The 5 Magical Apps That Changed My Life

okay so here's the problem that i've recently solved with these five magical apps like you i read a lot of books i browse a lot of articles on the internet i listen to a hell of a lot of podcasts and i'm always scrolling through twitter when i'm on the toilet and across these dozens of hours of content consumption every day i will occasionally come across highlights or interesting bits that resonate with me or things that are surprising or things like insights that i want to capture for later but until very recently i didn't have a way of logging these insights and so i would spend all of this time over the last like 10 years plus of my life listening and reading and browsing and watching all of this stuff and only really taking away a fraction of it and remembering even less of it and applying even less of it to my life which kind of begs the question that why was i wasting all this time consuming all this stuff if i wasn't going to then you know do something with it further down the line but now we've got these five apps that work together seamlessly to form what i like to call the magical insight logging framework an automatic method for capturing and logging all of the insights that we get from books articles podcasts and even tweets alright so let's start with the first three apps that make up the consumption layer which is the first part of the magical insight logging framework the first on this list and the least interesting is kindle so if you're reading books on kindle which i've been doing since like 2008 when the kindle first came out i think as you're reading stuff you can highlight stuff which is pretty fantastic this works really nicely on a desktop or laptop as well you can just select a passage you can highlight it you can highlight in different colors and you can do that on the ios and the ipad and android basically on the kindle app across any of your devices you can highlight passages the second app in our five part stack is a read it later app like insta paper or pocket and instant paper is the one that i use and the idea is that anytime i come across an article or a blog post on the internet that i want to read but i don't want to read it there and then then i will share it to insta paper and there's all sorts of ways of sharing it you can use the ios share extension you can email it to instapaper you can use the chrome or safari extension there are hundreds of ways of getting stuff into instapaper and actually this is one of my biggest productivity hacks in general it's that i will always come across interesting emails with interesting articles but i'll almost never read them there and then i will always save them to instapaper so that then when i'm next in the mood to read stuff i open up the insta paper app on my iphone or ipad or on the web and they've got apps for android and stuff as well i open it up and i've just got this long list of articles that i've saved that i can then start reading through one by one for however long i like and the really cool thing about insta paper and pocket is that while you're reading these articles on whatever device you want you can highlight them and that is how we are going to be inputting our insights in our insight logging framework so here's an article from common cog let's say don't forget about the world outside the book let's say i you know for some reason that passage like really resonates with me and i think oh this is an incredible insight i want to highlight this i can just highlight it and hit the highlight button and it will be highlighted or even if i want i can highlight something and i can add a note to it this is a test note that i'm adding to this highlight so i can take notes on the highlights that i'm reading as i'm going through them and app number three is a magical app that is unfortunately only available for ios they're working on an android version and this is now how i consume all the podcasts that i listen to and this is a truly magical app called air dot io highlight and share the best moments from podcasts so let me show you what this looks like so air is now my podcast app of choice on ios and i can go on air and i can go through all of the podcasts that i want to listen to um so it's a pretty standard podcast player so far but the truly magical thing about aaron why it's now my favorite podcast app is while you're listening to a podcast you can hit this big quote button in the middle and that lets you take an air quote which is a fantastic name and essentially what that does is while you're listening to a podcast if you hear something that's particularly insightful or that resonates with you you hit the air quote button and it will automatically create an air quote from the last 30 seconds to 60 seconds of the stuff that you've listened to and you can change that amount of time if you want so while i'm listening to this episode of the portal with eric weinstein and ryan holiday we still want to play the same games they won't let us tell our stories i mean like i've come across something that resonates with me and i'm going to hit you know the whole meet the air quote button and what that's going to do is it's going to automatically turn it into an air quote and then it gives me the option of titling it something so ryan holiday comment about meaning in life or something like that and now it saved it as an air quote and what's really cool is that air automatically generates transcripts for a lot of the most popular podcasts and so when you create an air quote if the transcription is available it will basically just create a highlight for you and this is completely game changing because before this app it was not possible to take notes from podcasts and so with this episode while i was listening to it over the weekend i took one two three four five six seven seven air quotes from it because those were the bits that particularly resonated with me so we've got those three apps that make up the consumption layer of the magical insight logging framework let's now talk about the integration layer and this is a very special app that i've been loving for the last like two years since i first discovered it and that is called read wise and you can find that at readwise.io and there is a special link in the video description if you use my code you will get an extended free trial for 60 days rather than 30 days if you want to try it out and so what read wise is is amongst other things it is the integration layer for my system so what it's doing it's bringing together all of the highlights that i've created from the three consumption apps and so if i sign into my read wise what we'll see is that it brings together books articles tweets and podcasts so when it comes to books it automatically connects to my amazon account because i've given it permissions and so i've got these 107 books that i've been highlighting on kindle for the last several years and what it's doing is that it's just bringing together all of my highlights from these books all into one place but it's not just books it's also automatically connecting to instapaper and so any article that i've highlighted and we can see i've got highlights all the way back from 2019 when i first started using insta paper when i discovered this it basically takes all of the highlights and puts them all in one place so this is an article i've read in buffer and these were seven of the passages that i highlighted from that that particularly resonated with me recently as well they've added tweet and podcast functionality so for tweets for example if i come across a tweet that i'm browsing and i find