are you obsessed with keeping your digital notes clean and tidy you might actually be making a bit of a mistake because all these notes and ideas that you've collected over the years they're little nuggets of gold that at this moment in time might not mean very much to you but in three or four or five or even 10 years time when you go back through those notes that might be the con ction that is the start of something very special this is one of the things that I stumbled across whilst reading ab
out Leonardo da Vinci and kernus and Isaac Newton back in their days paper was very expensive they couldn't afford to waste it and make a mistake and then tear it up and throw it away they had to make use of every square millimeter on the paper page this meant that they kept all their notebooks all their random ideas and they were scattered throughout many different notebooks but it was this that enabled them in a few years later well after they written the notes to make connections that they co
uldn't see in that moment this is why you do not want to be deleting your notes that you have collected right now they may mean nothing to you you might not be able to see anything important in them but you don't want to be throwing them away and I've come up with a system that in my notes app I can C keep all these random notes hidden away from view ready for me to pick up at a moment's time just by using my phone and SC scanning through these little notebooks I'm going to show you how to do th
at in this video okay so as you can see here in my Evernote and remember it doesn't matter what Notes application you're using you can build the same structure and the same idea in pretty much the same way so here I am in my Evernote using the notebook view so I have my notebooks organized in Evernote via Stacks so if you look here this little emblem here means this is a stack back up here this little emblem means it's a notebook and that's my inbox for collecting stuff so if I go into my inbox
right now I have uh my YouTube video the one that we're doing right now um and we also have down here uh a blog post that I collected yesterday which I thought was fantastic still needs to be processed and I have details of a podcast I will be appearing on in the near future now that's just my inbox I don't really need to worry about that nothing urgent will ever go in my inbox now I just want to briefly cover these down here so goals naturally this is where I like to put my goals now for those
of you who don't know I operate a system called gappa which is my version of Thiago Forte's par I like to see my goals and areas of focus at the top then my projects resources and archive you'll notice down here that I have an additional stack called current online courses now this is a lot of what my work is is creating and updating courses so I like to keep that one separate and keep all individual course notes in one notebook or stack of notebooks then up here I've got my projects and I can s
how you that these are the projects that I'm currently working on I'm doing my uh collect organize and do course update which means it's no longer in this stack it's pulled out and moved into my projects because it's current I've got uh my Workshop that's coming up on the 14th and the 21st of April and if you haven't signed up for that yet you can join still there are places available details of which will be in the show notes and then I've got the book that I'm writing at the moment which is ve
ry close to finishing and all the details related to that project is there now you'll notice that I've got a notebook here called projects and really that only holds one note which is basically my master project list so I have the three projects you saw there plus something that I'm always struggling with which always is in there and that's to get my fitness levels up high but okay that's an ongoing as you can see it's in progress and as you can see down here these are the um the deadlines for t
hese courses this one's coming up this one is pretty much all sorted out I'm currently in the marketing stage and I've got the links to the individual project notes right here so so I can just go into my Cod course update and it will give me this particular one will give me the checklist that I need to do once I finished recording so I go back to the master project list right there so essentially that is how the the main structure is now the bits that I really want to focus on in this and this c
omes about from a bit of research that I've been looking at from about archiving and the profession of archiving now essentially there are two things you need to know when it comes to archiving your notes you need to have what's called Providence now that means in your case it's going to mean uh you as an individual in most cases provenance means either the person or the institution the organization that's the Providence where is it coming from in your case in your digital notes that's coming fr
om you so the provenance is sorted out the next thing is the original order now the original order is an interesting one this is something that actually got me thinking so when it comes down to your resources these are going to be very very personal to you because these are all the things that you are interested in and it's long-term interest not just passing interest so most of you if you followed me for any particular length of time you know that I have an obsession with James Bond and inside
this particular notebook I've got tons and tons and tons of stuff related to James Bond the movies the books clothing props you name it it's all in here and it's just a resource of all the stuff that I am particularly interested in when it comes to James Bond effectively I'm interested in everything and if you go back to the notebooks you'll see that in my particular gen I've got 188 notes in there now I have spent time trying to learn Korean and that's in there last time I attempted looking her
e was the 28th of December but it's an ongoing thing for me but all these things are my own personal interests and it's going to be different for you because you also will have your own personal interest and these are the things that you want to keep out and just keep place keep in there now the big thing here is your archive now your archive is not just a glorified trash can I know many people think think I don't know what to do with this note I'll throw it into archive and actually that's quit
