Rapid and Daily Logging techniques guide my daily Bullet Journaling practice. I have been practicing Rapid Logging for almost 5 years now, as long as I have learned about the wonder of Bullet Journal. As Daily Logging was later introduced, I started to integrate it with Rapid Logging to journal with more intentions every day AND throughout the day.
This is how I maintain a consistent daily journaling practice. At the end of a day, I would have documented a daily record called Daily Log of what has happened, what I have done, felt, learned, and what’s next.
This Daily Log is not just a to-do list, but also a journaling record of my thoughts and feelings. It’s like a long page of journalling, but broken down into bite-sized bits of insights that are captured in the moments (this is crucial!).
👉🏻 Read first if you have not: 3 Reasons Daily Bullet Journal can Transform You (and How to Implement it). This article will give you an overview of the two Rapid Logging and Daily Logging techniques demonstrated in today’s post.
To demonstrate and expand on the application of these techniques, I will walk you through “A Day in My Life ft. My Bullet Journal” in this post. I hope you will find these techniques SO EASY and SO SATISFYING to apply straight away in your daily life.
🌿I structure my Daily Bullet Journaling practice in 3 phases:
BEFORE THE DAY STARTS
If you are reading this post, chances are you also like to plan your days ahead and give it some good organization. Am I right?
After years of trial and error experimentations, I learned that, it is best to plan your new day ahead in the evening before.
This is because of 2 reasons:
- One is, the morning can usually be packed and hectic (unless you are a very early morning person and can carve out time to plan your day in peace).
- Two is, knowing what to expect the next day as early as the night before gives this sense of control and predictability.
Here, I am not meaning that we plan ahead to dictate the course of our day and become fixated on controlling every minute of it. Doing this potentially sets ourselves up for disappointments and/or frustrations, when the daily plan does not go according to plan.
👉🏻 What I really mean is to get a rough plan and schedule for what you expect to make out of the day.
Such as:
- Remind yourself the top 3 things (or actually even better, THE ONE THING) you must get done
- Prioritize your tasks to schedule your best time of the day for the most important to-do
- Prepare yourself for meetings or events
Doing this will help prepare your brain overnight what it could expect to go through the next day. I often find myself also a lot less stressed when I have a clue of what is waiting for me when I wake up tomorrow morning, rather than close to a couple of hours before the new day starts already.
This activity can take me 10-15 minutes, including these steps:
⚫️First, I write down the critical items I need to get done using the BULLET key. These items are usually undone tasks migrated from the previous day or scheduled from Weekly or Monthly plan.
- ✨Tip: When migrating, you can also prioritize daily tasks in the Daily Log, by writing them down task by task in the priority order.
- ✨If a task or note is important, use the star or asterisk symbol next to the main symbol to signify that.
➖ (Optional) Sometimes, I throw in a note using the DASH key to remind my future self something.
⭕️ I schedule both events (decoded as CIRCLE key) and timeblock when to work on my tasks directly to the Calendar app. This is critical!
Having a plan is just as good if you also schedule it, to make it solid.
It’s not only about what to do, but also when to do what.
DURING THE DAY
As part of my morning routine the next day, I checked in with my Bullet Journal.
This is not a very traditional Bullet Journal thing to do by the way. I just love using CIRCLE next to a timestamp to document a particular moment of the day with some lines of thought and feelings.
Then, during the day, I follow through the preplanned daily task list and update this Daily Log record using Rapid and Daily Logging techniques.
Example 1:
Here I used the CHECKMARK on the task’s bullet once I finished the task. (or CROSS as BuJo’s original)
Example 2:
When there has happened an event, I used:
- The CIRCLE with a timestamp to document the happened event.
- The EQUAL as a Daily Logging technique to summarize a few thoughts about this event
🌿Reminder: Employ the Daily Logging methodology on top of Rapid Logging to capture your take-aways of tasks and events and transition yourself with mindfulness throughout the day.
You do not need to do this for every single task or event of course. The point is to be mindful and attentive to your thoughts and emotions, not to keep a wikipedia about everything happening in a day.
Be mindful. Be selective, when it comes to what really matters.
As the below example photo shows, I just documented 2 work meetings in the rows with CIRCLE symbol and moved on, as I do not have any further tasks or notes.
Example 3:
One cool feature I have not mentioned so far about Rapid Logging is this possibility to create a nested list, such as:
- Bullet 1: Go grocery shopping
- Bullet 2 (indented): Make a shopping list
By indenting the 2nd BULLET, I signified that “make a shopping list” is a sub-task of “go grocery shopping”. This sub-task needs to be done first, then the outer bigger task can be completed.
Example 4:
This next record amplifies beautifully what I wrote above about being mindful and attentive to what really matters. Here:
- I used the CIRCLE with a timestamp to document the happened event. (yep I spent one hour on Instagram alone, doom scrolling through Hannah Fry’s feed. Gosh she’s interesting!)
- I used the NOTE to summarize what I liked about her content (yep I’m that nerdy. I like to document the media I enjoy consuming. It’s interesting to learn about what interests me. Does that make sense?)
- Finally, I used the EQUAL to capture my excited feelings.
Since I just like this experience and what I’ve learned, I decided to gift it a special decorative washi tape.🌟
When I flip through my pages and pages of journal in the future, I will be able to quickly recognize and pause at these sections enhanced with special features (like stickers, washi or highlighters, etc.)
BEFORE DAY ENDS
My end of day journal ritual usually takes 10-15 minutes, including these steps:
First, update and migrate items in your Daily Log, if applicable:
- For TASK entries:
- Check off if completed or migrate forward / backward if not or migrate
- Migrate forwards means, the item is pushed to the next day.
- Migrate backwards means, the item is pushed back to the Weekly or Monthly plan, without a clear schedule.
- For NOTE entries:
- Enter them into a Collection for long-term storage if necessary
- Or convert them into an actionable task / event if necessary
- For special NOTE entries (with = symbol):
- Enter them into a Collection for long-term storage
- Or explore further as long-form journal if necessary
💡Sometimes, when time does not allow, I use weekends instead to do the organization of note entries.
The second thing I like to do (though I’m quite not diligent with 😅) is to update my Monthly Log – One Line per Day. More on this feature in the future post about Monthly Log.
As I’m not that 100% diligent, I do this also on weekends, together with organizing my notes. This is my ‘filing’ time, so to say. This can definitely be improved, so stay tuned for future reports!
Finally, to close the loop, I would repeat the Before The Day Starts phase.
So that’s it my friends! This is how I’ve been journaling everyday consistently using Rapid and Daily Logging techniques of Bullet Journal.
To Sum It Up:
In this post, I demonstrated to you:
- My 3-phase Daily Bullet Journaling routine, which includes: a Before the Day Starts phase, a During the Day phase, and a Before the Day Ends phase.
- Before the Day Starts should be best done the evening before, using Rapid Logging in combination with timeblock technique.
- During the Day, do not forget to employ Daily Logging techinique to capture your thoughts and emotions. Slow down. Be mindful and attentive to what really matters.
- Finally, Before the Day Ends is when you reflect on your day, update your Daily Log, and close the circle by repeating the planning for the next day.
I really hope you find this post helpful in offering you a clearer guide into Daily Bullet Journaling techniques.
📩 I’m curious to know what you think about Rapid Logging and Daily Logging application in your daily life, so please leave a comment below!
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Till next time, happy bullet journaling!
Warmly yours,
Suani
