In this instructional video, Matt Ragland shares his "1-1-1" method for achieving better work‑life balance during the holiday season using a Bullet Journal. He explains that the method consists of three pillars: one work‑related to‑do project to complete between Thanksgiving and New Year, one personal "for you" project that brings enjoyment or family value, and a dedicated time for an annual review. Matt demonstrates how to define the outcome of the work project, break it into milestones, translate those milestones into weekly deliverables on a weekly spread, and further decompose subtasks onto daily pages. He then outlines a personal project—writing an in‑depth one‑page review of Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces—and shows how to protect daily reading and note‑taking time, linking the notes to his Zettelkasten/ Roam workflow. The third pillar, the annual review, is presented as a reflective practice using prompts about highlights, lessons, and momentum across work, personal, and family domains, with suggestions for sourcing material from journals, content archives, and social media. Throughout, Matt emphasizes the importance of blocking time, creating small momentum‑building steps, and using the Bullet Journal as a visual anchor for balance. He concludes with calls to action: comment on viewers' own 1‑1‑1 plans, subscribe, and join his email list for deeper lessons and webinars.
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Work-life balance is something that's always been a challenge for me. I like to get a lot done personally and professionally, and the holiday season should be a time of rest, but often for me it just ends up being another time of rush. In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you my 1-1-1 method for better work-life balance during the holidays. Hi everyone, my name is Matt Ragland, and I create videos to help you get unstuck, plan productively, and actually do the work that matters to you. Oftentimes, I do that with a Bullet Journal, which is what we're going to be talking about and using today as a way to follow this 1-1-1 method for achieving better work-life balance in the holiday season. 'Cause let's face it, the holidays should be a time of rest, but I know for me, oftentimes, it can be a time of stress. It can be a time of rush. And I am really focused this year in creating a calm, productive, mindful experience for myself and for my family as we turn the page on 2020 into 2021. Because I don't know about you, but every holiday season in this stretch of time between Thanksgiving and New Year's, I always think that I can do way more than I'm actually capable of. And what I've realized after doing a number of annual reviews the past several years is that I can really only do 2 or 3 things in the holiday season. And that's why I want to encourage you in this video to follow my 1-1-1 method for better work-life balance in the holidays. And that stands for 1 to-do, 1 for you, and 1 review. So let's go into my lovely Baron Fig Fall Confidant and take a look at how I'm kind of putting this into my Bullet Journal. What we're doing is one to-do, one for you, and time to review. Let's talk about each of those in a little bit more detail. The one to-do is one work project for you to do and to complete between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The new year. So you're giving yourself 4 to 6 weeks to focus on a specific project that you can bring to completion before the new year starts. I don't want you to think that this has to be too complicated. But what I'm doing here is that I'm clearly defining what the outcome of the to-do is like. This is for work. And for me, it's I'm starting a new coaching program in January. And I just listed some of the key objectives, like big picture things that I know I need to do. For this project. These could be milestones. These could be like just things like random tasks that I need to do. So just do an initial like little brain dump of the things that you know are related to this project and just list them right here. But the last piece of this is I'm going through and I'm establishing the weekly deliverable for what I need to make sure I have done at the end of each week in order to move the project through to completion. All I'm doing right here to translate this into my actual weekly spread, I'm looking at it and this Black Friday bundle, which heads up, get on my email list if you want to know about the special Black Friday bundle that I'm doing, is this right here of the coaching funnel. And so you can remember that this week 1 deliverable is to wrap up the funnel and the offer. So I'm just translating this over to my weekly spread. So the coaching funnel, finish on CK, clarify the offer, and then if possible, get some first calls booked. Now I would then go to transferring this, like if there are any like subtasks for finishing the ConvertKit funnel or clarifying the offer, these are going to go into the daily spreads or the daily lists right here. So you can see how this works. Initial brainstorm, weekly deliverables, translating those like broad big picture weekly deliverables over to my weekly spread right here, and then if there are subtasks or specific things to do, transferring those into my daily layouts. The second is the one for you, and this could be something that helps give you more work-life balance going into the new year. Now when you think about the for you project, this is something that you should just want to do personally for the enjoyment of doing it or because it's going to be fun for your family or whatever it might be. And so for me, the project that I'm focusing on is that I've been wanting to write a really good in-depth book review for myself. I'll probably end up sharing it with you because that's what I do, but write a really good book review that just gathers all the notes that I take about a specific book and create something that I could just look at as a one-page review and be like, ah, these are all of the main takeaways and lessons from this book. And the one that I'm starting with is Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman. The reason that I want to go through this book is one, it is pretty short, so under 138 pages. But also this was recommended to me by several people because to try and pick apart and understand how does someone who's brilliant teach someone something complicated in a really, like, simple and understandable manner. I would like to think that I want to develop into the kind of person that can take complex topics and explain them really easily. So I'm going to use this book as a template for understanding how to do that. Plus, I think physics are pretty interesting. Now, to some of you, that may not sound like a very good life balance project.. But in the past, I've done projects around the home. It could be something that I'm putting together for the kids. It