I bought the notebook on a Saturday.
Hardcover, black, elastic band, thick paper that looks expensive because it is. I also took four fine-liners, a ruler and polka-dot tape. The woman at the counter asked if it was a gift.
I said yes. And it was.
The first three weeks were glorious. I made the index. I built a habit tracker with twelve little squares per row, all the same size, which took the ruler and a patience I did not know I had.
In week four I painted a pumpkin in the margin.
It was not October.
The February page is still blank. Not the blank of someone who will fill it later: the blank of a notebook in a drawer, under a charger that fits nothing in this house.
It took me two years to work out that the problem had not been me. Or the notebook. The problem was that I copied Pinterest thinking I was copying the method.
What Ryder Carroll invented, before the internet arrived
The original bullet journal is extremely dull.
Ryder Carroll, the designer behind the system, calls its core rapid logging. Every entry is one line, opened by a symbol: a dot for a task, its own mark for an event, a dash for a note. Done becomes an X. Pushed forward gets an arrow to the right.
That is it. No colour. No ruler. No pumpkin.
On top of that sit three lists: daily, monthly and future. At the end of each month comes migration: you copy out by hand, item by item, whatever you still want.
One notebook, one pen, four symbols.
The science, which comes in here rather quietly
I am treading carefully now.
There is no controlled study on bullet journaling. None. There are testimonials, videos with a soundtrack, blogs swearing a notebook changed a life. It may well have. But that is anecdote with good lighting.
What exists is research on writing by hand — similar, but not the same thing.
The most cited study is Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer's, in Psychological Science in 2014, under the unbeatable title "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard". Across three experiments, longhand note-takers did better on conceptual questions than typists.
Lovely. Then came the replication.
In 2019, Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson redid it in Educational Psychology Review, adding a group that took no notes at all. Performance did not consistently differ between the groups — not even the ones who just listened. In the authors' own meta-analysis, the effect favouring longhand was small and not significant.
The slogan does not hold up as a slogan.
A 2024 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, by Van der Weel and Van der Meer, put electrodes on 36 university students and saw more widespread brain connectivity during handwriting. It is 36 young right-handed people, and EEG connectivity is not remembering what you wrote.
So the honest sentence is this: the pen probably helps a little, for a dull reason with no neuroscience in it. By hand you cannot write everything. So you choose.
Where the pretty notebook lost me
Friction is the toll a method charges before it lets you use it.
The original charges almost nothing: open, write a line, close. The social-media version charges a fresh layout every week, a decorated header, and the feeling that you cannot write "dentist" in there without preparing the page.
An organised head can pay that.
For someone who struggles to keep any system going — and here I raise my hand — the toll lands at the worst moment. Nobody draws the February layout in the calm week, they draw it in the week when everything happens at once.
That is when the notebook becomes a debt.
And the pretty notebook is public: it was made to be photographed. A system you would be embarrassed to let get ugly is abandoned in the first ugly week.
How to keep a deliberately ugly bullet journal
What migration does not migrate
The ugly notebook fixes adherence. It does not fix timing.
It is a stationary object. It does not know it is quarter to three and the clinic closes at five. It does not open itself on Friday. It nudges nobody.
If you are the type who writes things down and never comes back — and the notebook in the drawer is my CV in that field — the bullet journal solves half the problem: capture. The other half, showing up on time, is still done in your head.
And your head was the part that was faulty.
Why I went and built something else
I have four beautiful notebooks at home, none more than six weeks filled in. They all failed at the same point: they were places I had to go to, and I only went on days I did not need them.
ASB came out of that missing half: writing things down in the ugliest way possible, one loose sentence on WhatsApp, and letting it come back and talk to me at the right time.