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Archiving old bullet journals in your own catalog

So you're getting ready to move to a new notebook. You probably want to make this transition as painless as possible. There are plenty of good ideas for setting up a new journal, but what if you want to keep the old journals? Lots of us do.

Bullet Journal archiving old notebooks

I just moved into a new bullet journal, the Universal Journal Slim. As the years go by, there will be many journals on my shelf since I intend to keep the old ones. In keeping things simple, I'd rather not reproduce old collections and other information into my new notebook unless it's really necessary. But if I need to reference an old journal I'd like that to be easy as well. So I'll use another journal to act as a long term catalog for my bullet journal archive.

Each time I move into a new notebook, I plan to copy the old index as a new chapter in the catalog. That way if I ever need to go back, I don't have to search each individual notebook. I can simply scan through the chapters of the catalog and find what I need. The catalog will need it's own index, of course. It's a bullet journal, too.

The originator of the bullet journal method, Ryder Carroll, also has some tips for migrating to a new notebook. See his post Yearly Migration.

I may work on a plan for a secondary list of the archive. It could be useful to have a topics list which references major aspects of this or that project I'm working on. For example, I design board games. Some are long term games with a lot of depth and replayability, customizability, etc. These are complex game designs and I can see how it would be helpful to be able to easily find an idea I had years ago and recorded in one or more notebooks. I'd prefer to somehow keep that all in one catalog if possible. Don't know how yet.

How do you keep track of info in your old journals? Comment here and be sure to subscribe.


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