As I learned along this path,

For a while I had wanted to write about my bullet journaling as a grad student but never really bothered because what I did was not really all that interesting. Mostly just vanilla bullet journaling with a few little modifications and novelties, like a failed attempt at using a Gantt chart to organise long stretches of thesis work.

But during the last fall, more like since june, I have been developing a way to organise stuff that actually stuck and is still enjoyable to use for me. Simple yet sufficient, so doesn’t get in my way, and doesn’t require nor encourage too much meticulous micro-planning.

It is nothing too interesting regardless, and it boils down to two notebooks and two referencing schemes. In this blog post I want to record this method in order to share it and as a reference for its reuse in my future projects.

So, one of the notebooks is my bullet journal, and the other is what I refer to as the Thesis book or Project book, TB for short. For both notebooks I use Rhodia A5 dotpads with 48 sheets, so 96 pages. Project book is the more generic name I plan to use for future iterations of this style of notebook, with Thesis book being the specific name for the project book I use to help with my thesis.

First, why use pen and paper for this? Well, there’s no reason to, other than if it works for you. Bullet journalling works for me, because I tend to overcomplicate planning with computers, and I don’t want to depend on the computer for planning because that has proved to encourage procrastination on the web or fiddling with the puter. The thesis notebook is simply an extension of this, I want to be able to work on my thesis task list without having to open the computer, even if most tasks involve the computer. I want to open the computer with an intent. Doesn’t work every time, nothing is a silver bullet, but it is better than the alternative for me, and a pleasant part of my daily life.

So let’s start with the bullet journal itself. My bullet journals are fairly vanilla with a few interesting novelties. I use one 96 page dotpad of A5 size per quarter, i.e. per three months. One notebook from january to march, another from april to june, another from july to september, and another from october up to december. This is an optimal way to do it for me because the smaller notebooks are easier to carry, I can fit two notebooks this way into my notebook sleeve I like, and more importantly, starting a new notebook every three months specifically has two main advantages: firstly, I can review my plans more often, given the requirement to move and evaluate them all four times a year; and secondly, I like to scan my notebooks to store them digitally and have them easily accessible in case I need to reference them, on my laptop. Scanning 60-80 pages (which is usually what I use up) is tedious, but much less so compared to scanning double that or more for an entire semester, which is what I used to do for a few years, up until the last quarter of 2021.

I number my bullet journal pages using small roman numerals for the front matter, that is from the front page where I put contact information up to the first month spread, and the rest of the pages are numbered with arabic numerals. It’s mostly an aesthetic choice but has a wee little effect on the referencing scheme.

Let’s talk about the bullet journal referencing scheme. First, a recap: I have four journals per year, one per quarter, I use lowercase roman numerals and arabic numerals for page numbers. I developed this scheme a long time before I even had the idea of a thesis book, simply to be able to refer to pages in past bullet journals from my current one in a consistent manner.

My reference scheme is as follows: YYYYQXX:pp, that is, the four digit year, the capital letter ‘Q’ standing for quarter, the quarter number in uppercase roman numerals, a colon, and a page number, lowercase if it’s a roman numeral. Let’s explain what this means based on two examples: (1) 2022QI:8 and (2) 2022QIV:vi.

Example (1) refers to the first journal of the year 2022, because QI is «quarter I». After the colon there’s the number 8, and that indexes a page number. With the way I number my pages and set up my spreads, it should probably coincide with a spread the middle of january 2022.

Example (2) refers to the last (i.e. fourth) journal of 2022, because QIV is «quarter IV», fourth quarter. The number after the colon is vi, i.e. 6, so the sixth page of the front matter, probably the page right before the first month’s monthly spread for that quarter.

Having smaller, quarterly journals means that this referencing scheme comes in handy pretty often, and I can use it almost whenever because the scans of the older journals are on my laptop’s hard drive. They take up about 20 megabytes in 150 DPI, so not much to worry about.

Another relevant part of the bullet journal is my week spreads. I divide the spread into a 2x4 grid, with days of the week assigned to each left to right. But I reserve the bottom left square for a section titled Current week. The current week box usually looks like a to-do list for the current week, but it functions more like the theme of the week: I never require myself to complete everything there in a given week, nor are the list items in there are simple to-do items to be added to days’ boxes later. Usually it is something more general like PhD shopping to remind me to do some work about my search for PhD opportunities. Seeing this I may add some more specific task for a day, like read this vacancy in UiO or figure out requirements at YTÜ. Where this becomes relevant is, this section is where I add a similar, general reference to the thesis notebook, the details of which we will talk about later.

