My Evening Routine with a Bullet Journal: 3 Things I Do to End the Day with Intention

Hey everyone, it's Matt, and welcome to another Bullet Journal productivity video. You're probably already noticing, different backdrop. This is our kitchen, pulling you out of the regular office to show you a little bit more of the house, just a little bit. And also that it's really dark in there. Why is it dark? Because it's evening. Why am I shooting in the evening instead of the morning? Because, to balance the morning routine video that I did recently, I wanna show you a little bit more of what my evening routine is like, and also to encourage you to really think about how important your evening wind-down routine is as you, like, wrap up the day and then move into a more productive morning. Because it was a real game changer for me to realize that what really kickstarted a good morning was going to bed and having a good evening the night before.. Because like trying to just force yourself to sleep less, you can do that for a little while, but like, you know, for a lot of us, you kind of understand the amount of sleep that you need. For me, it's around 7 hours, give or take 30 minutes. And so if I can go to bed at 10, which is pretty reasonable, then I can wake up at 5. So that's what I want to be talking with you about today. I'm going to show you how I wind down with the Bullet Journal and little Baby BuJo, that like little tiny confidant that I have, and also the Field Notes for time tracking. So You'll see all this on the kitchen table. Thanks so much for joining me. Make sure you give this a thumbs up and subscribe if you're here for the first time. And make sure you check out that morning routine video as well. All right, here we go. All right, so how I'll start here at the end of the day is I'll flip to the particular day and week that I'm at. So this is a Tuesday right now and it's April 10th. So the week of April 9th through 13th. And as you can see, what I've just been doing is going through and filling up my 10 blocks right here. Let me tilt it up a little for you. Going through my 10 blocks, shading these in as normal. So I've been working a lot on onboarding and a program we have called Creator Pass, doing some support, creator care, normal things, normal things, but filling all these in. So I can already see now I did block a lot of time for onboarding and for Creator Pass this week. So even though I already, already have two of these blocks filled up, you can see I have two others, another whole nother one ready to go for each. So right on track with each of those things over here. This is where I'm doing my agenda. And what I'm doing is I'm just making a quick checkmark to make sure that these things been done. Had a couple of meetings get moved, and so what I'm doing is I'm just drawing an arrow line and an arrow through those and notating the day that it was moved to. I'll talk more about that in a second. Realizing now that I don't like— I don't really like this setup as much as I do my overhead, but still gonna roll with it for this episode. You can see I've got these top tasks over here to the right. I've also been adding in a little bit more personal to-do, and so book the Airbnb, did that last night. Research some bags that we need for a trip. That we're taking in June and then have some more top tasks down here. You can see we've got a couple. You can see I have a couple of tasks that have been migrated over from either a previous day or moved or just ready to be moved over to Wednesday instead, but still doing all these normal things in my top tasks. And then I've already done some of these, some of these things. But let me show you the other stuff that I'm doing. I've got all of my top tasks kind of listed out over here. I've already put in my meetings. I moved over the meeting that was canceled from earlier. So this one, this one right here migrated here. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these migrated tasks from yesterday. So workshop descriptions, and I'm just going to be migrating them over to Wednesday. So I do all of these and this just helps me get a handle on what I've been doing today and the true top tasks that need to be taken care of tomorrow. So this gives me a good place to start. So when I wake up, when I get to work, I know I can just look at this and know this is what I need to start with. Okay, so from a work perspective, this is what I'll do. I'll fill in these 10 blocks, I'll shade them in as needed, I'll check off my agenda items and either check off or migrate any of my top tasks and move them over as well. Now the next thing that I'll do is go through and make sure that I fill in my time. So I haven't done a lot of this so far today. Let me go ahead and zoom in for you. But you can see everything right here. So what I did, I just, I slept in a little bit, up at 5:45, made some coffee, ended up journaling for about 45 minutes in the morning, and then we had breakfast, and then I spent some time with family, son, and then started working at 8. So 8 to, 8 to 4:30 was work. And then, so what I'll do here is I'll start this at 4, and I'll still put work here from 4 to 4:30. Remembering, sorry, I haven't noted this in a while. I just, I just know, you know, 15-minute mark, 30-minute mark, 45-minute mark. If you're watching this for the first time and you're like, what the heck is this? Make sure that you check out the time tracking videos. I'll link to them in cards up here, up here. I don't know, you'll see them. And then I went on a bike ride from 4:30 to 5:45, all the way to the 45 mark, which would be right here. And then I did more work. You can see I'm just filling in, filling in with lines to make sure that everything syncs up. And we had dinner basically until 7:45. Oops. More time with my son. And then see, it's 8 o'clock right now. So I've been working on this video since 7:45. Right now it's about 8:15. Let's just say I'm going to do this. Let's just say I'm going to do this for the rest of the hour in one way or another, going until 9:00. And then from 9:00, I'm probably going to work on taxes. Shout out to the government. Hopefully just for 30 minutes. I'm almost done. And then probably read. And that's pretty much it. Okay. So this is how, this is how I wind down and track my time at the end of the day. Normally, like I said, it's about 8:00 PM. Right now, and I'll normally do this closer to 9:00 when the day is like fully, fully done. The other thing that I'll do at the end of the day almost every single day is I always try and journal and just create a couple of short lines, sometimes short, sometimes not so short. I try not to judge it at all, just a little bit of how the day went. So you can see I've been doing this for pretty much, pretty much every day this year, and I've really enjoyed it. Sometimes it's like just a lot. Sometimes it's not very much, like this could be multiple days, but a lot of thoughts, sometimes little sketches thrown in here. I shared with some of you on Instagram recently, like this one specifically, working on my food illustrations here. Breakfast burrito, burger, soft serve ice cream. This is the main thing that I use this Baron Fig Confidant pocket size for, is just my daily logbook. And you can see I also wrote up here a 2018 log. It's totally not gonna, it's totally not gonna fit all of 2018. Like you can see, I'm about halfway, halfway through now, and we're definitely not halfway through the year. Alright everyone, let me know what your evening routine is in the comments below, because whether or not you're intentional about it, we all have an evening routine. So I'd love to know whether you're embarrassed about it or not. I had a terrible evening routine for a while. I'll let you know what it is in the comments, so check that out. And let me know what yours is, whether you're doing some— can't hold on to things— whether you're doing some time tracking, whether it's a journal, logbook, or you're breaking down your big BuJo at the end of the day. Let me know. And also try and go to bed a little bit earlier, or maybe you go to bed early already, but let me know what kind of changes you might be making to your evening routine that allow you to get a head start, head start almost, on your morning routine, because they, to me, they absolutely work together. A couple other things that I want to ask you about as we're wrapping up here is I have a brand new Instagram account. A lot of you have already checked it out. I sent it out in an email. So, two things: make sure you check out Bullet Journal Guy on Instagram. I'm going to link to it below. And also, get on the email list if you're not there yet. Make sure you check it out. You can go to bulletjournal.guide— bulletjournalguide.com. I'll do a couple of links in the description below and also up here so you can get on the email list. We do some cool extra stuff on there, and those were the first people that knew about the Bullet Journal giveaway. And so it's a great place to be. I send out like more regular tips and just little extra things. So it really is like a little bit of an insider access to some more, some more ideas and tips for the Bullet Journal. But thank you so much for watching this and every video. Give it a thumbs up, a like, give it a subscription. I'm talking too much, but I'm really glad you're here. I appreciate everyone, and let me know how I can help. Let me know some other videos that you want, but I've got, I've I've got a full load ready for ya. Full load? That sounds terrible. Let me know what you think about the kitchen also. See ya.