- I learned a productivity system that's helping to organize my life, improve my workflow, remember more of what I learn and add two inches to my biceps. Okay, one of those isn't true, but still, technology continues to move at lightning speed. Thousands of apps are launched each year.
AI chatbots are changing how we think about the future and we're learning more every day about how humans can create at their highest level. Instead of getting completely left behind, I decided to lean in to learn as much as I could. How could we make sense of all the information we consume?
What are the best tools to keep track of all of our ideas? What do the most productive people in the world have in common? The lessons I learned taught me how to best organize my own life, and they might help you as well.
Also, you'll add at least two inches to your biceps. This all started with just one question. "How can I improve my memory?
" Ever since I was young, I've been surprised by just how terrible my memory is. And to this day, I still struggle to memorize facts. I always forget people's names, and I lose my shoes at least three times a week.
Among the many experts talking about how to improve our memory online, there was one approach that seemed very different from the others. - My solution is kind of, maybe unexpected. It's kind of counterintuitive, which is to go to the opposite extreme and to not try to remember anything.
It's to actually outsource that job, delegate the job of remembering, and give it over to intelligent machines that have perfect memory and never forget anything. And that these days are always just a click, a tap, or a phone away. - [Matt] Tiago has spent the past decade perfecting a system to help people organize their lives digitally.
He calls it Building a Second Brain. That's also the name of his book. It's an insanely complicated structure of applications, tools, and techniques that are synthesized into a database for future recollection.
Or, put another way, - It's note-taking. Take notes on quotes you hear, things you learn, lessons you take away from books, articles, courses, conferences. - Okay.
It's gotta be a little bit more than note-taking, right? - Except there's a difference. Most people take notes for the short-term.
It's like they take notes just for a class they're taking or a meeting they're in, or a phone call. But to me, when I put in that effort, when I actually put in the effort to save that note, to me, I was creating this lifelong treasury of knowledge. I thought, every little note that I put into this system, could be useful far into the future.
And so I just started using a digital notes app which is widely available, in a way that was kind of more long-term, more systematic, more strategic, more intentional. - When a Notes app is working well, you can connect the dots between different projects, store resources and keep track of your best ideas. When a Notes app isn't working, you struggle to find things, your ideas get lost, and you have trouble getting started on projects.
Taking a look at my own Notes app, I could tell that there was a lot of room for improvement. So with the help of Tiago, I went about building a second brain of my own. Now taking a look here, you can see that I do have some organization.
The notes folder is the default folder for all of my notes. Then I've got a personal folder, a videos folder for all of my ideas for this channel and a few others. Now the system is broken.
I almost always create a note and just leave it in the default notes folder. That's why there are over 1,000 notes in this folder right now. All right, so it's time to take some of Tiago's advice here and clean this up the best that I can.
As I started to go through my notes, I realized just how messy things had become. Quotes, keyboard shortcuts, measurements for a shelf and some brilliant ideas like this one, called Armed and Dangerous. It reads, "Pixar movie about a guy with one arm that finds his second arm but its got a life of its own.
" I mean, these notes need to be protected at all costs. In all seriousness, there were a lot of really important notes in here. I just need to define them.
My previous strategy of organizing these notes into generic folders like documents, photos, personal, and business, just wasn't working. I have one folder that's just personal. So it's literally everything from my personal life just gets thrown in there.
So Tiago recommended that I use a folder structure called Para. - P-A-R-A. Which stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives.
- [Matt] In Projects, you store things you're actively working on. Like your office reno or upcoming trip to Europe. Then in Areas, you place things that are areas of responsibility in your life, like vehicles or taxes.
In Resources, you store things like book notes and inspiration. And finally, in Archives, you move the things that are no longer needed, but might be useful in the future. 24 hours later, and I'm officially done organizing all of my notes.
Let's take a look at what it looks like now. Right here in Projects, you'll find all my active projects. So things like YouTube videos I'm working on, an editing course, pregnancy, parenting and even golf.
That's right, I'm trying to pick up golf. In Areas, you'll find things like taxes, immigration, cooking and healthcare. And below this, we've got Resources.
This is really a work in progress, but it's gonna be the future home of all of the ideas that I learned through books, podcasts and articles online. And finally, we have Archive. This is where I'm gonna be archiving all of my old projects.