Here is a representation of what my weekly spreads look like:

I have a very similar spread right in between the weekly agendas and the month planner: the Weekly routine. I had used various designs for this, as the older blog post linked above can attest to, but I have come to prefer repeating the weekly agenda layout with little modifications. This spread is for distributing routine tasks and interests across the week. Interests is the key word because not everything is a to-do item here, and they are not meant to represent a perfect blue print for the week. Instead, it’s a suggestion as to what a healthy week could look like. Below is an example. Notice the lack of day numbers, and how the area/box for Current week has become the space for a decorative title for the spread:

Notice how instead of any particular, explicit task relating to the thesis, the list item merely reads thesis. This is indeed how it is in my book: it simply suggests that a given day is a day where I expect to work on my thesis. In order to know what to do, I need to refer to the Thesis book, which we will now talk about. But also notice simpler items in these lists like laundry or update computers, these do indeed become simple to-do items in the weekly agendas. I do not force myself tho. They are merely reminders, suggestions. Because every week is ultimately unique, one can’t go about it like a theoretical robot in a vacuum, repeating oneself, having no ups and downs. So I try to never set myself up to fail, to keep morale and affection for whatever I’m doing up.

Now ’bout the Thesis book! The Thesis book is again a Rhodia notebook, A5 sized, 48 sheets and thus 96 pages, a dotpad. I don’t think a dotpad is necessary, but I like dotpads and I had a spare, so I just went with that. The added benefit is, I have a fancy leather notebook sleeve I use to keep my bullet journal and my regular pens and triangular ruler together, and I can fit both the bullet journal and the thesis book into that sleeve. (Side note but one can’t overestimate how useful a sturdy, safe notebook sleeve is. So if you work with notebooks and would rather not they die at the first accident, do acquire or make a good notebook sleeve, if you can.)

Unlike my bullet journal, which is inspired obviously by the original Bullet Journalling Method, my thesis book is more influenced by a lesser known DIY planner thing, Strikethru. The basic principle of Strikethru is that, you have a page dedicated to live tasks, i.e. stuff that you want to get down now, and you have other lists or pages with diagrams or prose planning future stuff, and you have the past stuff to refer to. It gets more complicated, but that portion is what I have roughly based my Thesis book on.

The thesis book is simple: first, there’s a cover page with contact details, in case it’s lost and then found by a benevolent person who would wish to return it, hopefully. Then, there is an Index page, that is pretty similar to a bullet journal index page, or any other simple table of contents: a flat list of what’s where.

After that, there is the first to-do list page. The title of a to-do list page is the date that to-do list was created. My most recent to-do list was created on 23rd of November, 2022, so that is the title.

From the first to-do list page on, pages are numbered with arabic numerals, and before that they are numbered with lowercase roman numerals, just like with the bullet journal.

The to-do list page is an outline of active tasks that summarise what I am trying to do right now, at the current phase of the project. They are not minutiae or implementation details, and not everything is necessarily a task. Some are notes and ideas jotted down in a few words.

It is meant to be a single page long and brief and abstract.

When most of the items in a to-do list page get checked out, I start a new one on the first available empty page, migrate incomplete tasks if I am still interested in them, and add new stuff as necessary.

Now some extra information about my workflow that will help clarify examples, but you don’t really need to remember after reading. Detailed notes are on the computer, in an outline that divides up the whole project into Phases. So far I have completed phases titled preparation, bureaucracy, and readings, and I am currently at the analysis phase where I collect data and do my analyses. Subsequent phases are writing, defence, conferment, publications based on thesis. The structure of each of these documents is unique, but roughly, it is a mix of notes, tasks, ideas, questions, and so on that I can refer to. Thus, I create my to-do lists for the Thesis book by consulting the notes for the current phase, and essentially summarising it in an outline that resembles a to-do list.

For the current phase of analysis, based on my methodology and theory, I have decided to apply my analytical device in a repeated manner, such that each application revises and enhances the previous, and applies the improved methodology to new data. I call each repetition a round, and I am now at the first such round. This isn’t really grounded in any theory (pun intended!), it simply felt like a nice way to represent how my methodology, genre analysis, is usually applied: early pilot applications that generate an analytical method that’s then more widely applied in a repeated fashion until some metric represents a good enough final analysis (usually inter-rater agreement: one or more other researcher(s) analysing the same text coming up with a similar enough structure). The relevant part is, because of this structure, for the analysis phase, my active to-do list page represents the active round (round 1) of the active phase (analysis). Here is what it looks like:

23 november 2022

a) review page 4--8

b) analysis: round 1
   i)   collect data ✓
   ii)  visit locations
   iii) finalise theory
   iv)  pilot analyses

c) notes from meeting with advisor
   i)   revise bureaucratic documents
   ii)  revise research questions
   iii) use this particular theoretical construct
   iv)  a task I gave up on ❌

d) learn about the software I will use ✓

e) after round 1: ...

