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Published May 7th, 2026
I’ve always considered myself a fan of optimizing systems of organization and workflow, but there’s one itch that I’ve yet to find a sustainable scratch for:
The Digital BuJo
If you’re unfamiliar with BuJo, or Bullet Journals, I don’t fault you. I think most of my life I’ve been content with a basic agenda and calendar. But as life grows more complex and webbed, so too does long-term obligations. So, I adopted BuJo. In the briefest of terms, it’s a notebook where you use a simple checkbox, or bullet, system to curate an ongoing log of what’s happening and it’s status. Honestly, don’t overthink it. That’s how it gets harder.
But one thing I’ve struggled with, and still am to some extent, is bridging the analog and the digital. The officially endorsed BuJo app by the original creator of the system doesn’t work very well for me. Too much friction. BuJo should be friction-less.
Todoist? Fun, but bloated super quickly. Too many settings.
Obsidian? Even this, ironically, failed me.
LogSeq, and others? Same as above.
So what actually worked?
Honestly, it’s embarrasingly easy in retrospect. If I stop trying to use every feature that the product ships with and abuse it for my own needs, it gets a lot better.
What does my current system look like?
- Use the analog BuJo as much as possible
- Brain dump every thought that takes up too much space to write or track into a single page on Obsidian, maybe link it out to other pages as needed
- Avoid plugins, optimizing, etc. Just use it with the goal of being done with it, not sitting with it.
And that’s my technique. It’s not one I’m advocating or suggesting you use, but I think there’s a deeper trend here.
Just because all the features are present, doesn’t mean you need to leverage them all the time. There’s no such thing as a perfect system, it’s a misnomer or carries a hefty weight. The truest perfect system is the system that gets things off the list or ticked out of the BuJo.
It reminds me of the DIY Job Search Engine - Tax Records with GIS I just wrote on. Part of the drive there was being coerced into using all the features all the time. Sometimes the intent to reduce friction makes a worse experience for the end user.