Bullet Journaling: Life Management for Creatives
Dylan Mierzwinski · Illustrator & Lover of Flowers
A warm, ADHD-aware bullet journaling primer that teaches the analog system well but skips almost every visual example a beginner needs.
A confessional approach to a well-worn system
Dylan Mierzwinski does not open with a pitch for bullet journaling so much as a confession about failing at it. The course spends its first three lessons on personal history: a half-finished attempt in 2012, a stack of abandoned planners, an ADHD diagnosis in 2020, and a second attempt this year that finally stuck. This framing sets the tone for everything after it. Rather than presenting the bullet journal as a rigid method to copy, the course treats it as a practice that gets built and rebuilt around the user's own executive-function quirks, and Mierzwinski is explicit that creative people, ADHD or not, tend to share the same resistance to fixed systems.
The middle stretch is where the actual teaching happens, structured around what the course calls building blocks. The index and page numbering come first, followed by the future log for loosely-timed events, the monthly spread split into a log and a task list, and the daily spread as a catch-all. Pagination gets its own lesson, explained as small arrow notations that link a topic across non-consecutive pages, which solves the real problem of never knowing how many pages a project will need. Migration, the practice of copying unfinished tasks forward, ties these pieces together and is presented as the mechanism that keeps the whole notebook from becoming a graveyard of abandoned to-do lists.
Two lessons stand out for being more useful than the standard bullet-journal explainer. The chronic procrastination lesson breaks task avoidance into four concrete steps: write it down, rewrite it with an actionable verb and a time or quantity limit, then schedule a trigger like a phone alarm. It replaces the fuzzy advice most productivity content gives with something a reader can apply the same day, journal or no journal. The digital-complement lesson on Google Calendar and Evernote is equally practical, drawing a clear boundary between what belongs on paper and what belongs in an app so the notebook does not have to hold dated events it will inevitably lag behind.
Where the course loses ground is in its heavy reliance on the instructor walking through her own notebook verbally. Spreads, trackers, and page layouts are described in detail, page counts, colors, which marker was used, but a viewer trying to replicate a monthly log or a habit tracker from narration alone will have to do more mental translation than a course on a visual subject should require. The live Q&A replays add real value in isolated moments, particularly the answers on how to handle partially-migrated daily notes and when to hold off adding a spread to the index, but they also run long and repeat ground already covered in the building-block lessons.
The course succeeds at its actual goal, which is convincing an overwhelmed creative person that a notebook can flex around their life instead of the other way around, and it backs that up with an honest account of what did not work as much as what did. It is less successful as a rigorous how-to for someone who has never opened a dot-grid notebook and wants an exact template to start from. Paired with the included quick-start guide and resource sheet, it is enough to get a beginner moving, but it rewards patience with a narration-heavy format more than urgency for a fast setup.
The standout
The four-step procrastination framework, capture the task, rewrite it with an actionable verb and a time or quantity limit, then attach a trigger like an alarm, is a genuinely transferable technique independent of bullet journaling itself.
What you will learn
- How to set up the four core building blocks: the index, future log, monthly spread, and daily spread
- How to use pagination and migration to move tasks between spreads without losing anything
- How to name and file custom spreads (collections) into the index using a discernment-based approach rather than rigid templates
- A four-step method for beating chronic procrastination: capture, define with actionable and quantifiable parameters, schedule with a trigger, and follow through
- How to pair the analog journal with Google Calendar and Evernote so timed events and searchable notes don't clutter the notebook
- How habit trackers, health logs, and time-tracking grids can be built inside a daily spread without buying a separate tool
Best for: Creative freelancers or ADHD adults who have already failed with rigid planners and want a flexible, handwritten system explained by someone who has visibly struggled with it themselves.
Skip it if: Anyone who wants a fast, purely visual how-to, or a digital-only planning system, since the pacing is conversational and the notebook pages are described more than clearly demonstrated.