In the last post I wrote about transitioning my 14yo homeschooled eighth-grader from managing his assignments with a daily to-do sheet filled out by me, to a bullet journal. I described how I sat down with him on a Monday and showed him how to set it up.
On that Monday, I went through the following steps with him:
- numbered the pages
- made a two-page-spread Weekly Log, left side undated, right side divided into days
- entered his assignments for the upcoming week on the undated side of the Weekly Lig
- put check boxes next to all the to-do items
- started a Key for him
- showed him how to migrate tasks from the undated list forward to specific days
- made an undated Future Log for tasks to do “sometime”
- showed him how to migrate a non-urgent task back from the weekly list to the Future Log
- made an Index
Later in the week, as he worked with the bullet journal and completed tasks, we added more features.
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10. “Go back to the blank page 9 and label it ‘Next 5 Weeks.’ This part of a bullet journal is usually called the Monthly Log, but we are going to organize things on a weekly basis because that’s how I do your school assignments.”
He flipped back and labeled the top of the page, and then I showed him how to date each line of the page, starting with Monday of this week and ending with Sunday of the fifth week out.
"This is like the Future Log, except that it has specific dates for the next month or so. We’ll make a new one after four weeks. If you are looking at your Weekly Log and you decide that one of the tasks is something you would like to do, say, next Tuesday, you can migrate it back here and write it on Tuesday.”
11. “Let’s enter some things from the family calendar on the Five-Week Log.” I pulled up my Google Calendar on my phone and showed him. He wrote down a couple of upcoming Scout events and two days he was scheduled to serve Mass.
I added, on the last Monday, “make a new ‘next 5 weeks’ page.”
12. “What if you decide you want to do something in a couple of months, say in March? For that we need to make a dated page on your Future Log.” I sent him back to the Future Log and had him copy a simple twelve-month calendar onto the facing page. We added a couple of events to it.
“Here’s an important rule to keep the journal simple and uncluttered: Don’t put tasks on a month unless you are sure you will do them that month. Don’t put tasks on a day unless you are sure you will do them that day. Tasks can stay on the undated lists and be checked off from there.”
13. “Let’s go through your Weekly Log so far and update it.” He turned back to the weekly page with the assignments I had added on Monday, both in the undated list and in specific days. Some of the items were checked off, some not.
I went down the list with him:
“Did you do this one yet?”
“Yeah.”
”Fill in the box. Okay, what about this one, is it done yet?”
”No, I don’t have to do that one till tomorrow.”
”Okay, are you going to really have to do it tomorrow? Or can it wait till the weekend if you run out of time?”
”I really have to do it tomorrow.”
”Okay, let’s migrate it to the tomorrow list.”
He added the “migrate forward” symbol and rewrote the task in tomorrow’s day box.
We ran down the list, updating, and adding a few new tasks. “The idea behind this key is that by the time you make a new weekly list on Monday, you won’t have any more empty check boxes on this week’s list. You don’t have to have actually done everything. The main thing is you won’t have lost track of any tasks. You’ll either have completed the task, moved it to another list, or deleted it, and in all of those cases you will have marked the check box.”
14. “We’re nearly through the week, and there’s still stuff to do. Let’s mark all the remaining schoolwork items as Urgent.” I got a red pen and put an exclamation point next to all these items, without changing the checkboxes.
”So we won’t put these on the day lists, because you are free to do them any day this week you want, including over the weekend. But let’s require you, on Friday, to make a plan to do whatever’s left of these.”
I wrote “make a plan to do all the ! before bedtime” in Friday’s block.
”This way, we haven’t cluttered up your days with all the tasks that are still outstanding now, but if there are some left on Friday you’ll need to decide what to do with each one then.”
By now the weekly log looked like this:
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How did it go? So far, pretty well, I think. I saw him carrying it around and writing in it. I used a paperclip to fasten his science quiz inside the front cover on Friday, just like I used to clip the quiz under his to-do sheet on his to-do clipboard before, and that worked really well. I wish there was a little more room to write the exact assignments, like the math problem numbers; maybe this means we will have to expand the undated weekly log to a whole two-page spread and go to individual daily logs, I don’t know. We will be tweaking the layout as we go.
One pleasant surprise: the boy in question seems very positive about this new development, even eager. I get the impression that he now regards the weekly sheets I made for him all through middle school as a thing of childhood to be put away, and the bullet journal as a manlier thing. Something that sets him apart from his younger sister and puts him in the company of his older brother now taking college classes.
A test of this will come on Monday, when we set up the second weekly log. Will it be too boring and repetitive? Will he balk at migrating tasks by rewriting them? Or will it still be interesting? And will he have gotten things done?
Come to think of it, I’d better check that last bit on Sunday night, while there’s still time left in the week.
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