I currently lead a team of seven, and I have up to 8 meetings a day that I have to keep track of. I also make meeting notes and records of decisions that I make for legal accountability reasons.

Anyone familiar with bullet journalling will know that a standard bullet journal ain’t gonna cut it for this kind of orgamizational overhead.

Here are my additions and modifications to the Bullet Journal system:

Custom Bullets

  1. ∨ : this means the task has been delegated. I also note who I delegated it to.
  2. ∧ : Waiting. I am waiting for someone else to get back to me on this.
  3. > : Migrated.
  4. > > : Migrated into a different system.
  5. < : Scheduled.
  6. < < : Scheduled into a different system.

Standard Bullets

  1. X : Complete.
  2. · : Open task.
  3. \circle{} : Event
    • : shortform journal entry.

Daily Timeline

Down the left hand side of a standard A5 dot grid journal page, I have a timeline starting from 8AM to 8PM. Each square is 15 minutes. I add all of my meetings to the timeline so that I know exactly when and where each meeting goes. Each meeting is a task which gets ticked off when complete.

I also make a note of what I was doing in the timeline (‘discussion with Peter’, ‘approving timesheets’) so that I can remember what I was doing at any point throughout the day and I have that recorded.