By Salma El Sheikh
On Friday December 12th, 2025, I was on the internet reading all about planning and goal setting, not an unusual thing to do this time of year. After finishing my coursework and final exams last November for a Master’s program, I took a few weeks of rest and doing nothing. As I am waiting for graduation day and getting my M.S degree in my hands, finally, I slowly start getting back in the headspace of planning, and focusing on work after my hiatus.
I had been interested in bullet journaling a few years ago, and decided on Friday to check out the blogs on the website, which looks different from what it looked like when I was first interested in 2023. I hadn’t looked at it in a while. They have a title there of a blog post on tracking your cycle.
I’m a woman who has been tracking her cycle digitally for more than 10 years, and who every year gets a new agenda to plan her time with pen and paper. When I was introduced to bullet journaling in November of 2023, I accidentally automatically adapted the framework straight away lined up to my cycle, not the calendar as it exists. I never actually wrote it up like a traditional calendar. Because I was so excited about this and it worked so effectively, I did this in the back of my 2023 planner for two cycles. I did not wait for the new year in less than 2 months to get a new notebook.
At that time, I started following Ryder Carroll’s work, and in December 2023, I was so happy to see that, on his website, he has a channel open for people to pitch their ideas and contribute to his blog, credited ALWAYS of course! I couldn’t find much more inspiration on bullet journaling and cycle tracking simultaneously, and so I thought this is definitely a chance for me to bring up this topic, and be a part of this discussion. So, I sent in this pitch on December 26th, 2023.
Please read it, and don’t skip the bullet journal team’s intro in the first paragraph.
I thought my article idea didn’t interest them, because I never hear from them. They tell you : thanks for pitching, we will reach out if we are interested. This only if they are, because they very politely tell you in context that if your pitch is rejected, that’s not even worth them taking the time to follow up. Understandable, I assume they get a lot of pitches. They never write back, and life goes on, and I stop following Ryder Carroll’s work.
Now, back to last week (This essay will have a lot of time jumps back and forth, so buckle up!). Here is what I find on Friday the 12th, 2025 when I click on a blog post they have on their website dated October 2024.
This is confusing. I double check the date. Then I go to the about page and see that this “author” is actually an employee of Carroll’s. Believe you me I leave a comment, one that would for obvious reasons never get approved to show up. I did not keep a draft of my comment, and did not get an email like I did after I submitted my pitch in 2023.
There is no contact information publicly available for Ryder Carroll, so I send him a DM on Instagram on Friday the 12th, 2025. I will share this at some point. Not that it matters, I know it lands in his junk folder. I’m just confused, angry, and disappointed. But first, I want to share the annotations I made to my pitch, and the “article” Carroll’s website posted. This is not a similar universal story that resonates, this is theft. This is plagiarism.
What is your pitch about? (HOOK US, because remember, we don’t bother communicating rejection to proposals. Get us to read and not reject)
Nice hook, perfect actually! We’re keeping stealing this angle, sorry not sorry.
What types of people…? You said in your intro this is for the rest of the community, of course I’m going to give this answer as much thought as I can and try to be as inclusive as possible. I really hope you like this pitch, so here are several branching angles I thought of based on my main, own personal story that you asked me to provide for us to discuss when I impress you and we follow up.
Structure: outline (please give us your thought process (approach), so we can figure out ‘angles’)
Nice try, you couldn’t!
I want to understand this, so I start to look into things a bit more. It was a sleepless weekend, to put it mildly.
My story of course gets some bullet journal publicity, just with the wrong credits and meh mis-credited copy on the blog site like we see. Also the captions take from my pitch from 2023. Before you say there was no extensive copy and pasting, not of sentences as I phrased them at least, remember this:
💡Paraphrasing without citing your sources is PLAGIARISM.
If you know writing, you know this.
Especially if you run courses on writing. Or take said courses and leave testimonials for them. No way you don’t get the memo (Unless, …. but I’m jumping ahead, let’s stay in October 2024 for a second).
https://www.instagram.com/p/DAvUUaXP897/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Oh, and I see you had no trouble recreating my instructions. I wonder if the picture is so foggy to avoid detection by the original author of the story.
From:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DAoNPzwvh7Y/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
My curious friend notices that a comment is hidden. She also notices it’s a weird comment. Let’s see it.
