Transcripts
1. Introduction: Alright, productivity systems used to be incredibly cumbersome. There were dozens of file folders, handwritten notes yet used Post-its for everything. A lot of the time was a real mess, but we still manage to get things done. We build computers. We went to the moon, we became titans of industry, and we did it all with systems that most people today would laugh at. Generally speaking, with modern technology, we can now achieve productivity gains of anywhere from 200% to in some cases, thousands of percent higher than what people are forced to live with 30 or 40 years ago. The problem though, is that many people are not taking advantage of the tools and the technologies. And as a result, they're essentially back in the Stone Age. While other people, industry leaders, those that are making a real change, our zooming by and the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing more every moment. So this course is going to teach you how to be part of that 1%, how to augment your productivity using modern technology. And in particular, we're going to be talking about using Evernote. Hi, my name is Nick, I'm a software developer and I also run a successful YouTube channel, blog and a video production company. Most of my life has been spent working with technology in some way, shape or form. And I've spent years learning simple and highly effective systems to get more done and improve productivity. This series on offloading your brain, I've also called Becoming a cyborg because that's really what we are now where technology enabled cyborgs. The only difference between me having a chip implanted in my brain and having one just on my phone is the 2.5th or so it takes for me to tap the screen. But at the end of the day I'm still interface and what technology I'm still using it to work faster and ultimately more effectively. Now in this class we're going to start by first exploring the productivity of productivity, AKA what actually matters. I find today there's a lot of buzz going around about doing things very quickly and very efficiently. But I find not enough people are asking whether what you're doing in the first place is actually meaningful and whether it adds value to your life. We're then going to look into practical sidewalk tips using specific technology in this case ever knows, it's usually best to centralized technologies as much as possible because of the inefficiencies of switching between them all the time. The fewer that you have in the first place that the better in this, you're gonna learn how you can use Evernote effectively to build a productivity system. That means you will one, never forget anything, to never miss an important date or events. And three, free up your mind completely from the mundanity of day-to-day life to allow you to start being able to focus on big picture goals and big picture ideas. At the end of the day, the Internet is amazing. The only thing you need to change your lives is the technology that you are using right now to watch this video. So if being better at basically everything sounds like somebody or into, I will see you in the class. Bye for now.
2. Building a Task List: Most of us want to be higher-level thinkers, but we're constantly getting bogged down by small things that take away our mental processing power and basically make a slaves to what I call the minutiae. In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to remove these drains on our energy and what we need to do to allow us to pursue these big things effectively and efficiently, the principles will need to understand in order to do this is first the principle of automating where we can, and second, the principle of a ruthlessly prioritizing what we can't. So automating where we can automating refers to the process of putting stuff on autopilot, AK, eliminating our personal involvement in a task or in a piece of work. Not everything involves what I'm going to call your full being, your full presence and things that don't require it are automatable so that you can spend your time on things that do require it instead. And Evernote is fantastic for this, which I'll get into in a moment. But first the story, when I first started working, one of my very first jobs was in a biology lab. I had to run a couple of experiments pretty much every day and that required me to be there about two to three hours. All I had to do for those two to three hours is basically I waited for the experiment to finish and then I copy and pasted some data around from one window to another, and then I click a single button, and that was my job. That's what I was getting paid for. Now this is the first son my life. I really got to take advantage of the principle of automation. I mean, I was just starting to learn about like macros and automations and stuff like that. So what I did was I set up a really quick macro that was super dumb. All it did was I clicked a certain place on the screen, pressed a couple of keys and then pasted it somewhere else. But because of that macro, it meant that I no longer had to be in the land for the full three hours. Instead, I can now just come in, set up the system and then leave. And I always use that extra time by the go to the gym or grab dinner. Now that story and well being very small is an example of how you'd ask and automate tasks that do not require your full being if you were to save an hour, five days a week, let's say that's 261 days a year. I did. And I use that time to get into what I consider the best shape my life at the time. And I definitely went out every possible if I had an automated that task. So to make this practical in your own life right now, I want you guys to think about the areas and the places that you're currently spending time and you can automate a very simple exercise to do this is I want you to open up your Evernote or if you, we're going to be covering that in a minute and get a Google Doc or a piece of paper. Think about what you did yesterday and go through the entire day hour by hour from the moment that you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, jotting down all of your various daily tasks and daily activities. This includes stuff like making breakfast, taking your socks out of a lingerie, like really anything. And I include an example is below if you guys are struggling for ideas. Now once you guys have this list, I want you to make a table with three columns, automatable, semi automatable, and non automatable. Now automatable means you can get a robot or an app, or a macro, or even just somebody else to do it for you. These are things that you don't have to actually spend any time on at all. Semi automatable are things that you guys can't fully automate, but you can improve the efficiency of, and I'll talk about that in a sec. And not automatable are things that require your full attention or full being all the time. And it's actually says a lot easier with examples. So I'm gonna give you a few right now. Let's say you guys are a freelancer and every evening you have to add a quick little lime into your spreadsheet with your expenses from your credit card. This is a really common task and might take you one minute every single day for the rest of your life. But if you do that every day becomes six hours per year. Average life expectancy around the world is about 75 right now. So if you imagine that you do this every single year from age 20 to about 75, that's 330 extra hours of your time. A lot of time. That's a two-week vacation and Monaco or mastering a pretty simple skill, right? I don't want to trade that excitement in my life, just enter a bunch of expenses and I'm sure you don't. Either way you guys can do instead is you can automate it. You can download a budgeting app I was used. You need a budget, sink it directly with your BankAccount, basically all major budgeting apps now do this so you don't need to use a specific one, but most