Happiness

Today's Haiku:

Only three patients.

A small list is a blessing

Rounds are fun when short

Bullet Journaling

I have been trying to improve my mental health.  I am sure that if you examine your own life, or relationships, or what you know of some of your close friends, family or associates, you would find that mental illness is all around us, or sometimes within.  I believe it deserves more attention.

In the effort to help regulate my own emotional state I feel that it is important to work on priorities and tasks and planning.  After all, if I know what I need to do (tasks), and why I am doing it (priorities) and when I need to do it (planning), then I can hope to manage events and circumstances that might impact my emotions, for good or bad.  Missing deadlines = bad emotions, getting stuff done on time for the right reasons = good emotions.  This is a little like eudaimonism, "a moral philosophy that defines right action as that which leads to the 'well-being' of the individual."1 (a quote I ran across as a quote in The Bullet Journal Method.)

For a long time when I was a lot younger I was a hot and cold devotee of the Franklin planner system.  But it always fell by the wayside and I can tell you that when I had a year of that ordered, I never, ever used it the entire year.  Never.  It may have worked better if I had stuck with my desk job but I didn't and such a huge system is not really too useful in the white coat and scrubs world of surgery.  Plus, it is really pretty rigid.  Obviously with tabs and blank/ruled paper you can do whatever the heck you want with it but then you could just buy a binder with paper in it for a lot, lot less.

Several years ago I stumbled on something called the bullet journal method and started adapting some of the lighter elements of its philosophy.  Then one day a couple of months ago I went ahead and got the book that covers the system in depth, called The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll.  I am glad I did.  It is extraordinarily flexible (because it is based on a bound notebook of empty, dot-grid paper) and seems more meaningful to me than any system I have tried in the past.  Plus, and this is really important - if I don't use if for a day, no big deal!!!  I don't have to stare at the blank pre-printed pages of the days I skipped and feel bad about spending $40-50/year for paper blanks, of which I might only use 20%. 

Anyway, it is super detailed if you really want to get into the details of it.  I am in fact still in the stage of figuring out which pieces I will go forward with and those I won't.  My next step is to try and re-structure my early morning schedule to do a little planning, a little meditation and praying and a small period of scripture reading.  Part of that would be going over my bullet journal and using a little more of its techniques to structure my life a little better.

What systems have you used and found useful?  Which ones not so much?

1.  https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_eudaimonism.html