Episode: 2415
Title: HPR2415: bullet journal to org mode
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2415/hpr2415.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:33:12

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This is HPR Episode 2415 entitled Bullet Journal Tord Mode.
It is hosted by Brian in Ohio and in about 15 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summary is, my journey from a lot of digital.
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Hello Hacker Public Radio, Brian in Ohio here.
I wanted to say hi to everybody in the Hacker Public Radio land and had a goal to do three
or four episodes this year and seeing that I've done exactly zero, I thought it was time
to push record as Mr. X would say and get at least one episode out.
So the inspiration for today's show was that I heard Sean Shannon, I hope I said his
last name correctly, on Episode 2299, doing what's in my bag episode and in it he briefly
mentions using a bullet journal and then I think I heard Ken Fallon wondering about bullet
journals on the community news for the month with that episode.
So I thought it show was an order explaining how I went from using bullet journals to using
EMAX org mode.
But I thought also, I think before I get going too deep into this, I won't let you know
that I'm not an expert at any of the following topics.
Bullet journal, getting things done, org mode and especially EMAX.
I'm just somebody who's tried these tools, climbed the learning curve and have some observations
to make through that process.
So first, what's a bullet journal?
Bullet journal was created by a man named writer Carol.
He calls it an analog system for the digital age and I found out about it listening to
the Panatic podcast.
I think Dave Morris mentioned that one, episode number 70 and that was my introduction
to the bullet journal journal.
And so what it is, bullet journal is a method of laying out a notebook and using it to organize
and process ideas and tasks.
I'm not going to try to explain exactly how it's set up.
There's an excellent tutorial video at bulletjournal.com.
You can use any notebook.
You divide it up into index pages, a future log, monthly log, day log, and there's a visual
indexing and tagging system to help you organize stuff.
It's extremely customizable.
So how I used it, initially when I started bullet journaling, I, first off, I used it
for two and a half years and initially I just set it up completely stocked the way writer
explains it in his video.
But later on, I did some changes.
I put the index at the back of the bullet journal that seemed to help me out and I would
do some different set up initially as far as how the months were done.
I basically would set up a whole year all in one sitting and put those pages into the
book as opposed to waiting until the next month to do it.
I used the bullet journal as a daily planner and I idea storing device and a device to
help me make short-term and long-term goals.
The strengths of the bullet journal, it's customizable but it's within a framework.
It gives you a method to get organized that you can tailor to your needs.
It's pretty easy actually to find info in the bullet journal itself, but only if you're
disciplined about using it, if you come up with a really structured method of putting
stuff into it, indexing it, you can find stuff like, one was last time my car had
a tire change or what event a work happened the last time, whatever that might be a training
event or something.
But it does take discipline to do it.
Another strength of the bullet journal is that it's battery-free, it's power is right
up, it's always there.
Some of the shortcomings though, you do need to be disciplined.
Making a bullet journal, especially initially, can be tedious.
Sometimes you're entering items in multiple places, the monthly, daily, and index sections.
It takes time to set up to figure out exactly what you're going to do, takes time, especially
as you customize it or thinking about it.
As changes are made in it and you go off on your own trail of bullet journaling, it takes
time in some thought and you need to be disciplined to get the most out of it.
It sounds like Sean's use case that he mentioned in his podcast as a sort of project, idea
book sounds pretty cool and it might actually be a really good use case for the bullet journal,
sticking to a place to capture ideas and projects.
I kind of like that.
The shortcoming of the bullet journal is that it's hard to edit.
This may be a strength for some people, but for me, using it as a data planner, it was
a little daunting to use because I hate crossing stuff out and erasing is no good and changing
stuff is just tough.
Sometimes you come up with an idea and you have to leave space ahead of time or be willing
to index some kind of project idea through multiple pages and that was something I never
really liked about the system.
The monthly blog portion of the bullet journal, which if you ever try it and you know what I'm
talking about, it was always a mystery to me.
What it's use was how to use it, how to get the most out of it.
The shortcoming of the bullet journal is if you lose your bullet journal, lost it.
And there's really no easy way to back up a paper and pencil writing.
Although I did notice at my local library, they have a scanning station to scan books and
so you could maybe do it that way, but still you all end up with PDFs and OCR or whatever
they call it.
Text out of PDFs, it would be not impossible, but it would definitely have, take some work
to back it up in any kind of form.
So this led me to what I use now, which is org mode.
So you'll ask yourself, what is org mode?
Org mode was created by a man named Karsten Dominik.
And it is an editing and organizing mode for notes, planning and authoring in the free
software text editor Emacs.
So how did I find out about it?
Well, here's a, I'll try to keep it long story short, but I do a little bit of a hobby
programming using microcontrollers in C. I do my development at the command line in
a Linux, Linux, Linux terminal.
