There are seven Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks on a shelf above my desk, in graduated shades of grey and dark green, spanning the years between my late twenties and the spring I turned thirty-three. They are the bullet journals I kept for almost three years before I stopped. I still take them down occasionally — they are beautifully made objects, and the early ones contain handwriting from a version of me I find unfamiliar — but I have not started a new one, and I do not think I will.
What replaced them is a Notion workspace that is, in nearly every way, less beautiful. There is no hand-drawn calendar at the front of each month. There is no slowly improving brush-pen lettering. There is no satisfying weight when I close the cover at the end of the year. What there is, instead, is something the bullet journal could never give me, and which I did not realise I needed until I had it: the ability to find anything I had ever written.
This essay is the long version of that pivot, written for readers who, like me, kept a bullet journal seriously for years before the doubt set in. I want to be honest about what was gained and, more importantly, about what was lost. Because something was lost. The decision was not free.
What the bullet journal did beautifully
I want to start here, because most of the "I switched to Notion" essays I have read online are slightly dismissive about what they left behind, and that dismissiveness misses the point. The bullet journal worked for three years, and during those three years it did things no digital tool has matched.
The first was the daily attentional ritual of opening a notebook and drawing the day's spread. Five minutes with a fountain pen and a ruler, in the morning, before the laptop opened. That ritual was not the bullet journal's incidental feature; it was the bullet journal. Ryder Carroll's original method, before Instagram turned it into a calligraphy hobby, was about the cognitive act of writing the day's tasks slowly enough to think about each one. The drawing — even my modest, ungifted drawing — was part of the thinking.
The second was the way the notebook held my attention to a single page at a time. There was no "open in new tab," no quick toggle to last month, no temptation to redesign the system. The page in front of me was the only page available. That constraint produced a kind of focus that no app I have used has ever produced, including Notion. I want to name that loss explicitly before I describe what replaced it.
The third was the artifact itself. A finished bullet journal is a small physical book containing a year of one person's attention. My grandmother kept her kakeibo for fifty years; the seven notebooks on my shelf are, in their own way, a smaller version of that inheritance. A Notion workspace, however well kept, is not a book on a shelf. That difference matters and I do not want to pretend it does not.
What stopped working
The bullet journal's Achilles heel — and this is a phrase I have used to so many readers in correspondence that I have started using it on the page — is re-finding things.
The system has an index, of course. Carroll's original method puts the index at the front of the book and asks you to maintain it as you go. I did this faithfully. By the end of my second journal, the index ran to four pages and was, in practical terms, useless. Not because it was incomplete — it was meticulous — but because the granularity of useful retrieval is much finer than an index can capture. I did not need to find "March 2022 finances." I needed to find the conversation I had with K. about her mother, sometime last spring, and the index does not contain that.
The threading system that more advanced practitioners use — a small page-number reference at the bottom of any entry that continues a thread elsewhere — helped slightly, and broke down at the same place. Threads work for things you knew, in advance, would matter. They do not work for things that turn out to matter later.
By the third journal I had developed a quiet workaround: I would re-read each notebook at the end of the year and copy out the entries I wanted to keep into a digital document. The act of doing this was, on reflection, a confession. I was already running a parallel digital archive. The bullet journal had become the input layer; the digital document had become the actual memory. The notebook was beautiful and the document was the one I searched.
The week I tried Notion seriously
I had used Notion casually for kakeibo for about a year — I have written about that setup in detail in the kakeibo Notion template essay. The kakeibo template was, frankly, the gateway. Once I had a database I trusted with my finances, the question of whether Notion could host the rest of my written life was no longer hypothetical.
I gave it a week. I built a daily reset page modelled on my bullet journal's morning spread — four prompts instead of a hand-drawn box. I built a monthly reflection database modelled on the kakeibo monthly reflection. I built a single inbox for the kind of fleeting note that, in the bullet journal, would have gone into a "rapid log" line. That was the entire setup. It took about an hour.
What surprised me, by the end of the week, was not how much Notion did, but how little I missed. The morning ritual transferred almost intact — typing four answers in a quiet text box, with the tea cooling next to the laptop, was not the same as drawing the day's spread, but it was honestly close. The threading and indexing problem evaporated. I could find any sentence I had ever written by typing two words.
The week did not convert me. The month after did. By the end of that month I had not opened the bullet journal once, not because I had decided to stop but because I had not needed to. That is, in my experience, how most habit replacements actually happen. They are not decided. They are noticed.