(Page number: 11)

Let’s observe this some before we move on to how this is referred to from the bullet journal. It is first and foremost an outline made up of two levels. For the toplevel I use lowercase letters of the latin alphabet, a--b. For the second level, I use lowercase roman numerals. And each page is numbered, with this page being the 11th page of the Thesis book.

With these facts, how is the Thesis book referenced? As visible, in the thesis book itself, I simply use the bare page numbers. I do not expect this to be a problem because I do not expect to use more than one notebook for the project. This notebook is an helper for the bullet journal, and while in between to-do lists I have some pages dedicated to random notes, most of the notetaking happens on the computer. This is a planner.

So, the reference looks like: TBppaxx. That is, TB which stands for Thesis book, page number represented by pp (and it is always arabic numerals because the front matter of this book has nothing interesting), a which represents the letter of alphabet that indexes the toplevel of the outline, and the roman numeral that indexes the second level of the hierarchy, xx. It is important to note that this is based on the peculiar structure of the current phase: at the reading phase, I merely had a flat to-do list, with no hierarchy, so I used arabic numerals for those lists. I also allow myself to refer to any level of this hierarchy, so a reference can be made merely to the page, or to a toplevel item, or to a sub-item.

A couple examples then: (1) TB11, (2) TB11a, (3) TB11biv, (4) TB2:3.

Example (1) is the simplest useful reference: it refers to the page 11 of the Thesis book.

Example (2) refers to the toplevel list item a in the to-do list found on the 11th page of the Thesis book.

Example (3) refers to the second level list item iv found under the toplevel item b on the page 11 of our notebook.

Example (4), finally, is a referencing style I used during the reading phase. Notice the colon character that separates the page number (2) from the index of the referenced list item (3).

How are these references used in the bullet journal then? Well, there is no real limitation, but the pattern that’s been useful for me is as follows: I will refer to the active to-do list’s page from the Current week box of weekly spreads, indicating that that todo list represents the current state and short-term plan of the work. Every day, when making that day’s agenda, if that day is one of the days which my Weekly routine suggests I do thesis work on, I will add current tasks from the active to-do list in the Thesis book using references. Usually I simply refer to an earlier thesis work day to determine which tasks are current: if a task was recently scheduled, and not striked out on the Thesis book to indicate it is done, it means it’s current. So it’s a candidate for the current day I am making the agenda for. It is of course also a matter of thinking what I want to get done that day, reasoning about what can be get done, and I determine tasks to work on for the day.

If I did any work on a task in a given day, I mark it as done in the Bullet journal. That merely indicates that some work was done. Whether a task itself is completed or not is indicated by whether or not it’s striked out in the Thesis book: I strike out completed tasks, add a checkmark near them if I did do them, or a cross mark if I decided to not do them or failed them. At times also I take small notes near these tasks in the Thesis book using a differently coloured, finer-tipped pen; these are comments on the task and often relate to why they failed or how to modify them when I move them to or repeat them in the next to-do list.

As a result of this, a week spread in the bullet journal may end up looking like this:

Notice how the Current week area merely refers to the page 11 in the Thesis book, and how the plan for monday has detailed references as to what tasks to work on that day, and even a little comment on in what manner to complete that task near one of them.

This is basically how it all works. It is complicated to explain because it requires some context to show how everything works, but the principle is simple: A bullet journal, and a project book with to-do lists that can be indexed into using a system that is simple enough that it isn’t a hassle to use. And I think the most important part is how most of these supposed to-do lists aren’t made up of references to particular small tasks but are instead representations of a plan, or a routine, or a state/portion of the whole project. It provides me with a flexibility without which I get overwhelmed, and fail to be fruitive.

Ultimately this is what works for me, what I developed to help me. It may or may not work for you. So this is more of a record for myself and a suggestion for the reader, rather than a getting things done tutorial. That is the nice thing here, it can be your personal thing that is specialised to work for you. It can inform your fully digital task management setup, or an example for your fully pen and paper workflow, and anything in between. I hope it helps the reader in that, inspirational way.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.