“A comment here mentions Sarita Walsh and she doesn’t say that she is mentioned in the blog post, that’s strange. “ – curious friend
Why did the person commenting not say something along the lines of “ I also enjoy/ love that you mention Sarita’s work” ? Maybe she didn’t like the “amazing content” as much as it seems, or maybe this “nice two minute read” was consumed during a relaxed scrolling session where no one reads in detail and its easy to miss a brief mention. But if I believe you, that you liked Sarita’s work so much, wouldn’t her name have jumped to you, especially if you read it the day before, not months ago?
Why did the “author”, if she had given this commenter the benefit of the doubt of honestly missing a word or paragraph, not say something along the lines of “ Yes, I do too, I hope Sarita likes my shout out in the blog post” ?
I wonder if Sarita got a notification from IG about this tag, if this comment was hidden.
Now we can’t see exact dates of this conversation, but it looks like some time has passed (comment was 62 weeks ago, reply 61 weeks ago). So now I have to wonder: Was this interaction hidden to cover an edit? Why hide the comment? Was Sarita not happy to be mentioned by such a popular brand and asked to not be associated with it, on social media at least? Not hiding the comment is actually not weird, and hiding it like this is, well, weird.
Are you still reading, because I’m not done finding strange things.
I do the very desperate smart thing of sifting through the bullet journal newsletters I’ve been mostly ignoring for the past two years (I was ignoring these emails so much, I was asked kindly to unsubscribe last October, and again a few days later in November, which I do temporarily). Technology is wonderful, so I can also filter results with emails that mention a familiar name (or two, but let’s just stick with the one for now).
I see that a certain familiar first name keeps popping up in testimonials, all sent June 2025.
Nothing in these emails mentions that the testimonial is from a paid employee. Could it just be two different people? I go look at what the hell a transformation plan is. As I was tuning out of this space in 2024, I remembered something about a writing course launching/delaying, and I vaguely recall that there has been a rollout of a certification program. I land on this page.
What is this testimonial I see centered?
No mention of being an employee. In what world is a testimonial from a paid employee an accurate or authentic one? I also wonder, wouldn’t it be even better marketing to say, even our employees who work so closely to the “source” of this “method” love this so much, that they choose to do this work outside of working hours? Here again I ask, why not disclose this honest information? Curiouser and curiouser.
But Salma, maybe she wasn’t an employee at the time.
Well, thanks to LinkedIn, we can find out.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-zdarska-90aa016a/
She was, and she has been since March 2023, before the writing program rolled out. We also get a link to this certificate.
If she earned this in the summer of 2024, it must mean she was in the first cohort of this writing course that has since been rebranded.
I know, because as a subscriber and BuJo U member, I was invited to join in December 2023, and I even applied, for some reason. I actually forgot that I applied, email sifting is revealing a lot.
Why do these dates matter?
Because she plagiarized my work that I submitted to Ryder Carroll and his team, aka her workplace, while working for and studying with the man, who, TEACHES WRITING.
If her first and so far only published article (if there are more, I’m too tired to dig, they’re not locatable, help me and my curious friend out), was published in October 2024, could she not have been workshopping it WHILE taking the course in the summer? At the minute and a half mark of her testimonial, which exists so openly to incentivize people to invest 1K USD in Ryder Carroll’s course, she talks about a revelation she had in the months after finishing this course. Those are the months leading up to “her” only “article” in October 2024, as of December 16th, 2025.
Not only is this a course on writing, its writing with the purpose of being your authentic self, it was called ‘writing for being’ at the time.
Maybe originality is not a requirement for authenticity? Is that what transformation, the rebrand, here is? If paraphrasing without citing is plagiarism, I argue that transformation without originality is appropriating.
What does the dictionary define to appropriate as? Tell us Cambridge dictionary.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/appropriating
“to take something for your own use, usually without permission”
So here was the memo, another one, because for some reason they seem to keep getting lost. Not that this would ever be an excuse. Without permission, sigh!
Merriam Webster gives as even more painful definitions of appropriating, giving us examples from colonial practices and plagiarism in academia:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/appropriating
“as in seizing
to take or make use of under a guise of authority but without actual right
archaeologists wrongfully appropriated artifacts excavated at ancient sites for their museums”
“as in stealing
to take (something) without right and with an intent to keep
you can’t just appropriate somebody’s term paper and put your name on it!”
