There is a good chance you have a drawer somewhere with at least two planners in it that you were genuinely excited about when you bought them. Beautiful covers, real intentions, about six weeks of use before they went quiet.
Lately the question I get most often is whether the bullet journal (used in the way they teach it) can work as a planning system, and instead of just answering that, I want to give you the two things I look for in any planning tool. Once you know what to look for, you stop wondering whether you failed the system, and you start seeing pretty quickly whether the system was ever built to hold a life like yours.
1. It has to tell you when.
A planner has one job, and that job is to tell you what you are doing and when you are doing it. Not eventually. At two o'clock.
The bullet journal is built from four pieces, an index, a future log, a monthly log, and a daily log, and nowhere in any of those pieces is there a layout of your actual day, from the time you wake up to the time your head hits the pillow. The monthly log has you write the numbers one through thirty-one down the left side and jot the big stuff next to each one, in a space about the size of a postage stamp, with no times attached and no way to tell whether the thing you wrote is a ten-minute phone call or something that will eat your entire Tuesday. It is a list of things with no when. And a list with no when is not a plan, it is a wish.
2. It has to show you how much time you actually have.
This is the bigger miss, and it is the one almost every tool skips.
Nothing in the bullet journal process asks you to look at how much available time you really have in the day, the week, or the month. So you write down what you hope to accomplish, with no accounting for the four hours you are going to spend in motion, driving carpool, sitting at practice, packing lunches, being busy being busy. When you can see those pockets laid out in front of you, you can look at a Wednesday and know it is not the day to start the big project. That one piece of visibility is the difference between a week that holds and a week that quietly buries you.
3. Look at what the system costs you to run.
Every new page in a bullet journal means numbering it, creating the spread, and going back to the index to log where it lives. Then there is the migration process, where at the end of a day or a week you go back through everything you wrote, and anything that did not get done gets a little arrow moving it forward to tomorrow, or next week, or next month.
That is a daily task list with a lot of beautiful maintenance wrapped around it. If a tool is asking for that much of your time before it gives you anything back, the tool is a project, not a system.
4. Give it the job it is genuinely good at.
I am not here to tell you to throw it out, because the second word in the name is the useful part. Journal.
I teach a whole process for handling the notes you take during the week, the ideas you catch in a training, the quote from a book you want to come back to, the thing someone said that stuck with you. A bullet journal is a lovely home for exactly that. The index actually earns its keep there, with a page for books you want to read, a page for quotes you love, a page for ideas you are not ready to act on yet. It becomes a repository, which is a real and valuable thing to have.
It just should not be the thing telling you what to do and when to do it.
Put your own planner to the test
Pull out whatever you are using right now and check it for those two things. Can you see your day with actual times on it, and can you see how much room you honestly have to work with. If it does both, you have a real planner and you can stop shopping. If it does neither, then all those months you spent feeling like you could not stick with it were never about your discipline.
- Plan-a-Palooza 2026 — Early Bird Tickets Are Live 🤩
Early bird pricing is live, and I do not want you to miss it!
Plan-a-Palooza is the one time each year I teach my full annual planning method live, and we build everything together in real time so you walk away with a plan that actually holds up.
This year's event is October 22 and 23. Early bird pricing runs through August 31, so now is the time to grab your seat. I can't wait to see you there!
The Off Hours Rule Every Entrepreneur Needs for Work+Life Harmony
It is 8:30 on a Tuesday night. Your laptop is closed, but your phone is still in your hand, and you are answering one more email. You have set your office hours, you have told everyone your schedule, and work is still somehow everywhere.
This week I am getting into why setting office hours alone is not enough, and the simple shift that turns your calendar into an actual boundary instead of just a list of intentions.
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Do you have a separate system for managing your finances?
Your TOP Planner is not the place for everything, and finances are a great example of that. This week I am sharing exactly how I handle financial management, what actually does live in my planner, what lives somewhere else, and the one book that finally gave me a system I feel good recommending when someone asks where to start.
You can grab the book here: The Money Habit by Mike Michalowicz.
Remember, this video is updated every Wednesday, so don’t miss it! Head to The Pink Bee app to watch now.
Friend, don’t forget, just 15 minutes of planning today can set the tone for your entire week. You’ve got the tools, you’ve got the tips, and now it’s time to take action. Let’s crush this week together!
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