Part of my addiction to Personal Information Management (PIM) is constant flirtation with platforms I haven’t tried… or even ones I have tried but want to revisit.

Waxing philosophical for a second, that probably goes with the territory.  Part of the obsessiveness that goes with an interest in PIM is FOMO, Fear of Missing Out.

“What if there’s something to that alternative GTD software I didn’t try?  I owe it to myself to just take it for a spin, just trial it.”

Well, there’s no such thing as “just trial it” with PIMs.  You have to actually run a decent simulation or you don’t find out what you need to know: does this PIM system have something new I can add to my bag of tricks.

And so I’ve frequently been in the situation of running two PIM systems simultaneously, one as my standby and one as a trial run.

And so it was, at the end of November/beginning of December.  I spent two weeks running BuJo and MLO side-by-side, trying to see what I could learn about either.

“MLO” is my standby, MyLifeOrganized, which I’ve been using for a few years.  I blogged about my crush on MLO some years ago here.

But a bigger and bigger % of my day and week is going into MLO daily and weekly planning and support.  I found myself wondering if there were something… leaner?

Enter BuJo, which is the shorthand for “Bullet Journal”, a wildly different PIM approach described on the bulletjournal.com site.

1. Biggest surface difference: BuJo is analog.  You keep your accounting in a paper notebook and you fill in stuff with pen or pencil.  It’s really analog.
2. Core BuJo is not particularly supportive of GTD.  The core of GTD — putting everything into the system, managing all open loops, organizing stuff by context, picking next actions — can be done in BuJo to some extent, but the system doesn’t really support it, and probably isn’t meant to be used in that way (FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m of course not a BuJo adept and I’m sure there are many decent implementations of GTD using the BuJo “platform”
3. The standard system has no weekly review.  This was a big conundrum for me, because I’m deeply addicted to weekly review as the main tool for constraining what I work on.  “Native” BuJo has a daily flow and a monthly flow but no weekly flow.  I suspect this is by design, although the core Bullet Journal text has a nod to weekly review as something you can implement if you want.

But the promise of the system is that it’s lean.

1. You take lean notes (the term “Bullet Journal” comes from the bulleted telegraphic style in which Ryder Carroll, the inventor of BuJo, advises you to take notes).
2. You struggle to exclude “stuff”, not include it.  Part of the methodology calls for regularly “migrating” entries from one place to another (to Next Month, to the Future, to the Next Day, etc.)  The virtue of migrating by hand is that you take a hard look at what goes forward and what does not.  Migrating is core to the smooth operation of a BuJo process.  (One of the core tenets of GTD is that putting everything into the system — instead of trying to keep it in your head — makes your life easier.  My guess is that Ryder Carroll would not agree.)

The lean “promise” was appealing to me.  My MLO implementation has gotten more and more… involved.  My Saturday and Sunday planning (yes, I do some planning on each day) probably takes 2-3 hours all in.  My morning routine probably takes an hour.

I guess I was hoping that I could scale some of the kruft off my MLO practice with some hot ideas from BuJo.

So what happened?

I dug in, I read the book.  I decided that a few things in my and monthly reviews could be streamlined.  I decided that I liked the telegraphic BuJo note-taking format and would try to use that in my daily Evernote entries (part of that morning routine I was grousing about above).

And I decided that, for now, I was happy with MLO and was going to continue on with it subject to those tweaks.