Who knew you can learn so much from dictionaries! If only this wasn’t so disappointing. Alas, I sigh again.
I want to switch gears because this is sad. Remember, I said there was a second name. I was reminded because in my filtered search I read this one from last April:
This second name sounds familiar. Yes, this is the name of the contact person on the form I submitted. Obviously I didn’t think a graphic designer was responsible for handling blog pitches, and this just had me keep the shovel and dig on. Man, this is tiring!
I go to the about page to see names of team members, find this person’s full name, and go back to good old linked in.
We can see in LinkedIn that she was promoted in October 2024. We used to until mid December 2025 at least. As I proofread/edit this document 2 weeks later, suddenly that part, almost 3 years worth, of her employment history is missing (??). I saved the page as pdf though before the change, and will share the part that used to be there about her time working for Carroll.
(Was SEO doing so well at this time? content manager must have done so well to now be social media lead.)
We can tell from her proud listing of accomplishments there that this is a time of significant growth for the brand, not just her.
She is also a ghostwriter, or used to be, I can’t tell:
https://clearvoice.com/cv/AlliaLuzong
She also solicited pitches for bulletjournal.com two years ago via her LinkedIn:
This was clearly her job. I see here though that no one bites; no one engages at least. Does this mean I overestimated interest in their brand, that they inflate their market position intentionally in their copy , and they could have actually extended the courtesy of following up with potential contributors, regardless of level of interest? Is this their way of “finding” creative ideas, but wanting to create some loophole?
Salma, you just said you ignored their newsletter, couldn’t you have just missed an email?
The newsletter emails I get to one email address I use for this purpose, just newsletters. I submitted my proposal via my personal email, the one I use for the most important things. You would see this behind the crosses, which are there now to guard my privacy. Those email addresses are not available publicly.
My personal email I check in January (a newsletter I got in my other inbox tells us the team is on break the last week of December 2023, and I also probably heard this in the BuJoU forum) to see if my pitch was picked up. This is the email with very little traffic, because I intentionally avoid newsletters to not miss important communication. This is the email they ask for twice on the form.
Again, I never decide anything, and in no way do they have any PERMISSION or RIGHT from me to use my work without crediting me. I never tell them, in any way, shape or form, take this, I’m out.
If someone says maybe eh eh eh, NO. I never, in my own words, relinquish my rights to my story. I shared it with the explicit promise that these people actually like to give credit where credit is due.
If they had accepted my pitch with me as the writer (I want to write this, duh! Why else would I take the time to fill the form, with my REAL NAME), they should have written to me with great job, let’s get to work, can you please do xyz, send photos to review, … . If I hadn’t replied for some reason ( Impossible to reply to something that doesn’t exist; I couldn’t because they never inform me or write me actually), they should have followed up again, at least twice, first to check why I didn’t reply, and second to inform me they really want to move forward, but they can’t reach me.
If they think this landed in a junk folder for some reason, its their job to send from a verified email that doesn’t do that. Their wording in their soliciting of pitches tells us to please not beg them to publish (they don’t offer publishing guarantees, but promise crediting guarantees), and that they are responsible for communicating once they accept an idea they like.
I have an email in my personal, primary inbox from their director of Education and Community from March 6th, 2024 to update on a course scholarship. I forgot I had even applied to that. If their content manager couldn’t reach me, and the point of having a pitching channel is “connecting community”, why did I not get an email from the director of community? They clearly know how to get to you, when they want to.
They also have my social media handle, if worse comes to worst. They have no excuse.
They never reach out, is my point. And for some reason, months later, they take my idea and give it to someone else.
One has to ask, did they intentionally wait 9 months, because if they published so close to the date of pitching, someone might put two and two together? Did they lie about waiting for content cycle or whatever, what they were actually waiting for was the course roll out, and wanting someone from that course to write this? If the beta cohort fails, this would look bad, so maybe they wanted to take some ‘precautions’. The irony is that if they had posted fast and straight away in January 2024, I would have assumed someone just beat me to the punch.
Salma, your idea is not that original, any one could have had it.
I know women have been tracking their cycles for eons, and humanity in general has been looking at the sky for millennia to orient itself in time, duh! My story that I pitch is original, my angle that they don’t even change is original, and my process is original.
