> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.dafinasmith.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The System I Keep Coming Back To - URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/the-system-i-keep-coming-back-to/ - Published: 2026-09-11T02:41:03.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T02:41:03.000Z - Description: How I've used a bullet journal for nearly a decade to organize my businesses, my family, my ideas. It keeps the general chaos of being a person away. - Author: Dafina Smith - Tags: Money & Career # *How I've used a bullet journal for nearly a decade to organize my businesses, my family, my ideas—and the general chaos of being a person.* Every year, Labor Day feels a little like New Year's Day to me. Summer is when I loosen my grip. I travel. The kids are out of school. Routines get a little fuzzy. I play more. Then September comes, and I want to lock back in. I run two businesses. I have a family. There are holidays coming. There are things I want to build, things I need to remember, things I want to read, money decisions to make, appointments to schedule and an astonishing number of tiny pieces of adult life that seem to exist solely to take up space in my brain. A girl needs a system. And despite all of the technology I use—and I use a lot of it—one of the systems I keep returning to is almost aggressively analog: a notebook and a pen. I've been bullet journaling for nearly ten years. I still have the old journals. I label them by year and archive them. I choose different colors depending on whatever energy I'm feeling when I start a new one. They sit together now as a strange little physical record of my life. And that has turned out to be part of their value. > The best system isn't the one you follow perfectly. It's the one you can keep returning to. ## Why a bullet journal survived all my other systems I have always been a notebook person—and, unfortunately for my wallet, a planner person. For years I would buy separate things for separate parts of my life: a gratitude journal, a calendar, a planner, another notebook for ideas. I loved the idea of all of them. What I didn't love was trying to make my actual life conform to someone else's preprinted pages. There was never enough room where I needed it and always too much room where I didn't. Then I discovered bullet journaling. The basic idea is wonderfully simple: instead of buying a planner that dictates the structure, you create the structure as you go. That flexibility is probably the single biggest reason I'm still using one. There are periods when I'm extremely disciplined and I'm in my journal every day. There are other periods when life is full and I barely touch it. This summer, for example, I did a midyear reflection, planned a month, wrote in it for a few days in August and apparently opened it exactly once in July. And nothing happened. There were no sad abandoned pages labeled JULY 17 waiting to remind me that I had failed at my productivity system. When I was ready to come back, I turned the page and started again. I increasingly think that is what a good system should do. It should accommodate a life—not demand that you organize your life around maintaining the system. ## The notebook itself is intentionally boring I use a **Leuchtturm1917 dotted notebook**. I prefer the dots to lined pages because I draw, make lists, create little bookshelves and generally want the freedom to use a page however I want. I once bought the official branded Bullet Journal version and didn't find that I needed it. The regular dotted notebook works perfectly well for me. The numbered pages matter, though. So does the table of contents. Every time I add something I may eventually want to find again, I put it in the index. Without that, you don't have a personal operating system. You have 200 pages of thoughts you'll eventually have to hunt through. And I always keep a pen with it. My current favorite is a Muji pen. During particularly committed periods, I've even bought those little adhesive pen loops so there is literally no excuse for the notebook and pen to become separated. I like stickers, too. Productivity does not have to be ugly. ## The first pages aren't a to-do list Every new journal starts with my **mission and vision**. They don't change every year. Every few years I revisit and rewrite them, but I want them physically near everything else I'm planning. Because otherwise it is surprisingly easy to become extremely efficient at doing things that don't actually matter to you. More recently, I've added a personal manifesto: what I believe, why I do things the way I do, how I want to work with people and things I know I need to keep working on in myself. Then the journal gets much less profound. There is currently a **glow-up tracker**. That might include a chemical peel, something I want to investigate for my skin or some other completely superficial thing I've decided I want to do. Both belong in there. That's another thing I like about having one notebook instead of a collection of specialized planners. My life doesn't divide itself neatly into *important things* and *unimportant things*. Neither does my journal. > It is surprisingly easy to become extremely efficient at doing things that don't actually matter to you. ## My family memory log I also keep a family and core-memory log. This isn't elaborate journaling. When something happens that I really want to remember, I write down a line. That's it. A funny thing one of my kids said. Something we did together. A small moment that I know I don't want