During one of the highest stress points while I was working from home, I discovered bullet journal from youtube. My favourite to watch is Plant Based Bride because I love all that gold colour she puts in the journal. I also used her rolling weekly spread for my work. Journal Away has beautiful drawings in her journal. I enjoy her channel for the art.

I was really stressed in March because the kids were home for a bit. I was doing a lot of meal planning on top trying to keep up with kids homework. I had to work. My journal was a mess then because it had the kids work, my work, the food for the day (meals + snack).

In April, before the circuit breaker kicked in, I bought a planner for their homework. I planned, my husband executed. I made homework and snack breaks my husband’s job. I only did main meals.

I was still stressed in April and May but there was a bit more order in my journal – it was all about work. My tasks list for work was endless. I ran out space on the notebook. I put June in a new notebook. After a few months of experimenting I got into a groove.

I discovered that planning to the gills made me more anxious. So I started leaving weekends out from the planner. I was working on weekends but unscheduled time made me felt less stressed up.

I liked having a time sheet to blocking out my meetings. I was trying to figure out why I wasn’t completing a particular project and started to track my time. I did not magically find more hours. I realised that empty slots were filled up with other work, eg emails, work discussion, thinking, etc. I am trying to be more goal oriented but my time seem somewhat dictated by urgent business for that day. I stopped being fixated with the idea that I must accomplish big goals only. These urgent businesses were part of my job.

I started out a page a day. It took up a lot of pages. Midway through I switched to a rolling weekly list which felt tidier.

This is a great system for completing things. There is something that I find it hard to keep track of – that is my completed work. Some of my completed work will be brought up again for fine tuning because some one else has seen it and need to include their point of view. My work life has a lot of those moments. Without penciling the completed work I don’t have a list of what I have done for the month, especially if my time is spent on urgent business of the day. Penciling in doesn’t really show up in a neat way so I’m still trying to figure it out.

The other thing that I thought I could but eventually gave up was having thinking notes in the same book as the journal. It was impossible to reference any of my meeting notes because even though I had pages, everything was in a mess. I gave up and split notes and planners into different books and I felt that was more orderly.