We tend to present an image of creativity as this place of chaos and confusion.

Paper scattered atop a desk, post-its placed everywhere from your bathroom mirror to on top of your milk jug,

or if you live in Brooklyn, on your coconut milk.

It's assumed that to be creative, you must be unorganized, overwhelmed, and frantic.

But that simply isn't true. Some of the most successful people I know

have developed a system to keep their creative projects completely organized. If you're starting

something big, be it a film, a new book, or a client project, you have a massive amount of

information to catalog. And I'm sorry to say, but your brain alone isn't up to the challenge. A tornado of

papers and a desktop cluttered with 200 icons will only serve to distract you. You must stay

organized. It's the only way to do your best work. This is episode 19 of The Ground Up

Show.

My guest today is writer Carol, a digital product designer and creator of the Bullet Journal.

He's been featured by the New York Times, Fast Company, and LifeHacker, and he's got an amazing TEDx talk called How to Lead an Intentional Life.

Ryder, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to have you here.

I got to look at some of the stuff that you do, including the bullet journal, and it's pretty damn cool. Do you want to briefly explain what it is? Sure. I like to define bullet journal as a mindfulness practice that's disguised as a productivity system.

So it uses basically just a paper notebook to help you keep your mind clear and keep you aware

of the things that you need to do. And more importantly, keep you aware of why you're doing

those things. So it's a daily routine. It's really flexible

and it's really designed to become whatever you needed to be. Have you always been a fan of

analog and actually writing and journaling? It seems like there's almost a resurgence of that today with the Moliskin notebook and bullet

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