For those who know me, I’ve been bullet journalling for about 4 years now. The details about how I bullet-journal and why is probably a whole other article (and more!), but I wanted to share with you the practice I’ve taken from my work at #ENTRYLEVELBOSS into my personal life and how it has helped me, especially in this dumpster 🔥of a year!
Back when I started working at #ENTRYLEVELBOSS, Danae Shell introduced to me to weekly company retros. Of course, I had heard and read about them but, I had never been in a company that carried them out consistently.
For work, we carry retros out weekly and they are always a great way to evaluate our work and start the cogs turning for the plans for the next week.
At home, I carry them out monthly. I started in January pre-pandemic, but I’ve continued them every month and I have found them so damn helpful! When I do them for myself, they are not about ‘life goals’ or professional development aims, they are about a take stock, notice what’s good, notice what’s missing and a slight course correct, if needed.
OK, so here’s one prob with both retros and bullet journalling, once you get properly into them, they get super personal and therefore harder to share in public! I mean, they are for me, and not for you! However, I’m going to share a few for you (with some teeny edits when others are involved) to show how they’ve worked for me in reality.
January
Liked Lacked Learned Longed
This was the first one I did and was so simple. I think it took about 10 mins and I couldn’t believe how much better I felt. It reminded me of the awesome holiday I had at the beginning of the month and reassured me that a couple of weeks off the gym hadn’t made a difference!
February
What I remember the most about this one was how easy it was to find ‘What was good’ items!
March
It’s usually Sad Mad Glad but I did it this way around! This was the beginning of lockdown and at the end of the month I was feeling pretty depressed. However, yet again, going over the month I could clearly see that there were some excellent bits to the month and it gave me hope!
April
Dixit is the retro I love to hate. It does work slightly better in a team (because you get to hear other people’s interpretations as well as your own and it’s always so good when the other views are more on the nose than yours!). I always HATE the idea of doing it, but whenever I start, the ideas just flow! It’s also a great retro when you don’t know what your thinking as the focus of a picture just helps somehow!
How I retro (and some ideas for you)
- I use my journal, but at work we use Notion, I regularly read about retros but this article has some great ideas and I’ve created a Notion page of templates for work (a copy of which is for you here!)
- I pick the one that feels right, but try to make sure it wasn’t the same as the previous month so I don’t end up repeating the results.
- I time it for 15 minutes and just write (hence it being quite messy). I don’t prep. I don’t edit. If I don’t use the time, I just sit for the time allotted and the thoughts eventually come.
- I do look back over them — in particular over the positive things — they have been excellent reminders that despite the difficulties of the year, there are good things happening to me (as well as bad) and I think that’s particularly useful right now. Anyways all I need to do is look at social media to remember the bad 😭
I want to highlight at this point that I know I am extremely privileged, and am I fully aware of the fact that a lot of other people are having a distinctly shitter year than me. These retros don’t mean I forget or gloss over that, and there are other points of my life that I sit with and acknowledge this. This article is about a light touch approach that I use to record my life and help me along the way. I hope it can be the same for you.
Let me know what you think!
sx
