I Tried Rigid and Loose Life Systems. I Still Haven’t Picked A Clear Winner.
Cleaning out the junk drawer by my front door this morning—the one that collects every random thing I don’t know what to do with, expired gum, broken rubber bands, a key that I’m pretty sure doesn’t open anything in my apartment—I found two old notebooks I’d completely forgotten about. One’s a leather-bound bullet journal I bought on sale two years ago, right after I got laid off and decided I needed to get my life “under control.” The other’s just a cheap spiral notebook, the kind you buy for a dollar at the drugstore, that I used to jot down notes for the fancy Google Sheets productivity system my best friend Lila built me back then. The bullet journal has a big coffee stain blotted into the back cover, from when I spilled an oat latte on it at the library last winter. The spiral one’s edges are chewed a little where my cat Mochi thought it was a good chew toy when she was a kitten.
I got so obsessed with this question back then: what’s the right system? Which one do I pick? Before the layoff, I’d worked at a job where someone else told me what to do every day, when to be where, what deadlines mattered. Suddenly I had 16 waking hours a day to fill, and I’d lie in bed until 11 some mornings staring at the ceiling, panicking because I hadn’t “achieved” anything before noon. So I went down the rabbit hole, like everyone does. Watched all the videos, read all the posts, tried everything from the 12-step morning routine to the big getting things done method, and ended up stuck between the two big camps: either the super structured, everything-has-a-permanent-place system like Lila’s Sheets, or the loose, adapt-as-you-go messy style that lets you change the rules every week.
Lila’s system was really impressive, honestly. She spent a whole Saturday building it for me, when I was moping on her couch eating too much cold takeout. It had seven tabs: one for job apps, one for weekly to-dos, one for budget tracking, one for habit tracking, even a dumb little tab called “small wins” where I was supposed to log every good thing that happened, even just “had a good coffee” or “Mochi didn’t knock over my fern.” It was color coded. It synced to my phone. It calculated how much I spent on groceries automatically. The problem was, I spent the first three days after I got it tinkering with the colors, adding little extra tabs I thought I needed, and then I caught a cold that knocked me out for four days. When I woke up, the whole week was blank, and I just couldn’t make myself go back and fill it in. It felt like I’d already failed the whole system, you know? Like if I couldn’t even keep up with it for a week, what was the point? I felt too embarrassed to tell Lila that, so for three months when she asked how it was going, I just said “oh it’s great, so helpful!” That awkward little lie hung between us every time we talked about organization, until I finally admitted it six months later and she just laughed and said she doesn’t even use her own system half the time.
The bullet journal was supposed to be the answer to that, right? No rules, you just write what you need. I bought that nice leather one because I thought if I spent more money on it, I’d use it more. The first ten pages are all these fancy habit trackers I drew by hand: drink 8 glasses of water, walk 10 minutes, read 10 pages, no social media after 9pm. I filled out the first four days, and then on the fifth I forgot, and I just… never went back. Now half the journal is grocery lists, half is doodles of Mochi, half (okay that’s more than half, math doesn’t work here) is random notes for freelance ideas I had while waiting for the bus. Sometimes I’ll open it and find a note that says “talk to mom about her birthday” dated from three months back, and I’ll panic because I think I missed it, but no, it was for last year, and I did get her a pothos, she still has it. It’s messy, but it’s mine. The problem is, some weeks I have eight million things going on—three freelance deadlines, a doctor’s appointment, a friend’s birthday dinner, need to pick up cat litter, need to drop off a package at the post office—and I’ll scribble them all down on different random pages, and then I can’t find the note about the doctor’s appointment and I’m ten minutes late and the receptionist gives me that annoyed look. That’s annoying enough to make me swear off paper entirely for a week.
Last month I had a big deadline for a brand client, paid enough that it covered my rent for two months, so it was a big deal. I decided I’d use the Sheets system to block my whole day out, 30 minute chunks, everything scheduled. I had 9-9:30 for emails, 9:30 to 12:30 for drafting, 12:30 to 1 for lunch, 1 to 3 for edits, done by 3 so I could go for a walk. Then at 9:15, I looked out the window and Mochi’s stray cat friend was stuck in the oak tree in my front yard, meowing his head off. I couldn’t get him down, so I had to call the fire department, and they came, and it took an hour and a half to get him down, and by then my whole schedule was blown. I sat down on the couch after they left, staring at my Google Sheet, and I just felt that old familiar panic: I ruined the whole day, I’m never going to get this done, I messed up. I almost just closed the laptop and ordered a large pizza and binged that new reality show I’ve been watching. But instead I grabbed my beat up old bullet journal, flipped to a blank page, and just wrote two things: 1. Finish draft of brand article. 2. Call vet about Mochi’s flea meds. That was it. No blocks, no tracking, no color coding. I got the draft done by 4, it was fine, the client loved it.
So if you ask me which system I’d pick, I don’t have a clean answer for you. I thought back when I started this that I had to pick one, stick to it forever, that if I jumped around I was just being undisciplined. I went to one of those casual productivity meetups at a coffee shop once, right after the layoff, and when everyone went around talking about their systems, I said I just switch between whatever works that week, and the whole table went quiet for a second, like I’d admitted I never floss. That still makes me laugh, thinking about it.
Some weeks I’m all in on Google Calendar blocks, when I have a lot of appointments and I need to sync them with my boyfriend’s schedule too, that works. Some weeks I can’t stand looking at a screen any more than I already do for work, so I just scribble everything on a sticky note stuck to my fridge, and that works better. I still feel a little guilty sometimes, when I see someone online talking about how their perfect system changed their life, and I think I should be doing that, I should pick one and stick with it. But then I remember that time I got the big article done with just two lines in a messy notebook, and Lila admitting she doesn’t even use her own fancy system, and the sticky note I had last week that just said “buy cat litter” that I actually remembered to buy for once.
I guess the system I pick is the one that doesn’t make me feel bad when I don’t follow it perfectly. That’s not very fancy, I know. It doesn’t make for a neat, shareable tip. But it’s the one that works for me, most days. Most days, anyway.
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