I’m going to use the tag ‘bulletjournal-hacks’ henceforth, for additional notations/conventions I come up with, to enhance/improve upon the basic bullet journal. Today’s addition is ‘Email Reference’, or EMR. What is it used for?
If your task/note is related to an email you’ve received or sent, it would be handy to make a note of the email in the journal, to allow you to easily lookup the email later, should you want to do so.

I decided to put my EMR at the tail-end of the book. You could simply flip to the last few pages of your diary, and designate the leading page as EMR (email reference). In my diary with 159 pages, I simply selected page 155, and used it for EMR (and made a corresponding index entry for it). An EMR entry would look like this:

Serial Number/Partial email id/Partial subject/Date/Direction

The serial number can simply start at 1, and be incremented by one for every subsequent entry. The direction is a simple <- or ->, indicating whether the mail was received by you, or initiated by you. The combination of direction, partial email address, date, and subject are more than enough to search and find the email, irrespective of what email client/software you use. In my monthly or future logs, I can provide some additional context by simply using EMR . In daily logs, I can just use the EMR entry, to keep the entry even more brief.

My monthly log entry might look like this:

• Work on new project proposal: EMR-17

Since the daily log entry doesn’t need to be very descriptive, as it only needs to last for the day, I can simply write the EMR number, with the correct signifier. A daily log entry might therefore simply be:

• EMR-17 or > EMR 17.

The corresponding EMR entry might look like this:

17/sender@example.net/Invitation for project prop/20170906-1735 <-

Tags: bulletjournal-hacks, bulletjournal