And I wanted, I've always tried to work out of way to have sort of an IDE, a command line
IDE where I'd have all my tools, my editor, my bash shell to do the actual compiling
and then uploading to the microcontroller and maybe a place to have some documentation open.
And I'd sort of been playing around and using VIM and a bash shell as a sort of minimal
IDE.
I was using it on a laptop that didn't have X installed.
This was certainly just for fun.
I do not make my bread and butter using these kind of tools.
This is completely for fun and for just the challenge of doing it.
But as always, when you've got a hobby and you're trying things, I wanted to try something
new.
And I, of course, had heard about Emacs and I'd even tried it a couple of times, I'd
opened it up.
It's part of Slackware, if you install the complete Slackware packages.
And I didn't like it.
I couldn't figure it out.
I didn't understand it.
I didn't get the time to try to figure it out.
But while searching through some HPR episodes that ran across Clot 2, who has a lot of
awesome episodes about a lot of different subjects, but he's got three episodes, episode
8.52, 8.56 and 8.61 about getting into Emacs and those episodes got me through the initial
process of starting and using and some of the basic ideas, the fundamental ideas of Emacs,
which without those, I would have never even gone this route.
So after getting playing around with Emacs and trying it out, of course, the next step
like everybody does is you start searching around and with great knowledge places, YouTube.
And all of a sudden, while looking through Emacs stuff, I kept hearing this thing called
org mode.
And especially I found a website by a man I'm Rinder Konig.
He's a, I think he lives in North Carolina.
And he has a series of videos really well done, screencasts, I think he calls them, about
getting yourself organized with org mode, which I started watching.
And it's like, wow, this is exactly what I wanted it a way to organize my life.
Like I've been using the bullet journal, but in using Emacs and a new challenge.
So I switched in October 2016 to using org mode instead of a bullet journal.
And so how do I, how do I use it?
At its heart, org mode is just an outliner.
I use org mode to set up daily to do tasks, organize projects, and jot down notes.
And org mode has a subsystem called Agenda View.
It can generate daily planner views from your org mode files.
And I will admit that I initially tried to mimic the bullet journal in org mode, but
after playing with that for a while and being frustrated, I find it was better, a better
approach is to use the strengths of org mode, rely on those as opposed to trying to import
the strengths of bullet journal, which are, as you can imagine, quite different.
So what are the strengths of org mode, you might ask?
First off, org mode is, it's really, it's very, it's easily editable, editable, it's
searchable and customizable.
You can take projects and you can break down, you can break down a project into as finite
detail as you want, and that detail level can expand or contract as necessary.
But the real power of org mode comes out when you start using it to capture ideas and
tasks and information.
And you can capture these events via a thing called capture templates that you can create.
And then these, this new data that you capture is then saved in the appropriate org files.
And then later on, can show up in your agenda view as to do items or whatever, however
you want to set up your agenda view, it's very customizable.
Another strength of org mode is that it's really easy to back up, but everything is text,
it's just simple text.
It's a future proof, it's not some proprietary data, it's not a physical object in the sense
of like a notebook where you could just lose the one thing, you can make multiple copies
of these small text files that are a tremendous amount of information within them.
And another great strength of org mode is that there are a lot of really good tutorials
online, either at YouTube or just at people's blogs, it's something people have been using.
And it's, I'm coming late to the game, but I guess it used to not be part of EMAX, but
now it's as of I think 25, EMAX 25, it's now just part of EMAX when you install EMAX.
Shortcomings, as you might expect, there are some shortcomings.
First, you do need to know a little about EMAX using the EMAX editor, and that can
feel a little bit overwhelmed to try, but if you're even thinking about it, try those
HPR episodes first, and just start playing with EMAX itself and then work your way into
using org mode.
EMAX is a new tool, and it will require you to use your brain, and that can be a short
coming.
And without going into too much detail, I'll just say a short coming is EMAX key bindings.
So what's next?
I've been using org mode now for a year as an organizer planner, as a replacement to
my bullet journal, and my biggest frustration is portability.
A laptop is a great device, but it's not nearly as portable as a notebook, so I've been
trying different ways to use org mode in a portable solution.
Now there is an app for Android and iOS called MobileOrk.
I used it in Android, I can't test anything about iOS, and never will.
But if the Android app just left me wanting it, I did not like it, I did not understand
the whole push pull concept, the documentation is not that good.
So this led me to trying a couple of different solutions with different devices that are
portable, that aren't laptops, and it has led me to what I think is a great solution,
and that will be a subject of another edge per episode, hopefully done before the end
of the year, because I'd need to do two more, because that would go a three.
So thanks for listening.
If you have any ideas about bullet journals, or org modes, or how you use them, or what
are your ideas on how to use them better, please record another episode for HPR, I think
it would be very interesting to listen to.
I'll put links in the show notes for the different things that I think are appropriate, and
other than that, thanks for listening, this is Brian and Ohio, signing off.
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