Staying Organized despite dissociation (Life Skills)

Especially when you are struggling with amnesia and your memory lets you down frequently, it becomes a priority to organize life and use the best tools available.

Food (and drinking) logs can help you keep track of your intake.

Keeping an eye on finances protects you from ugly surprises.

Daily to-do-lists can help you not to forget half of our tasks (or do them twice!)

That means a lot of papers, sticky notes, chaos… Not necessarily!

We started using a Bullet Journal instead.

A Bullet Journal starts with an empty book. The rest is up to you. It is common to have a calendar function, but it is very flexible and can be adapted to your needs. Our Bullet Journal contains overviews over the year, month and week as well as our to-do-lists.

We use a daily time-line where appointments are color-coded and a parallel to-do-list. This helps to see when there is time to do things from the list and in which order tasks should be done.

In addition to the calendar we use the Bullet Journal as a tracker.

That means weekly

• food/drinking logs

• meal plans

• sleeping log

• exercise logs

Right now the only monthly log we keep is about finances/spending.

We also have certain pages for

• thought collections

  

  wish-list

• therapy goals

• wish lists

• larger purchases/ shopping lists

• addresses

• emergency/safety plan

• skill-lists

• routines/rituals

• system rules / core values

All of the sticky notes and messages we used to leave everywhere were “eaten” by the Bullet Journal.

We do not use the Bullet Journal for conversations. There is a different place for that. Keeping things separate helps to stick to “organization” instead of entering relational struggles.

The book has to be kept at a certain place in our home and must not be moved. This system is easily sabotaged, so if you are still in war with yourself it might be too early to try this.

You can find detailed instructions on how to set this up on YouTube. I recommend watching a few videos because everyone does it differently and there is something to learn from all of it. For the most basic instructions visit www.bulletjournal.com

[If you go to YouTube or Pinterest for this you will soon notice that some people make this a piece of art. that is one way to work with it. It is not necessary. Our Bullet Journal is meant for work and we don’t decorate it. If decorating is something you enjoy, by all means, do it.]