could be just reading books and not reviewing them, whatever it might be. But it's something that I just want to do for myself. Now for this, I'm not doing weekly deliverables. I'm not treating this as much of a project, but I'm mainly just trying to block and protect time to read and take notes every day. Now then I do need to review those notes. And possibly put them in Roam and clean them up in Roam. This is also a really good practice for me in my note card taking, note card method that you can read more about in this Zettelkasten video that I did a couple of weeks ago. So be on the lookout for this. You're still probably going to get access to it, but this is something that for me, I've just really wanted to start doing more of. The third item is to conduct an annual review. And again, this might on its surface look like something that is a little more work-related, but what I have found after writing 5, 6, 7 years of annual reviews now is that it does give me a really good balance of looking back and thinking about what were the highlights, what were the lessons of the year, what were the things that really stood out to me, what did I really enjoy, what were the milestones both work and personally for our family, and it gives me a really good picture of what was work-life balance about? What were the things that mattered to me? What were the things that stood out? I use these prompts from thinking about highlights and lessons from the year, just kind of thinking about what is top of mind for me. But this is where, and let me just be kind of meta here with you for a second, to think about— I have a note card about this— and think about, you know, not just what are the highlights and the lessons, But one of the good ways to figure this out for yourself without relying on just what's top of mind is this is where journaling is incredibly helpful. And if you want to get into more of a journaling habit, I have some resources to help you with that. But looking back through your bullet journal, if you're a content creator, like the type of content you create can, you know, kind of trigger your memory and how things worked and how they happened throughout the year.. And then like looking back through even really simply like photo albums, Instagram, if you do a thing, there's something called like top 9 where you can look at your top, your top engaged and liked posts. So all of those could trigger different memories for writing an annual review. If you have been following me about journaling and especially about note-taking lately, then you know that your like top-of-mind memory retrieval can be a little unreliable when it comes to just thinking about, hmm, what were those highlights? So the way this review works for me is mainly kind of like the For You project. I'm just protecting and blocking time, like a couple of hours for this, to go through the source material, whether that's my journal, my bullet journal, content that I've created, photo album from the past year, Instagram even, and I'm just starting to make lists.. And then I'll just start kind of expanding on those. So I'll give each one a couple of lines so I can make additional notes. And then because I always publish my annual review, you certainly don't have to do that, but I use all these as like ways to start different sections of my annual, annual review when I actually publish it. For something like an annual review, you will probably have things that pop right to mind, and those are important, and you should write those down. But giving yourself time to do an annual review, even if it's just a list of bullet points, even if you're just recording a voice memo of yourself, if you're doing a video like this, it can be a really, really valuable way to just take a deep breath with yourself and think about what happened this year. What could I do different next year? Do I want to do anything different next year? And one thing that I would think about is in the different parts of your life, whether it's work, personal, family, friends, things that you want to be improving. Ask yourself and give yourself an honest answer of, am I creating momentum, positive momentum in these things that I want to be doing in my life, the things that matter to me, or am I getting myself stuck? Am I in a rut? Am I like reversing rather than creating momentum? Because it is something that is very real. Like, momentum is very real when it comes to where you want to be going in your life, and especially with the habits that you create. But really, I'm just, I'm giving myself a few pages here in my bullet journal to focus on this 1-1-1 method: one to-do, one for you, and time to review. As a bit of encouragement on those parts of your life where you want to create a better habit in, you want to create positive momentum in, just take that first small step that can create that momentum. And when you think about how you get the ball rolling on something, like literally, it can just be a little, a little push, a little poke that gets it moving in the right direction. And then you just kind of keep on pushing ever so slightly, ever so lightly, will keep you moving in the right direction with the things that you want to be doing in your life. So I'd really love to hear from you in the comments what your 1-1-1 strategy is for this holiday season where you can really look for some positive work-life balance going into the holiday season where our families, our friends, like just people in our communities need us to be present and focused on them more than ever. So let us know in the comments what is your to-do review, and a thing that you're going to do for you in order to find that work-life balance in a busy holiday season as we turn the page into 2021. Thank you so much for watching this video. I love creating these for you. Look for a new video every week as we go towards the new year. I can't wait to share these with you. Thank you so much for all the kind words and comments in my last video about how I Quit my job, and now I'm doing YouTube and many other things full-time, including coaching and courses, consulting, lots of exciting things that are coming up. So stay subscribed to this channel. You can also subscribe to my email list to get even more information about ways that we can work together, additional lessons, tips, strategies, insider VIP webinars that I don't really publish here on YouTube. So the email list is the place for that. Thank you so much again, and I can't wait to see you in the next video. Thanks. Bye. Hey, a couple little extra things before we go. If you're not signed up to my email list, you totally should because that's where I send out an additional weekly lesson and I'll do free webinars. I'll offer deals and discounts to my trainings and courses, resources. So definitely sign up to that. And if you're not subscribed to the channel yet, please do that as well. Thanks so much.