e good because if we go back to here your Project's area needs to be organized by topic because you know individual projects I don't need notes in here about something unrelated to the Cod course all I want is all the notes related to Cod course grouped together and placed in one notebook because it's specific to a topic but if you want to get the most out of your archive then your archive needs to be random because this is how your brain actually works now there is a bit of a misnomer out there
people want to organize their notes by a logical sequence and they want it all nice and neat and tidy now that's great if you want a computer to organize everything for you because computers operate on logic they make logical connections but those connections are logical and you would make them very quickly if you saw a list of that stuff the tremble is your brain doesn't work that way your brain works on an illogical area because it's dealing with time or its perception of time it's dealing wi
th your own life's experiences and your knowledge that you've gained throughout your life now that isn't logical you pull everyone's going to be different we've had different life experiences and we have different levels of knowledge so really if you want to make those really interesting connections and to be creative you want to create some kind of Randomness however if you've got thousands of notes you're never going to go through them so there needs to be a way of where we can actually put th
em into their natural order of things now again I've gone back to how places like the UK National Archives have done this the US AR National Archives many of the country's National Archives I've even looked at how libraries and M museums organize their stuff when it turns out for all that kind of stuff they go by date so what I've done in my archive is all the notes I've got in my current Evernote go back to 2015 it's just one note and I was actually showing my wife this now this is currently or
ganized by by when you know when I last looked at this note or when I opened up this note but uh you can go in here and I think if it's in here date created so this one was created in October 2015 now I kind of pulled this out because I realized wow I had interest in Aston Martin almost 10 years ago actually I've interested in ason Martin for a very long time but going back to this I've got my notes down here now the thing is round about 2017 I think at the end of 2017 I archived pretty much all
my notes or exported all my notes into a an archive file and I've placed that on a hard drive so I actually got notes that will go back to 2009 but my life changed around about 2017 I no longer taught English I started focusing on this business fulltime and so what I have here is very few notes uh prior to 2018 but I do they're actually on a separate hard drive but if you look down here I've got loads and loads of notes that I've collected now you will notice that I do keep like here if I've go
t um I've got tags I am using tag another one here I've been fing kuros for a very long time too and I know I go back to like 2014 is with kuros so there's a lot of stuff here that I've just had so much fun putting together but it is effortless because if I go back to my inbox here um and we could say this particular note here it's a YouTube video I don't really need to see it again after these notes so I can just move that now to my archive for 2024 um it's going to go in and it's going in on t
his date uh this particular this one here is I haven't tagged this particularly yet but I can do and I can just put creativity um I'm going to create a tag for that because who knows I might want to to do that and again all I need to do is now move that into my 2024 archive now in maybe five or six years time when I go through that archive I say oh yeah I remember reading that post from Dave Trot on damaged creativity so this is something that I really wanted to stress don't delete your notes no
w there is a certain type of note that you may want to do I often create a meeting note and then maybe collect nothing then sure if you haven't written anything in a meeting note by all means just throw that one in to your trash can there's no worries there but the way I like to have this structured is my my archive is really important and I do like it to go back as long as it needs to go back so I don't mind I mean the way the OTE works it doesn't matter how much stuff you've got in here CU you
're limited by month not by your total usage now you'll notice also there's some stuff here that's outside of the archive that's because these are notebooks and you know I I haven't done anything with those they can stay down there there all I can there not too many of those but the wonderful thing of this is I don't now need to worry about it that Randomness in my archive is there it's still organized by Providence because me it's all related and connected to me and the natural order for me and
just makes sense to have it organized by uh year that I collected this stuff because my interests pass over and throughout the years the other thing about this is if you want to give yourself a little bit of an extra level of organization then you can use tags and tags are great because I mean when I look at my tags they're probably all over the place yep I've got tons of different tags it really doesn't matter but it does give me an extra level of stuff that I may want to collect at a you know
search for in the future cuz I'm thinking about how I would search but there you go that's what I really just wanted to cover goals areas and focus and projects they actually want to be grouped together by related topic because they're obviously related to a specific topic but your resources of course this is more related to topic but it's also about your personal interests and then your archive is for everything else and you really want to create that Randomness so that your brain can use that
power of ilogic to make some very interesting connections later now if you want to learn more about how I'm using those digital notes and bringing everything together then you can watch this video next
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