I organized 1,000 notes into folders, deleted another 1,000 completely, and threw 500 into a general archive folder in case I need them later. And if you were wondering, yes, I held onto that amazing Pixar idea. I also organized my Google Drve files into that same PARA format.
In the process, I almost deleted 15 years of tax data and nearly gave myself a heart attack. But luckily, I was able to undelete the files. Personally, apart from that brief moment of panic, I found the process of organizing to be oddly satisfying.
And I was starting to realize how my second brain could be helpful if I stick with it over time. - When there's a place for something, you find more of it, right? When there's a special place for a certain kind of information, you're gonna start to notice all these little bits and pieces of information that relate to those projects.
Once you save them, which can be by typing a note into a phone, it can be taking a photo with your smartphone camera, it can be downloading something from a website. It now doesn't go into this black pit, this black bottomless hole of stuff. It goes right into that Project folder.
- As I got on with my life, I continued to take notes as usual. By default, all of my new notes saved to my generic Notes folder. This acts as a kind of inbox for my notes.
I'm taking a note right now for a company that I just learned about that helps to offset your carbon footprint. So that's pretty cool. And then every week, I go through my notes like I go through my email and organize them into the appropriate folders.
This was already working so much better than my previous spray-and-pray approach. If you're more of a visual learner, you might be interested in checking out a free app called Milanote. They're actually my sponsor for this week's video.
The best way that I can describe this app is that it's a notes app for creatives. And it's pretty amazing. Whether you're decorating your home office, or working on an infographic, Milanote is a great way to pull together your ideas and mind map projects.
Let me show you a project that I recently used them for. I wanted to give my YouTube videos a design refresh. So I created a new board called YouTube Design.
And I plugged in their Moodboard template. From there, I added inspiration from creators that I admire. I included photos, thumbnails and graphics that caught my eye.
And I made another section with all the things that I think that we're currently doing right, like these GIFs. And then I shared it with my designer. This specific board wasn't super structured and that was the point.
I wanted it to be a playground where we could throw around ideas, add comments, and narrow in on a vision. And here is the final look that we landed on. If you wanna get started with Milanote, I've got some good news.
It is absolutely free. So click the link in the description below. There's a link down there.
And you can get started on your next creative project. Check it out. Let me know what you think.
Throw a comment down below if you love it as much as I do. So the most important part of your second brain is the Notes app. But as I learned, that really is just the center of your second brain.
There's a little bit more to it than that. When you zoom out, there are other tools that connect to it. Some things you probably already have, like a to-do list and a calendar, and another category that I personally never even considered until speaking with Tiago, called capture tools.
It turns out that these play an important role in your second brain. - Capture tools are a specific category of apps that are designed to do exactly that. To get information, capture information, from either the digital world or the physical world and get it into your notes.
- [Matt] My current process is to either jot down a note into Apple Notes and then forget about it forever, or highlight a physical book and then forget about it forever. Having literally never spent a second thinking about capture tools, I asked Tiago if he had any recommendations as I got started. - Are you familiar with a service called Readwise?
- No. No, I haven't heard of it. - Oh my gosh, you're gonna eat this up.
Readwise is pretty much besides, like a Notes app itself, my absolute number one recommendation. But it basically connects different apps. So what happens basically is every time I make a highlight in a Kindle book, Readwise is sort of, it's like this process running in the background, this little helper, it detects when I've made a highlight and with no further action, there's no exporting, no syncing, no whatever it is, it automatically imports not just that highlight, but every single highlight from the entire book.
Silently, quietly in the background, over to my Notes. It just appears in my Notes. - Clearly excited to get started, I downloaded Readwise, connected it to my Kindle and got going.
Digging into a new book now, called "The Psychology of Money. " Gonna be taking lots of highlights and notes along the way. As I started reading new books, I felt more confident I was gonna be able to track and sort all the most important information I was consuming.
Instead of just crossing my fingers and hoping I'd remember everything, I got really intentional about the information I wanted to see. Sometimes it was for a specific project I was working on. Or in the case of this personal finance book, it was lessons that would help me for years to come.
I can't be the only one that always highlights the popular highlights. 11,439 people can't be wrong. So I just finished reading "The Psychology of Money," and all my highlights are automatically populated here to Readwise.
