Technical Writing and Bullet Journaling: the Odd Couple
“Writing” in “technical writing” dominates over “technical,” and writing means tracking things in an linear and purposeful manner
Being a technical writer is much more than delivering user manuals. It’s a way of looking at the world by simplifying the language required to describe it.
Life is hard. Life is simple. Both sentences are meaningless. The language we use to narrate life is either hard or simple.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s meaningless to state that life is hard or simple to accept. I’m speaking about understanding life and its happenings.
The daily effort of technical writers is simplifying concepts to make them simple and actionable by users. Regardless of the problem’s complexity, the solution they describe must be simple. Otherwise, instead of delivering a solution, they provide another problem and fail in their primary goal: facilitating decisions.
When you chase facilitating decisions, you come across a bulleted list sooner or later. Why? It’s a way — I’d say the way — to make things linear. Look at whatever instruction manual; you’ll find the list of what users can do, the list of actions users must take to accomplish what they can do, the list of what users cannot do, and so on. Lists are everywhere, regardless of the product or service the instruction manual explains.
It’s the same for life.
Technical writing is planning and tracking
As technical writers, we plan and attend interviews with experts, understand audiences, and plan writing and publishing the most straightforward concepts and instructions possible.
Let’s write it in a slightly different way. As technical writers we:
- Plan interviews with experts.
- Attend interviews with experts.
- Understand audiences.
- Write concepts and instructions.
- Publish the most straightforward concepts and instructions.
That’s a bullet list! It’s the same content as at the beginning of the paragraph but much more readable.
The same applies to writing instruction manuals: it’s a linearization endeavor.
Bullet journaling is tracking and planning
On the other hand, the subtitle of The bullet journal method — by Ryder Carroll — says:
Quote: Track the past, order the present, design the future
Isn’t it the technical writing mindset applied to life? Indeed, life doesn’t come with an instruction manual, but it’s up to us to write it!
It’s no coincidence that the book begins precisely with a return to childhood and then gets to the bullet journaling method. Like in technical writing, before explaining, the premises are listed.
Bullet journaling is technical writing for life
Bullet journaling is a sort of meta-technical writing: the instruction manual about writing the most relevant instruction manual that describes our life. It’s the effort to stay conscious of what happens and what we want to happen.
Often, great things happen when enough awareness arises about a domain to get into its meta-domain. Think of Facebook rebranding into Meta: the marketing side of such a rise.
Bullet journaling is a terrific enabler of going meta in our lives, day by day, month by month, year by year. Even life by life?
Takeaway
Some might be frightened by considering bullet journaling as the technical writing of life, as if bullet journaling were the instruction manual of life. If this is your feeling, I ask you a question: why?
Life itself seems to be a technique to preserve information and time and promote consistent transformations. On the other hand, any technique is a list of steps to execute to accomplish its purpose. So why shouldn’t life have an instruction manual?
Sure, life’s instruction manual is not something given: we have to write it. That’s where journaling comes to play, and that’s where bullet journaling reveals its power.
My truth: Things are less complex when you write them down!
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