Why Bullet Journaling Stopped Working for Me
Putting pressure on fragile cognitive skills
For several years, I was an avid bullet journaler. The system worked perfectly for me because it gave me structure, memory support, and all of the things that I struggle with due to executive dysfunction. A couple of months ago, when my cognitive function took a sudden dip, my bullet journal suddenly looked like gibberish. For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to get back on the metaphorical horse, to no avail. Why? What happened? Well, ironically, for a bullet journal to work, you need to have the exact sort of cognitive function that you’re outsourcing to it.
The bullet journal system requires you to prioritize. You look at a list of tasks to be done and say, I’m going to move that one to today and take care of it. For me, that was great because it narrowed down and organized the possible choices. I knew that I needed to work on this project, or from this list of chores. When your executive function blows out, they all look equally important, and the journal is just a collection of more decision points.
Migration becomes a massive cognitive load. I didn’t get this done yesterday, so I moved it forward to today. Then, I didn’t get it done today; does that mean it’s not important and I can blow it off? The system-as-written says, probably? My brain says I wouldn’t have written it down if it weren’t important. Suddenly I’m spiraling into contemplation of all of the things that might happen because I didn’t do it, and quite possibly panicking because I can remember why I needed to do it and, sometimes, can’t recall how to do it.
Setup and maintenance became agony. Again, reviewing pages to check for incomplete tasks to migrate, checking the future log for upcoming events, looking over collections for things that need to be addressed, all stop looking like support structure and begin to feel like an overwhelming amount of unfinished work. Rewriting, indexing, cataloguing, ugh, the entire system becomes a wall of things that need to be sorted, and my brain wants to do them all at the same time.
Short reminders become worthless because they represent a sequence, not a single task. A note to “write Substack posts about X” means I have to remember all of the steps, from opening the computer to what the article needs to say to how to make words go good together now are sequences my executive function needs to place into a logical, executable order. Which is exactly what executive dysfunction can’t do. I’d need to stop, think of all of the steps, write them all down, and review them for anything missed. It’s actually easier to sit with Substack open, staring at the blank page, trying to figure it out as I go, than to plan and execute the required steps.
Most painfully, bullet journals are graveyards of lost tasks. That’s their key function. They’re evidence not of failure but of incompletion, which feels a hell of a lot like failure. It feels like you’ve fallen so far that you can never find your way back. So at some point, you stop struggling, put the thing down, and don’t pick it up again.
Clearly, I need a system. I’ve started using index cards, taking an hour in the morning to sip coffee, think over what needs to be done, and write that down. At the end of the day, I throw the card away. If there’s anything mission-critical, I tell my wife and have her remind me, or set an alarm on my phone or my laptop. Bullet journaling works great for moderate executive dysfunction, but it’s a horror show when cognition gets bad. For now, daily lists with no baggage work. Going forward, I just have to keep figuring it out.