It is. It is. It is.
And riddle me this please. The man works with a team of women mostly/only, and this whole time no one writes about anything remotely close? If they had, I would have been so happy to find the information, use it, maybe even engage with it and ask questions, and go on with my day. He has been doing this for years, and nada? He never thinks half his audience would care? His team just doesn’t also?
If you google search: bulletjournal.com female cycle, bulletjournal.com period tracker, bulletjournal.com menstrual cycle, there is the article with my concept, plagiarized and appropriated and mis-credited, on the top, and nothing else from Ryder Carroll’s website.
Here are screen videos from time of writing, December 16th 2025. (It’s Tuesday already? Man this is tiring.)
Did they just land on SEO gold? Too good not to steal? Especially at a time the company is growing?
My pitch is nice, but come on, we are scaling here and this is money! I just don’t get this insight, or the update when they decide to use my ideas that they asked for and promised to give ME credit for.
Its so disappointing that they couldn’t even do a better job of developing and promoting the idea of aligning monthly planing to a truly personal calendar. (A bit misogynistic too, would you say, or is that going too far?)
How could they develop it though, when the best they can do is appropriate it? They have to want to use the angle excuse, but they can’t. Nice try!
And if the point of the writing courses they offer is authentic being or whatever, writing your own story, bringing about your own metamorphosis into who you were always meant to be, why ask a (former) student to work on someone else’s idea? This is just embarrassing, and makes everyone look really bad, wether they do well or terribly.
Forgive me for inflicting my abysmal handwriting upon the world. Here is a video of my handwritten records from 2023 and the first half of 2024, so you can see the genesis of this story. Thank you for having the attention span to stay this long.
It’s almost impossible to begin to explain what it feels like to see your voice under someone else’s picture. As I have been trying to make sense of this, reading my words and “theirs”, seeing how they use them for their own benefit and personal/professional image, and how others react to those words and praise a voice in the wrong body if you will, I kept thinking back to that scene in the classic Disney movie the little mermaid, when we see Vanessa singing with Ariel’s voice. The feeling this scene evoked in a child or anyone absorbed in watching the movie is uncomfortable, but passing. This feels just sick.
My online and social media activity has been very minimal for years, focused on the essential that I needed for work. I used artwork for instagram, not my own picture, and used to have just one picture of me out there on LinkedIn and a website. My work will have to wait a bit longer now, because I find myself wanting to guard as much privacy as I can, after having shared more than I bargained for.
This is not the story I wanted to share. That story was in the pitch you saw in the beginning. The one I thought no one wanted to hear.
I have been writing this up for four or five days at this point. With nights with little or absolutely no sleep and barely any food in my system, I can’t tell. Did I say I was tired?
I start sleeping better, and do more research on “the method” because I want to see if there are other claims of plagiarism, and well … again I ask myself why has no one seen this before? And why do I keep coming across more suspicious behaviour?
bulletjournal.com exists as a website today, because more than a decade ago people backed up this kickstarter to support this “cause”: a free website to host all these ideas, because they are “invaluable” and Carroll believes everyone should have free access to these ideas to improve their lives.
Nothing in the kickstarter video or campaign copy says PROFIT or intention to SELL PRODUCTS.
Notebooks are offered as a reward to backers who put in a bit more, but this is represented as a reward for pledging, not a main product. In fact, those early backers probably pledged because they wanted a unique notebook, not a mass produced notebook with a unique logo.
Why not start another kickstarter just for notebooks, if demand was so high? Why not do the honest thing of saying I’m seeing a market opportunity here, so let me see if I can offer people this as a product I want to sell, and if people will fund me to set up shop (a shop that makes money), not just this free resource I want to create?
Isn’t that misleading? If bulletjournal.com is a business you want to scale or start, why not just say so? No rules against it on Kickstarter.
There’s nothing wrong with making a living or a profit, but if the intention behind the kickstarter and the promise made is a free resource, isn’t it icky to say the least (maybe illegal, but how would I know) to make a profit out of it, and start selling products to make money? On the same website that needed crowd funding, except the crowd was told this is a free library, not a gift shop? Backers gave money for a free resource and community space, not for Carroll to set up shop.
If things picked up because this is just amazing, and I don’t deny Carroll deserves to make all the money he wants because he helped so many, why not create a separate shop website, and be honest and upfront about it?
