Why I abandoned bullet journaling

Don't underestimate the power of a good to-do list

Mina Kmiecik, Astigmatism, 2025, acrylic on canvas.

In 2022, I made a significant career change. I attempted the jump from academia to industry. Well, not entirely. I went from doing a postdoc at an academic hospital setting to another postdoc in an industry setting. Both positions were postdocs, but the environments were completely different.

The bullet journaling method, which I wrote about in a previous post, served me well throughout academia. However, I noticed a few months into my industry postdoc that bullet journaling was becoming inefficient. This was due to one key aspect that differed between the two environments: how goals were defined and tracked.

Bullet journaling for perfectionists

My experience in academia was that projects and goals were largely long-term, with minimal to no oversight. The constant grant writing interspersed with teaching, analyses, experiments, and publishing made things busy, but my to-do list never changed too rapidly from day to day. But importantly, there wasn’t a formal process for setting goals and adhering to them.

My industry postdoc was different in this respect. Goals for the quarter were developed according to company objectives; weekly updates on those goals were tracked; self-imposed grades on your projected performance were due mid-quarter and end of quarter. There was a much more rigid system for achieving planned goals. Weekly updates for each team within the department were submitted according to these goals.¹

I noticed quite early in my industry postdoc that bullet journaling was unable to keep up with the fast paced nature of this new work, especially when writing weekly updates (i.e., accomplishments and findings of the week). I needed a better way to track items on my to-do list and the progress on those items.

Also, projecting how long something would take became very important for reliable planning. The analog bullet journaling system became burdensome when tracking these projections. At times, the task list in my bullet journal got so long that it became tedious to write out and transfer over to the next month.

I needed a better solution.

I played around with various options, including fancy tools like Jira and Confluence. But I eventually settled on a simple method, which is so unlike me, the Google Sheet to-do list.

Now hear me out; a Google Sheet may seem lame on the outside, but it’s probably one of the most powerful to-do lists if you organize it right.

Here’s how I recommend setting it up:

• Column 1 - Task

• Column 2 - Link

• Column 3 - Date Assigned

• Column 4 - Date Due

• Column 5 - Date Completed

• Column 6 - Days remaining (conditional formatting)

• Column 7 - Completed (checkbox)

• Column 8 - Notes

You don’t even have to create it! Here’s a free template that I created. Feel free to take it and adapt to your own needs.

Example super-charged Google Sheets to-do list.

Why was this simple sheet so powerful for me?

1. It was fast and easy to enter a task, to-do list item, or idea.

Pro tip: If you use Chrome, you can set this sheet up as a tab that automatically opens when you open Chrome.

2. I could sort tasks by days remaining to see what was urgently due.

3. Once I finished a task, I checked the box in “Completed” and filtered to include only “FALSE” rows; this removed the completed items.

4. Some tasks had a clear due date; others I estimated. Over time, I discovered how optimistic my estimates really were. This helped me calibrate and plan better for future tasks and goals.

5. I entered links for tasks that had a clear web component: Jira tickets, websites to read, documents to review, anything and everything. This made navigating to that task faster and saved me time.

6. Non-urgent tasks started piling up at the top as their due dates came and went. I either get rid of these tasks or reassigned them a new due date

7. When it came time for a weekly or quarterly review, I filtered the “Completed” column to only “TRUE”. This showed only the completed tasks. Then I’d filter by “Date Completed” and saw the dates when I completed each task. From here, it was much easier to track what I completed rather than from memory

This Google Sheet method served me well during my fast-paced industry postdoc. If you end up trying this method, or have another tried and true method, please let me know how it works out for you by commenting below!

1. Although some may cringe at this, I really enjoy this aspect about industry. For someone who likes organization and structure, this really helped me think deeply about what projects are worthwhile, and what is necessary to achieve an ultimate goal. Without a rigorous system to track progress, it’s easy to get distracted and take on more projects, thus making it more difficult to achieve that initial goal.