There are 68 of them in total. As I went to sync all these highlights to Apple Notes, I ran into a problem. Apparently Apple doesn't let you sync with Readwise.
The only solution would be to switch my Notes app. I'm not doing it! I am not gonna switch my Notes app.
I just organized Apple Notes. It took me seven and a half hours to code through and organize the whole thing. I'm not switching.
Even though I can't use this feature, it's still nice to have all my highlights in one place. And if I really need to, I could always copy and paste over the quotes that I really want to save. One final tool that I learned about is called a ReadLater app.
And as the name would suggest, it allows you to save things to read later. There are lots of different options online. I went with one called Reader.
This way I can go throughout my day, saving the things that I find interesting from articles to videos, tweets and blogs, and consume them at a later time when I'm not distracted. - And it's just incredible, just time shifting that, right? It's like in the moment you see that Buzzfeed article of like 35 funny cats.
Right in that moment, it feels so important, like, "Oh no, this is the thing I really need right now! " But if you just time shifted even an hour, or a few hours to that evening, suddenly you see that in your reading list, you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is completely pointless. " Which means you save all the time that you would've spent consuming that junk content.
- [Matt] I really like how Reader formats content in a distraction-free way. There were two features in particular that I was really impressed by. First, when you save a YouTube video to Reader, it automatically pulls the transcript.
- All of this begins with learning to make the distinction between background tasks and immersive tasks in your life. - So you can highlight the most important takeaways. And second, you can highlight directly in your browser.
So say I'm reading an article on The Verge. I can now highlight right on their website. And the coolest part, all of these highlights and notes sync with Readwise right alongside my ebook highlights.
This was all very new to me. I know that there are a lot of people that have been using these apps for a very long time, but I'm somewhat of a late adopter. And so it really felt like I was catching up on a decade's worth of technology in a month.
The more that I used my second brain, the more I started to see the benefits. It felt like I was finally getting my shit together. When I went to the dentist, I could quickly pull up my notes from previous appointments.
I even had notes linking directly to my past X-rays. I was able to pull together lots of notes that are helping me to prepare for the birth of our first child. Take this note from a podcast that I listened to, called "How to Be a Great Birth Partner.
" I've included a summary of the key points at the top of the page. And as you scroll down, you can see I use a technique that I learned from Tiago, called Progressive Summarization. That's basically just a fancy word for highlighting.
The important parts are bold and the really, really important parts are also underlined. It helps as I go back and try to digest and remember this information. I was able to store video editing techniques, office inspiration, personal finance tips, camera recommendations, and recipes for brewing coffee.
No longer a black hole. Everything had its place. One of the big reasons of creating this note-taking system is that it's organized and we can come back to it, and we don't get lost and we can search for things.
Is that right? - The structure of your notes should match the structure of your life. Because the purpose of notes is to support and enhance your life, right?
So sometimes I'll see people with this beautiful sophisticated note-taking system that looks like a research database, or looks like a gigantic library Dewey Decimal System. And it's beautiful. It's aesthetically pleasing.
It's impressive, and then over here, their life is a complete mess. And I'm like, "No, those two things should be related. They should complement each other.
" - [Matt] So much of the productivity conversation online today is about the tools. Every day there's a new app or AI program that you apparently need to have. But I've found that it's less about the tool and more about how you use it.
That's why I stick with Apple Notes instead of switching to another more trendy app. And that's why I didn't waste my time trying a dozen different ReadLater apps and just picked one after a 10-minute search. There's something to be said about sticking with the basics and just doing the work.
And that's advice that you should take if you wanna build a second brain for yourself. - Start with something too simple and then wait till it breaks. Wait till you try to do something with it and it's actually not good enough.
It's not powerful enough. It's not specific enough. That is the moment that it's time to move to something a little more powerful, right?
You may find yourself moving a file into that gigantic personal folder, and then a little voice in your head, a little feeling says, "Uh oh, I don't trust that I'm gonna see this again. I don't trust that this is gonna be found. " That's not only an allowable approach, that is the best approach.
It's organic. It's bottom up. In response to how your life is changing.
- [Matt] Find everything that I talked about in this video, including links to all the apps I mentioned and Tiago's work in the description below. And please subscribe for more deep dive videos into self-development in the future. Thanks for watching.