It’s as if he wanted to get as much money as possible, and not disclose this as scaling an existing business to make profit.
Here’s what kickstarter chat support had to say about this. This is the AI answer, but the point is valid, no?
So what, he created a company after.
Well, the ethical thing would have been not to embezzle use funds that were originally intended to create a free resource to create a for profit company, or transform that free website that needed crowd funding to provide the “digital” brick and mortar so to speak to set up a shop (who knows what’s going on here, these are just observations, not accusations). Create a new business, why not? Carroll could still have an honest bio and use his bullet journal success story on his CV for any other venture that is not the free website he raised money for. The website he said he wanted to create to curate ideas from the community for free. The irony, I know.
And because the shadiness never ends, he didn’t create the company after, he created it before.
Lightcage LLC exists in the fine print of bulletjournal.com , and some extra digging in the about and support pages makes it seem like it was created in 2015 after the bulletjournal.com , but actually, it was founded in 2007, according to these sources.
https://apps.dos.ny.gov/publicInquiry/
https://rocketreach.co/lightcage-llc-profile_b4427954fa342a29
So no, Lightcage LLC., the company if you do a little digging on the BJ website you find is responsible for the website, exists since 2007, 7 years before the kickstarter. This is not disclosed on the kickstarter campaign.
Nothing on the campaign mentions profit, or intention of making profit, in fact the exact opposite.
It’s as if Carroll not only wanted free market research/ market testing for his business that he already had and wanted to scale, but wanted his target market to pay for this research as well through deceit.
And no, the kickstarter did not serve as a channel to preorder notebooks and do some market testing. If you read the copy of the campaign , this is not a preorder for a notebook business, the notebook was a bonus to incentivize donations, very different things. He never changes the main purpose of the campaign on the main page. He never says there is profit for him, he makes it seem like this other company is offering support for a free cause. Leuchtturm, not his one Lightcage LLC.
Because it’s so popular and people are just hyped to buy notebooks he gets away with this. He never lays out a clear business plan, and I think this is very intentional, because he thinks people will donate more readily for a cause/ free resource than a business that is looking to scale. On the website, he says business started in 2015, but actually, that’s the date the trademark was registered under the business that exists since 2007. This is not a new business, it has been all along, he just doesn’t disclose this, and gets funds to scale under false pretenses.
Just like he gets intellectual input if you will under false pretenses, and misuses it to scale his business (again) via writing courses and great copy with awesome SEO.
What does this have to do with you, Salma? You didn’t pay back in 2014.
This is a clear pattern of misappropriating resources, wether they be financial or intellectual in nature, and shows intentional misleading, right from the start .
This also shows that the original and main purpose of this website is to offer a free digital space for ‘practitioners’. This was the clear message in the kickstarter campaign, and it was on the website and the post used on LinkedIn that asked people to pitch ideas for articles. Even when the blog was pushed to the back of the website so to speak, the blog is still represented as a unifying ground for people to tell their story with this journaling “method”.
Not a space to share stories almost exclusively from employees and students.
Not a space to sell physical products, or courses that cost hundreds/thousands of dollars.
Definitely not a space for Carroll to solicit free ideas that he uses to get traffic to a website he uses to funnel prospective buyers to invest in his physical products and so called “plans”.
All on bulletjournal.com, the website that exists because ca. 2800 people wanted to fund a free resource in 2014.
It also proves that everything is used by Carroll and his company for their profit, and their profit only. This is not a library or “community space”, its an enterprise. If they solicit intellectual property and later use it for getting traffic to their store and eventually money in their pocket by appropriating it to their own intellectual property, the least they can do is keep the promise of giving credit where credit is due (they can’t though, because that’s the definition of appropriating, and we can’t be expected to have known any better until its too late because that’s the definition of being intentionally misled, right from the start).
Extra reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bujo/comments/1f6si3r/just_thinking_aloud/
https://archive.org/details/advanceddayplann00smit0/page/n5/mode/2up
Disclaimer
The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The material is being used for purposes of criticism, comment and reporting only. All rights to the “original” content are held by their respective copyright owners. I do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used (logos, pictures and what not). If you wish to use any copyrighted material from this essay for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain express permission from the copyright owner. I do claim ownership of my original pitch and video, which were copyrighted the second I created them.