I am a person of habit. I am a person of habit.
I've never been much of a person who writes things down so I mainly keep a diary to keep track of dates. Did you find it hard to throw the old ones out? I get a bit sentimental, even with notebooks I know I don't want to look at again!
ReplyDeleteI have other notebooks to be sentimental about! Though I did agonize over the decision to recycle the old books, the reality is they were mostly in poor condition anyways from being thrashed around in my backpack when they were active
DeleteMy "bullet journal" (which doesn't follow a lot of the instructions closely, as far as I know) system is pretty similar to yours: I use most of the pages for a weekly planner; there's a few blank pages in front for a few sections of notes I'll keep referring to (including tracking what books I've read, and student loan payoff and savings milestones); and have an additional set of blank pages in the back both to keep a bit of a "diary" or journal and also for other random notes about more one-shot things, such as when I want to do some math about something specific that just occurred to me. Like Jane, I suspect I'd get a little sentimental about my old books and want to keep them! (I only have one old, fully used book at the moment...)
ReplyDeleteI keep things like travel information/flights on a Google Calendar though. I've found that Google Calendar is very functional for keeping track of things like travel and interview schedules.
I think the habit/goal tracker aspect of the typical bullet journal system is something that I currently lack and could incorporate. I am motivated by having some visual representation of progress (at some point I used to track # of leaves on each of my plants, before I had too many plants). That's probably what could make my current setup more functional/less of a passive storage of info/more active productivity tool
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