What I gained, in concrete terms
The honest list, after two years on Notion:
Search. Two words and I can find any line I have written since the switch. This sounds small until you have lived inside it. Half of what I now write builds on something I wrote eighteen months ago, and that connective tissue was, in the bullet journal era, almost entirely lost to me.
Toggles. The single most underrated feature in Notion. A toggle lets a page be both short (when collapsed) and long (when opened). My monthly reflection page is a single toggle per month, twelve toggles down the year. Closed, the page is a clean year-at-a-glance. Opened, each month becomes a full essay. The bullet journal had no equivalent. Detail required either taking up the page or being elsewhere.
Linked databases. The reading log talks to the monthly reflection. The kakeibo ledger talks to the studio's editorial calendar. These cross-references are not impressive — they are, in fact, embarrassingly simple — but they make the workspace start to feel like one continuous artifact rather than seven parallel notebooks.
Portability. Notion exports cleanly to Markdown. I tested this before I committed. If Notion changes in ways I cannot accept, I can leave with the archive intact. The bullet journal was, in a sense, even more portable — it was already on paper — but the paper archive was effectively unsearchable, which is its own kind of immobility.
What I lost, in concrete terms
I want to be honest here, because most "I switched" essays skip this part. I lost real things. Three of them are worth naming.
The act of drawing. The morning spread, the small hand-drawn calendar, the slow improvement of my brush-pen lettering — these were not productivity features. They were a small daily art practice that the bullet journal had quietly given me for three years. Notion does not produce that. I have started keeping a small sketchbook on the desk for ten minutes of drawing before the laptop opens, and it is honest to say that this is a deliberate replacement, not a natural one. Without it, the switch to Notion would have made me poorer in a way I would have eventually noticed.
The closing of the cover. A finished bullet journal at the end of the year is a discrete object. There is a moment of putting it on the shelf. Notion does not have that moment. I have tried to manufacture one — an end-of-year archive page, an annual review ritual I described in the slow-living templates essay — and it works, partially. But the satisfaction of closing a physical book is not fully reproducible, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The constraint. The page in front of me was the only page available. Notion always has another tab. The temptation to redesign the system instead of using it is constant, and I have lost more days to "improving the workspace" than I ever lost to "improving the bullet journal." This is the loss I am still working with. The koromogae-style reset I describe in the workspace reset essay is partly an attempt to compensate.
Who should not switch
If your bullet journal is working — and you would know, in your body, whether it is — do not switch. The retrieval problem only becomes acute after about two years, and many practitioners never reach the point where it bites. If you reach the end of each year and the previous year's notebook is, in practice, an artifact rather than a tool, the bullet journal is doing its real job and Notion would be a downgrade.
If you find yourself, like I did, secretly maintaining a parallel digital archive — that is the signal. The bullet journal is asking to be retired. It has done its work, and the work has outgrown the format.
The hybrid I almost recommend instead
For about six months I tried to keep both — bullet journal for the morning ritual, Notion for the archive. It did not last, and I think I understand why. The bullet journal stops being a bullet journal when it becomes a draft for something else. Its psychological weight comes from being the primary record. Reduced to an input layer, it became a chore.
That said, I do still keep paper alongside Notion. The monthly reflection I write by hand first and transcribe — for the cognitive reasons described in the four kakeibo questions. The daily reset I do entirely in Notion. The kakeibo ledger lives in Notion with a paper companion from the Mindful Yen Etsy shop for the monthly reflection page. This is not a bullet journal hybrid. It is something else — paper used surgically, where it does specific cognitive work, rather than as the primary system.
What the workspace actually looks like
The Notion workspace that replaced the bullet journal is the same one I describe in the solo creator setup — five databases, two standalone pages, a deliberately plain home page. If you would like to see it, you can try the workspace I use here →. It is on Notion's free plan and built for one person.
What I would say, to a reader at the same crossroads I was at two years ago: the switch is real, and the loss is real, and both are smaller than you fear. The morning will still belong to you. The pen will still be on the desk if you want it. The notebook on the shelf will still contain what it always contained. Notion does not erase the years of bullet journaling; it simply continues the conversation in a tool that can keep up with you.
If you would like to read more about the practices that survived the switch — the four kakeibo questions, the monthly reflection, the slow assembly of a one-person studio — the Mindful Yen Substack is where most of that thinking continues now. Letters from former bullet journalists are especially welcome. There are, it turns out, more of us than you might think.