When did you start your first notebook?

Photo by Maresa Smith for Death to Stock

Tomorrow, August 8th, is Bullet Journal Day, this year marking its 13th occurrence. And every year when the date rolls around, I ask myself the same question: when did I start mine?

I know the answer, actually, because I still have just about every single notebook. My oldest surviving one dates back to 2003. They sit in a row in my bookcase, a nice little stack of years gone by, and it's genuinely one of my favourite things to pull one out and open it at random. It's bizarre, the moment you land on a page from a particular year or period, your brain instantly reconnects with exactly where you were, what you were doing, what was happening in your life at that time. A notebook does that in a way a phone or any digital system ever will.

From Post-its to One Trusted System

Long before I'd ever heard the term "bullet journal," I was already carrying notebooks around, but back then it was one system among many. Post-its on the desk, notes scattered across the computer, a to-do list here, an idea jotted there. Nothing lived in one place, which meant nothing was ever fully trusted.

That changed after I heard David Allen give a keynote on Getting Things Done, and later read the book and attended the seminar and then organized an event with him. His idea of a “single trusted system" – one place your brain can offload everything into, so you stop trying to hold it all in your head – genuinely works, even if you only ever adopt the first two or three steps of his method. It's why, all these years later, I still keep one notebook at a time. Because the system works, I don't need five.

When Ryder Carroll later put a name and a structure to more or less the same instinct, it fit like a glove.

A quick word on where Bullet Journal Day comes from

The system itself was invented by Ryder Carroll, a Brooklyn-based digital product designer who spent years developing it as a way to manage his own focus and organisation. He first shared it publicly in the summer of 2013, launching bulletjournal.com with a tutorial video that unexpectedly went viral. It was picked up first by Lifehack, then Lifehacker, then Fast Company, within days of going live.

A year later, in 2014, Carroll ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund a proper community website and, eventually, a dedicated notebook, meeting his funding goal in a matter of hours and pulling in the support of thousands of backers. That collaboration led to the now-iconic dotted notebooks that bullet journalers everywhere fill up year after year.

What started as one designer's personal system for staying organised has since grown into a worldwide practice, blending productivity with mindfulness: tracking the past, ordering the present, designing the future, as Carroll puts it.

Why I keep going back to mine

I'm not going to pretend I've bullet journaled every single day without fail, nobody does. But what keeps me coming back, time after time, notebook after notebook, is that same idea Carroll built the whole method around: get it out of your head and onto the page, so you can actually see it.

In my line of work, juggling dozens of projects at a time, a notebook is where the real planning happens before it ever becomes a spreadsheet or a call sheet. Ideas that seemed impossible on a Monday morning start looking like a plan by Thursday, just because I wrote them down somewhere I could return to.

And that stack in the bookcase? It's basically a paper trail of every project I've worked on, in my own handwriting, complete with crossed-out plans and the odd sticker or business card added from an event to remember or a meal never to forget.

Over the years I've turned into a bit of an evangelist for the whole thing. My colleague Manu picked up the system from me, became just as much of a convert, and now several people on our team use it too. That's really the beauty of what Carroll built: it's simple enough that anyone can pick it up at any time, and open enough that you can shape it into whatever you need. It doesn't even matter what notebook you use. I switched to MD Notebooks last year, the Japanese paper ones, purely because they're such a pleasure to write on with a fountain pen. That small detail matters more than it sounds. When the writing itself feels good, the whole thing turns into a ritual rather than a chore. And a ritual you actually enjoy is the one you stick with. That's what gets things done.

Your turn

So this Bullet Journal Day, I'll be doing what I do every year: pulling out one of the old notebooks, flipping through a few of the others in between, and adding one more entry to a collection that's now over two decades deep.

What about you — when did you start yours? And do you still have it? Or are you still using post-its?