Bullet Journal For Software Engineers: How To Remember Everything And Increase Your Productivity (Part 1)
First part of a series about how to use Bullet Journal to increase your productivity as a Software Engineer.
As a Software Engineer, you want to take notes.
Taking notes is an essential habit you want to develop. You must offload your brain from all the information you need to remember. I take notes every day at any moment.
While writing this post, I have my notebook beside me and take notes.
There are multiple methods for effectively taking notes. I started using a Bullet Journal about a year before writing this post. I found it extremely easy to understand.
But it also allows you to adapt it to your personal needs.
BuJo consists of taking notes in bullets. Every bullet can be a note, a task, or an event. Every bullet is written in its line. At the start of your day, you write the current date in the format you want; I use this one:
DOW YYYY-MM-DD
Wed 2024-05-15
After that, your day begins.
I adapted BuJo to my needs and fit it into my work since I mainly use it.
In this post, you can learn how I use notes, tasks, events, and “important” modifiers to be effective in my daily job as a Software Engineer.
Notes
Notes are identified using the dash.
They are things you want to remember. 90% of the bullets in your BuJo will be notes. They can be thoughts, ideas, quotes, or anything else.
Don’t elaborate on notes; write them down as they come to your mind.
My suggestion is to think of your BuJo as your database for writing. It should be optimized for writing, not for reading. You should focus on writing things immediately without interrupting your focus and avoid context switching.
During a conversation, write notes in the same language as the conversation.
I’m from Italy, and in my career, I have worked with Italian colleagues and people from other countries, so I speak both Italian and English at work. I tried to do BuJo in Italian and English, but none worked. The reason is that I had to translate from one language to the other in both scenarios, which added friction. So, in the end, I write notes in Italian if a conversation is in Italian and English if the conversation is in English.
Some people use a different notation for quotes, but I don’t.
I tried using the “ symbol for quotes, but I found it harder to write. Trust me, when you are in a meeting, there could be many quotes, and having a symbol that might quickly become ugly doesn’t help. Also, it is very common that you want to write a quote someone says and a thought that came to your mind; having the same symbol for both can be helpful.
The goal is to offload your brain and put things on paper the easiest way possible.
Tasks
Tasks are identified using a dot.
Tasks are things you have to do. The same applies to notes; be synthetic and don’t elaborate while writing. Your goal is to put them on paper; you can elaborate later.
Some people use apps to track their tasks.
That’s fine, but I suggest having only one place to put everything; you can migrate it later. I put all my tasks in my BuJo and then, if needed, transfer them to a different app.
Consider this scenario as an example.
You are in a meeting, and during the meeting, someone tells you to schedule a call with Bob. You have three options:
Open your calendar app and create the event on the spot.
Write your task in your BuJo like: “Schedule call with Bob.”
Write the task on another TODO app.
I would always choose option number 2.
What’s important now is that you don’t forget your task and don’t stop following the meeting. You could write the task on an app, but the best thing about having a single place where you write everything is that you don’t need to switch anything. While the meeting continues, you keep writing everything, such as notes and tasks, on your BuJo.
Writing tasks on your BuJo keeps everything in the same place.
Events
Events are identified using a circle.
Events are things that happen during your day. They could be meetings, conversations, or other relevant activities. I started using events more and more. When writing this post, I use events for more than just things you can put on a calendar.
I use events to categorize my work.
Everything happening during an event is shifted one column to the right. This means that all my notes generated during an event are grouped in that event. So, looking at my page, I can have a clear structure.
Events are the core of my BuJo process.
I use events for all the following things:
Meetings
Conversations
Pair Programming sessions
Working on a specific task
Writing posts
Preparing for an interview
And so much more
Events are a great way to visualize and divide my day.
While working on a ticket, I take notes. Those notes live under their event, so I know they relate to that work. This way, you don’t need to repeat the context in every note to ensure I know what it’s about.
Using events, you organize your notes.
Important
Important notes and tasks are identified with a ! on the left column.
This is a personal choice. There are many ways to mark things as important in BuJo. The crucial thing to remember is that you want to look at your page and immediately know what’s important.
To achieve the structure of the image, I left the first column of every page blank.
This way, while writing, I can always add the exclamation point to the left of any note or task.
Events can be important, but I rarely use the ! to classify an event as important.