- 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 Drive 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.
