A Bul­let Journ­al For Magic

Not so long ago the concept of the bul­let Journ­al came to the aware­ness of many people which had used the clas­sic Filo­fax time man­age­ment systems.

It was­n’t long and the thing cre­ated a real hype on the inter­net, a lot of people for­get­ting the major idea behind and mak­ing their journ­als into a scrap­book, glue­ing silly stuff inside. Some made it a book for prac­tising calligraphy.

This is typ­ic­al in these mod­ern times to make a trend (often sale­able) out of an idea and jump onto the train, copy­ing slav­ishly and without think­ing what oth­ers do. The basic ideas behind the bul­let journ­al and why it was inven­ted are often for­got­ten with all the hype, using expens­ive col­oured Japan­ese pens being more import­ant that the con­tent (read an inter­est­ing view on this here).

If you stick to the main concept and use it what it was inten­ded for, it is good. The idea is to stay away from digit­al note tak­ing and go back to the basics with pen and paper. With the bul­let journ­al concept, you can do this without being forced into the alloc­a­tions a Filo­fax has.

Being a paper and pen afi­cion­ado myself, I quickly real­ised the poten­tial of this concept for magic and became an avid fan of it. By incor­por­at­ing this sys­tem into your magic­al note­books, you will not only have a col­lec­tion of your ideas, but also an agenda to keep track of your prac­tising times and achievements.

All you need is a simple note­book and a pen. The thing that makes this sys­tem dif­fer­ent to the Filo­fax is that here you cre­ate your tables and timelines. You can even insert cer­tain spread­sheets which are track­ers, show­ing clearly the monthly results.

The bul­let journ­al will be more or less a note­book with a timeline. Also, using the sys­tem will make sure you remem­ber and put a ‘time stamp’ on when exactly you have a cer­tain idea. Con­sid­er­ing the amount of ideas I gen­er­ate and col­lect each month, this sys­tem really saved my life and made things a lot easi­er for me.

Just think about cre­at­ing a few monthly spread­sheets for prac­tice and achieve­ment of cer­tain sleights, tricks or routines. If you get into the habit of using your note­book on an every­day basis, you will be auto­mat­ic­ally reminded to put in those short time prac­tising ses­sions of your favour­ite techniques.

With this sys­tem you can also sched­ule these train­ing ses­sions and divide them into smal­ler chunks, achiev­ing much more without even noti­cing it. Anoth­er use­ful spread­sheet would be the habit track­er they very often use in this sys­tem. With this, you will be able to change the way you do cer­tain sleights in a very short time.

Give it a try and think about it, it is really worth it. You’ll find all neces­sary basic inform­a­tion here: www​.bul​let​journ​al​.com. On You­Tube, you can find many very nice and refresh­ing ideas on how to main­tain such a per­son­al­ised note­book. Check out the work­ing and the con­struc­tion of the vari­ous track­ers and think how you could apply them to your magic training.

Final Tips

Don’t get over­whelmed by the vast amount of dif­fer­ent tech­niques. Just start with a simple plain note­book and a pen.

Install the basic fea­tures of a bul­let journ­al: index, year, month, week, day, future, trackers.

If you do this the first time, just install one month and work with it for that 30 days. Don’t install the whole year. Things will change on a monthly basis as you get bet­ter with it.

Don’t go for all the hype and expens­ive ‘props’ people want to sell you. The bul­let journ­al idea was a min­im­al­ist­ic idea and should remain so.

Con­cen­trate on the con­tent, not on the form.

Take whatever works for you, and for­get the rest.

Pass it on!