How I Use My Bullet Journal to Solve Engineering Problems
When I changed general practitioners a couple of years ago, I brought along my bullet journal, a habit I’ve kept to ensure I track discussions and health advice. Noticing my notebook, my doctor asked if I was an engineer, explaining that her father, also an engineer, carried a similar-looking black notebook. After my appointment, I remembered one of my engineering professors always carried a black notebook as well. The interaction made me start to wonder what value my bullet journal adds to my research and career. I believe it’s safe to say that today pen and paper seem old-fashioned, and all the emphasis is on modern, digital engineering tools. Of course, I use several different digital tools and software packages every day for work. ANSYS Fluent and OpenFOAM help me solve fluid dynamics problems. Visual Studio helps me with data analysis and building machine learning algorithms to see patterns that I can’t. Microsoft Office puts my thoughts into a medium I can conveniently share with others. However, after thinking deeply about the purpose of my bullet journal in my research and profession, I can say that out of all these modern tools, none of them give me as much return on my investment as my humble paper journal. The humble paper journal acts as a lever for my greatest problem-solving tool – my brain – by helping me effectively capture, refine, and synthesize the problem I’m working on.
Trying to figure out how to solve a new problem usually activates a stream of ideas about similar problems I’ve seen before, tools I may be able to use, and any unknowns I’ll need to figure out. This can all be a bit overwhelming to take in and (speaking from personal experience) causes paralysis by analysis. I overcome this by grabbing my bullet journal, putting pen to page, and letting all the thoughts flow out in whatever order they come to me. This serves two purposes for me. It helps me take the most important step – the first one. Also, it frees me from worrying about forgetting any important facts, connections, and ideas I will need to solve the problem. By capturing all my ideas in my bullet journal, it gives me clarity, peace of mind, and a starting point to start refining my strategy.
Once I’ve gathered all the raw materials spinning around my head, I use my journal to start sculpting the solution in a process of continuous refinement and review. When it’s all written in front of me, I have an easier time of parsing what directions are likely to be the best leads to follow. This process feels like a distillation or a refinement of the best ideas. From there, I’ll start structuring the outline of a potential solution by grabbing what I’ve identified to be the most useful ideas. My goal during this stage is synthesis: figuring out how to first organize and then connect all the moving parts into the most concise and easily understandable way possible. Eventually, I reach a threshold of comfortability for a general plan, and I’ll go back and review it. I’ll intentionally try to poke holes in my solution and come up with counterexamples. It’s certainly more often the case than not that I find something I need to fix or account for. This step is always an iterative process for me and can take up most of the time I spend working on a problem depending on if it’s a short sprint or a full project. I always try to do my due diligence here, because I strongly believe in a difference between productivity and progress. I can always occupy my time by working on something, but what I really care about is whether that work is progressing me toward my goal.
At this stage, I’ve carved out the most promising path forward, and the only thing that left to do is to actually do the work and solve the problem. I have a natural inclination to procrastinate when there’s a big project in front of me, so I’ve found it not just helpful but a necessity to put some kind of guardrails to keep me on track. Everyone has their own planning and scheduling tool they use, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of taking elements from SMART goals, backward design, and some ideas from Ryder Carroll’s ‘The Bullet Journal Method.’ Whatever your process looks like, I suggest making sure it always has the following keystones: clearly defined, actionable milestones/tasks, due dates for each one, and some kind of calendar or chart to track your progress and keep you honest. Dwight D. Eisenhower is credited with saying something along the lines of “Plans are useless, but planning is everything.” You’ll likely miss some of your due dates or come across problems that you didn’t anticipate, but you’ll undoubtedly make more progress than if you hadn’t planned at all.
I originally planned for this to be a simple 3.5 essay, but as it started to come together, I felt that it seemed too linear compared to what my journal really looks like. That’s why I included some screenshots from my personal Bullet Journal to show that my actual process is much more chaotic and iterative than I’ve made it sound. The indeterminable hieroglyphics in the first picture is a mind map where I was just capture all the big ideas floating around in my head around a research problem. Clearly, this isn't a beautifully construted, final product; the point is to just get everything in my head on the page. The second picture shows an early outline I made for this article. It's more structured than the mind map, but still incomplete. It also shows annotations that mark where my thoughts continued to develop. The third picture shows a Kanban-inspired layout for the major milestones in the first phase of my dissertation. I have pre-specified due dates in one column, but you'll notice dates in the margin that mark when I actually reached the milestone. In short, my journal is a place where I try to focus on progress rather than perfection.
The steps I’ve laid out aren’t necessarily can be applied to digital notetaking apps and not paper journals, but I do think there is something special about the added friction when putting pen to paper. The average speech rate is about 125 words per minute, while we can only write at about 20 words per minute. The difference in rates forces us to be careful with our words and distill our thoughts down to the most important ideas. A journaI can act as a repository for your project ideas, a blank canvas where the solution starts to take shape, and a planner to keep you on the path to completion. I think my favorite notebook brand, Leuchtturm1917, puts it concisely in their motto “Denken mit der hand,” which translates from German to make the point that writing is “thinking by hand.”