that it particularly resonates with me all i have to do is send that tweet to the read-wise twitter account and it will automatically save the tweet or save the thread into read-wise so again bringing all them one place and finally more recently they've added podcast support so it automatically connects to air because i've linked up my airdo i o account with read wise and now all of the air quotes that i'm capturing from podcasts are automatically being synced into read-wise so here are some highlights that i took from the hugh jackman episode of the tim ferriss show and because air had a transcript available for it like all of the quotes that i've got from this episode are now all in one place in readvise so that's all well and good we've got this app that integrates all of these different highlights from these different sources but what's the point of it well there's two main benefits of this firstly the traditional read-wise service and what i've been kind of talking on my channel for the last two years since i first discovered it is that if you want every day readwise can send you an email that has five of your highlights that's randomly surfaced but very recently they've added another feature and that makes this absolutely game-changing and part of the magical insight logging framework and that feature is that read-wise can now automatically export all of its highlights to notion which is the app that i'm using for my second brain so as you'll know if you've been following this channel for a while notion is the app that i use for my second brain it's my central external note-taking system that basically organizes my entire life for the record notion are very kindly sponsoring this video but they don't have any creative control over what's being said and it's one of those things where i've been using notion for such a long time since like i don't know february march 2019 and it is a perfect stroke of luck that they also want to sponsor my videos because and don't tell anyone i would make these videos anyway even if they didn't sponsor them but we'll keep quiet about that anyway i use notion for everything it organizes my life it tracks my workouts i use it when studying for my exams so when preparing for the usmle the us medical exam that i've been live streaming on twitch every morning check out my twitch profile link in the video description i also use notion to manage every aspect of my businesses and this youtube channel and writing scripts and editing and working with my team it just does so many things and the best bit is notion is now completely free of charge you only pay for notion if you're working with a team so if you're an individual if you're a student you can use notion for free for however long you want for whatever you want it's absolutely fantastic hit the link in the video description if you want to check it out but yeah thanks notion for sponsoring this video and so the best thing ever is that read wise now automatically exports into notion and so what that means is that when you link your notion account to read-wise what it does is that it creates this special read-wise page which just brings together all of the highlights all of the insights that you've gathered from books articles podcasts and tweets and this is really freaking cool right so for example this is the library for everything but if i want to look at books here are all the books that i've read that i've highlighted um and i can go into one of them let's go tribe of mentors and i can automatically see every single one of the highlights that i've got in here and if i click on one of these locations it will open up the kindle app to that location where i've made the highlight if i want to find the context behind what i was thinking at the time here we go in the last five years what you believe behavioral habits improve your life happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop the mind is just as malleable as the body blah blah blah from tribe of mentors by tim ferriss and this works with everything looks like if i click on articles i can filter it by all the articles that i've read let's see mark manson's post how to 80 20 your life and in this post i highlighted these two things in 1906 there was italian economies blah blah blah economic output on a larger scale like that clearly resonated with me at the time which was in november 2019 and because i highlighted this on instapaper which is connected to read wise as the integration layer which then spits out its output to notion as my second brain it's now here all in one place and i can do that with a recent podcast i've listened to that i've highlighted for example here's the hugh jackman one and it's got all of the highlights for me in notion with nice cover art and stuff so it just looks pretty and it even does that with tweets which i've only started doing recently because i actually didn't realize you could do this so for example this is a thread that i bookmarked that i've now shared into read wise which has now gone into notion get a cup of coffee in this thread i'll help you work out how much money you need to retire so when i read this thread of 39 things i was like oh this is cool i'll save it but then it was it's been sitting in my twitter bookmarks for i don't know absolutely ages but now i've got it all in notion all in one place so those were the five apps in the magical insight logging framework if you also have this problem where you're consuming too much stuff books articles podcasts tweets whatever and you don't have like a system for mining the insides from that idea and actually applying them to your own life and remembering them then i'd really recommend you set up your own magical insight logging framework you don't have to use all of these apps uh kindle i would 100 recommend to everyone insta paper versus pocket you can use both air is the only way of doing this with podcasts at the moment read wise is fantastic and for your second brain readwise also outputs to notion rome and evernote so you're not tied into any one app for this sort of thing but as i said the one that i use for my second brain is notion and i swear by it and i love it and i just basically organized my entire life around notion and i remember that back in the day like two years ago anytime people would recognize me on the streets or something hashtag plex they would come up to me and say hey ali you know i watched your ipad videos and i bought an ipad or an ipad pro because of your recommendation but in the last like 18 months or so not one person has said to me i've bought an ipad because of recommendation instead now the thing that people say to me when they meet me in real life is i started using notion because of you and it's changed my life so thank you so if you want to find out more about how i use notion to organize my life and supercharge my productivity hit the little playlist over here that'll be some of my top performing videos about how i use notion behind the scenes of my magical system so thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 1,091,652

Rating: 4.9065914 out of 5

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, apps that changed my life, life changing apps, best apps for podcasts, best apps for reading, ali abdaal books, productivity, notion setup, how to use notion, notion for productivity, notion tutorial, notion app, productivity 2020, notion productivity, notion apps, notion app setup, notion app tutorial, notion setup 2020, my notion setup, building a second brain, second brain notion, tiago forte second brain

Id: lhpY1frNqdA

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020