(upbeat music)
- At this point, the skeleton of your productivity system
is now set up
and you could ostensibly start using it
and basically end the course here.
But, I want you to stick around for a couple more videos
because we have a couple of meta skills
that I think are important to master
if you want to keep using your productivity system
efficiently over the long term.
The first concept we're gonna talk about here
is something I like to call quick capture
and it's the idea of reducing the friction involved
in getting information into your system
because a productivity system with all of its folders
and hierarchical trees and labels and projects,
it creates this double-edged sword.
Once information is in it,
it's very easy to find an information,
it's very easy to keep things organized
and navigate through the system.
But, that makes it kind of a pain
to input that information in the first place
and, you know, if you're on the run
and a client emails you something
and you have to put it into your system,
you don't want to be dealing with the process
of going through all these folders
and finding the exact right notebook
or the exact right label to apply,
so quick capture is just a set of practices
for in the moment, reducing that friction
and then coming back later
and maybe processing that information
a little bit further
and getting it really organized when you have more time.
Now, this is a concept where I can give you a couple
of examples, but what I want to do
is challenge you to start thinking of other ways
that you could reduce the friction involved
in getting information into your system
with regards to your particular system
and your particular work.
But the first example that I want to show you
is a concept that I like to call the daily note
and this is basically the idea of having
one note in your note taking system
where you record all the events of the day,
basically everything that happens.
That way, you can open Evernote
or whatever app you're using right to it
and I like to put daily notes right in the inbox
because the inbox is the default notebook in Evernote
so I might write things down
and it could be literally anything.
I could be making bullet lists
with a bunch of random characters in there,
I could be doing basically whatever I want
and there could be all kinds of different disparate
notes and different disparate types of information
within that daily note.
The key is, when you end the day,
you end it by taking five minutes to just copy
all the stuff out of that notebook
and put it where it's supposed to go.
This isn't something you have to do,
but I've found it useful at times when I'm really stressed,
maybe when I'm traveling and I really just don't
want to take the time to navigate all my folders
and notebooks because I'm you know, in a cab,
or on a plane or walking down the street,
trying to get things into my system.
Another application to this concept
is finding ways to scan physical documents
into your digital system faster.
Now if you're using Evernote, like I am,
there is a digital scanning tool right within the app
but I like using an app called Scanbot a little bit more.
The reason I use Scanbot is that you can define
a default notebook that all scans are gonna go to
and personally I just use Scanbot for business receipts
so I can easily scan a document
and in fact the app will actually find the outlines
of the document and take the picture automatically
and once I hit okay, it's gonna send that receipt
to Evernote and I never have to do anything
and it's super quick and super automated.
And just to give you one more fun example at home,
I have an Amazon Echo and as it turns out,
Amazon Echo has a to do list feature
right inside their app,
but you can also hook that up to several external
to do services including Todoist.
So my girlfriend and I have a shared list in Todoist
called our shopping list
and we have that list bound to our Echo app,
which basically means that when we're in the kitchen
and we run out of something like we run out of eggs
or something, we can tell the Echo,
hey put this on my shopping list
and not only is that going to go onto the Echo shopping list
within that app, it's also going to go onto our Todoist
which is shared which means that whichever of us
goes to the store, both of us are able
to open that app, see what's on the list,
check things off.
We are always in sync.
And just for extra fun, I will share one final tip here.
I get a lot of ideas in the shower
and it's kind of hard to write down those ideas
in the shower and I guess you could maybe yell at Siri
if you can yell at your phone loud enough,
but they also sell these waterproof shower notebooks
that just suction cup to the wall of your shower
and on more than one occasion,
I have had an idea or maybe the entire script
or outline for a video pops into my head
while I'm in the shower
and I frantically scrawl that outline
down onto that shower notebook.
So it has saved me more than once
and it's pretty cheap.
Anyway, in terms of action steps for this video,
there aren't a whole ton.
Number one, start thinking about ways you can remove steps
in the processes that you go through
to get stuff into your productivity system
and maybe start experimenting with apps
like Scanbot as well
and now that you've got those ideas kicking around
in your head, we are going to move onto the final concept
in this course which is the idea of the review day.