swallowed by the hundreds of other things that happened that month. Sometimes productivity is remembering to do something. Sometimes it's remembering what already happened. ## My personal library This may be my favorite section. I draw bookshelves and keep a record of what I'm reading. Over the years I've created my own categories: fiction for fun, literary fiction, personal development, business systems, personal finance and whatever else I happen to be trying to learn at the time. I also keep a running list of books and podcasts people recommend. Some years the shelves get very full. This year? Less impressive. That's useful information too. The point isn't to manufacture evidence that I'm a person who reads. It's to have a record of what I was curious about at different points in my life. ## The chaos list This may be the least glamorous and most useful thing in the entire notebook. I call it my **chaos list**. It's where I put all of those tasks that don't belong anywhere but nevertheless need to happen: put something into a trust, renew a passport, find a boat captain, complete a background check. The administrative debris of adult life. I don't necessarily schedule all of it immediately. I just need somewhere trustworthy to put it. Then, when I unexpectedly have a pocket of time and enough energy to deal with annoying things, I know where to go. There is something psychologically calming about taking a cloud of vague obligations out of your head and putting it on paper. > Cataloging the chaos makes it feel less chaotic. ## I plan in seasons, not quarters This is one of my more idiosyncratic planning habits. I own and run corporations. I understand quarters. I just don't particularly enjoy thinking about my *life* in them. I live in the Northeast, where the seasons actually change, and I've realized that seasons are a much more intuitive unit of personal time for me. So four times a year I do a seasonal check-in. - What worked? - What isn't working? - How am I feeling? - What needs more attention? - What does success look like at the end of this season? Then I set a few intentions. There is something much more human to me about saying *this fall* than *Q4*. Businesses have quarters, people have seasons. ## The rule of three From there, things get more tactical. At the beginning of each month, I write down key dates and choose my priorities: my personal top three, the top three for each company I run, and a small number of financial goals—sales, savings, investments or whatever needs my attention that month. I repeat the process weekly and sometimes daily. Three keeps appearing because I have learned something about myself: a giant to-do list does not make me more productive. It mostly creates a very detailed record of everything I failed to accomplish. Three meaningful things is different. If I accomplish three important things in a day, that's a good day. If I move three genuinely important things forward in a week, that can be a very good week. The constraint creates a guardrail. Instead of constantly experiencing myself as behind, I have a reasonable definition of done. My weekly pages also have extremely practical buckets: **Do. Buy. Research.** I meal-plan there too. Nothing revolutionary. That's rather the point. > A giant to-do list mostly creates a very detailed record of everything I failed to accomplish. ## Why I still write things down I haven't abandoned technology. My calendar is digital. I use AI. I have a Remarkable. I use all sorts of tools that I'll write about separately because each solves a different problem for me. My bullet journal isn't competing with any of them. It does something different. Sitting down with a pen and a blank page removes the noise. I have to decide what matters enough to physically write down. Maybe part of it is simply the feedback loop I grew up with: hand, pen, paper, thought. I don't see any reason to optimize that out of my life just because a newer technology exists. ## The unexpected value of keeping them I originally kept my old journals because I'm a person who keeps things. Now I think the archive may be one of the best parts of the practice. I can pull out an old journal and see what I wanted then. What I worried about. What I thought would be difficult. What I was trying to build. Sometimes it's humbling, but more often, it's encouraging. There are goals in those notebooks that once seemed enormous and are now simply my life. There are also things I desperately wanted that I no longer care about—which may be equally useful to remember. Looking backward gives me a way to ask: **Am I still aligned with the person I thought I wanted to become?** And occasionally the archive is useful in an absurdly literal way. A friend recently called and asked if I remembered a preschool consultant I'd used years ago. I did and more importantly, I still had the notes. ## A system that leaves room for a life I think I've finally figured out why the bullet journal has survived nearly a decade of new apps, devices, planners and productivity experiments. It isn't because I've found the perfect system. It's because the system leaves enough room for me to change. I can be intensely ambitious in September and barely open the notebook in July. I can put my corporate priorities next to a book I want to read, something my child said, an investment goal and an appointment for a chemical peel. That messiness isn't a flaw in the system. **It's a reasonably accurate representation of a life.** And now Labor Day has passed. My notebook is back out. My Muji pen is attached. It's time to lock in.