Found a 1987 BuJo at a garage sale in Ann Arbor and the margins surprised me

I picked up a used notebook at a garage sale on Packard Street last Saturday for two dollars, mostly because the cover looked interesting. Turns out the guy had been keeping a daily log in it since 1987, and he used a simple dash system in the left margin for tasks and a dot for notes, basically the same signifiers we all use now. What got me was how he marked unfinished items with a small arrow to the next day, page after page, for 3 years. Has anyone else come across old journals like this that show the system was around long before the internet made it a trend?

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

ivan52216h ago

The arrow thing is the part that really gets me. People act like migrating tasks is some new trick from the app era, but this guy was doing it by hand in 1987 with nothing but a pen and some patience. Three years of arrows means he wasn't just writing stuff down, he was actually going back and dealing with it, which is more than most of us do with our fancy digital setups. What stands out to me is the dash and dot system being basically identical to what gets taught now, which makes me wonder how much of this stuff got passed around by word of mouth before the internet ever put it in one place. Some office worker in Michigan probably copied it from a coworker who copied it from a boss, and it just kept going. Makes you realize the tools change but the basic human problem of too many tasks and not enough time hasn't budged one bit.

5