Journaling: Index and Key

In my first post on journaling, I referenced the original basic system that Ryder Carroll developed. He listed four core sections to his system: 

• Index/ Key
• Future Log
• Monthly Log
• Daily Log

Today, we are going to focus on the index and key.

1st Journal Index

1st Journal Key

Now, I have a confession. In the eight months I have been bullet journaling, I have only made an index or key twice, in my first journal, which was never completed, and in the teacher journal I am in the process of creating now. After my first journal, I didn't see the need to indexing every minute topic that came up in my life. And, since this was my journal and I new what the bullets meant, I left I could save myself some time by dropping it from my journal. That is until I started setting up my teacher journal and realized there are going to be topics (such as RTII data) that are going to come up several times a month plus the trackers I will be using. So, having those pages listed makes referencing them during meetings much easier. After this realization, I went back and indexed my second bullet journal.

The purpose of the Index is to catalog all the topics that you need access to on a regular basis. Ryder calls these topics, collections. If you look at my 1st Journal Index, you can see that I listed some reoccurring topics in my journal, but I failed to indicate the page numbers. For this layout, I started listing the pages (had I ever finished) on the left and the topics on the right. This is how it was presented for Ryder's system.

2nd Journal Index

In my 2nd Journal Index, you can see that I listed all the topics I needed to keep track of, as well as the page numbers where they are located. Notice that they are not bunched together. I think that was my biggest hang-up in using an index, that the topics jumped pages several times. However, that is precisely why you need an index in your journal. For this layout, I chose to put the topics on the left and the pages on the write. I did this because I wasn't sure how much space I would need to catalog everything. As you can see, there were a couple of topics listed twice because I ran out of room on the original line.

For my teacher journal, I went back to the pages on the left and topics on the right format. I didn't do this for any particular reason. The way I planned my teacher journal, all of my collections WILL be clumped together, for the most part. I did leave room incase I needed to expand this list. I will focus on the setup of my teacher journal in a future post.

I hope that this clarified the purpose and importance of these two journal essentials: Index and Key. Feel free to leave me your comments and questions below. I look forward to hearing from you.

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