will lie to export your budget as a CSV later so you guys can upload it spreadsheet for your taxes or for your business financials or whatever. Now I'm gonna talk about this later, but you can also then use Evernote to take a quick picture of your receipt and it will automatically apply OCR optical Character Recognition so you guys can search for it later come tax time whenever you need it. And I do this all the time for my own freelancer business. Now in this example, technology is now safety 330 hours. Or if you guys like to think about in monetary terms, has now made you approximately $7 thousand in average North American wage. That's pretty cool. So that's an example of a task that's fully automatable. Another thing you guys do every single day is you make a dinner. A big part of making dinner is obviously preparing your food right there, cotton up your veggies, you're making your carbs, whatever. You also have to buy your food which might take an hour or at the grocery store or online or what have you now if making dinner takes 20 minutes of PrEP every single day, adding on the ten minutes of shopping, which is now averaged over the course of the week, that becomes half an hour every single day, every single week. And if you guys value those 30 minutes quite highlight one way you can completely automate this as you can look into meal preparation services that pre-prepare and deliver your food for you. It obviously does cost significantly more than going on buying it and preparing it yourself. But if the value of that 3.5 extra hours per week is higher than the extra 50 to a 100 bucks difference than it's worth it for you guys. And you'll also find you'll have an extra 3.5 hours a week to spend on other things. And maybe some of those things you're making money. This is an example of tasks that is semi automatable. A non automatable tasks could be a big picture task, something that requires your full attention to a 100 percent of the time. This could be painting or writing or seeing a friend or things of that nature. So those are just some examples. I now want you guys to go through your own list and split your data into those three categories. And if you're ever lost for ideas and feel free to check on my example Evernote I've linked down below and I'll be talking about linking in a few minutes. So that was the first principle which was automating where we can end the fantastic part about this is if you guys do this for a few days or a few weeks, you'll find yourself with a bunch of extra time, but it's going to allow you to start naturally gravitating towards these bigger ideas and bigger thinking. And this is actually the exact same way that we're going to use Evernote, instead of being interrupted every 10 minutes by some tiny task or some tiny thought, now that we can automate and streamline them, you're going to have a lot more time to consider the bigger problems and bigger issues in your life. And you also know that the quality of your thinking is going to improve to the second principle is ruthlessly prioritizing where we can't. Now we all have goals here. Some of us want to purchase a house or go traveling or build a software company or start a family. Obviously your individual goals might be different, but the most important thing is to have goals in the first place. Interestingly enough, at the beginning, I don't actually think that the specific goal that you're talking about actually matters as much as just having a goal. Lot of the time people don't have goals is just because they don't know enough. They haven't explored life enough or worked enough to really understand what fulfills them or makes them happy. So the most important part is just to start moving. And a very simple exercise for this is to brainstorm three things you'd like to have done by the end of the year. And one thing you'd like to have done in three years any longer than that, and things typically get a little fuzzy. But three years is the sweet spot. After you guys have those goals, the most productive way to become productive is to then create daily sub goals to achieve those goals and then ruthlessly prioritize them above all else, an example big goal of mine is to publish five courses by the end of the year. A smaller subgoal of that would be, well, we only have five months left until the end of the year, so only to publish one every single month. And a daily subgoal of that would be to spend 30 minutes per day or 900 minutes per month working on my courses. Once I had that actionable daily sub-goal, I can now add that to my list of daily tasks that we figured out earlier and we can start prioritizing. So to do so we open that list of automatable, semi automatable, anon automatable. And we ended the last tab, which is the stuff that we cannot automate. These things to go to require a full being or a full presence in almost all the time. This is where your daily some bulls are going to lie as well after we've done this for the other goals, let's say another one a minus to exercise every day and another one a minus to spend time with friends, we can now turn to the task would prioritize it. So prioritization involves two things. It involves ranking and involves eliminating. The first thing to do is to eliminate everything that is ultimately irrelevant to my end goal of doing a couple of things here that are really important to my big goals of publishing Courses and exercising and seeing friends like for example, writing a screenplay. Writing a screenplay was definitely one of my goals at 1, but it is no longer one of my goals today and it's taken up a fair amount of my time. So I'm going to eliminate this entire remaining daily tasks and head now I'm going to prioritize them based on what I think is the most important to meet today. So of course work and exercising up top. And then once I've organized them based on decreasing priority, I now have a ranked list of the daily tasks that matter to me Now from here, and this obviously depends on the way that you work best. Some people worked better in the morning, some people work better in the evenings. In my case, though, I always do these tasks first early in the morning, every day, and I work my way down that list. Then I'll let my automations and my semi automations take care of everything else in the background so that I don't have to. Okay, that was a quick and dirty example. Productively being productive, you should now have a list of daily tasks to automate and semi automate, as well as a priority list of remaining tasks and goals in descending order of priority that you can do each and every single day to get closer to your goals and closer to your dreams. But all that knowledge in mind, we're now going to turn to Evernote. And I'm going to show you an incredibly effective system for managing your entire life. I'll see you there.
3. Understanding Evernote: So to start, this is going to be a very basic walkthrough of Evernote as a platform. If you guys have used Evernote in the past and already know how ever know it works, right? How to edit text, how to add things, so notebooks, etc. You can skip this entirely. Meet me in the next video for everybody else, this is going to be a gentle introduction into how to use Evernote from start to finish. Now first you actually need to download Evernote. If you are on a Windows computer or a Mac computer, you can just go over to their website and download right here at the top right hand corner. If you guys are instead on an Android device, you can simply go to the Play Store and download from there. They also have a web app that you guys can use. That just means it operates in your browser and if that works for you, then go ahead. One of the downsides about this though, is you no longer get a bunch of the highly useful keyboard shortcuts that I'm going to be showing you guys because it'll start interfering with other apps and stuff like that. The last thing I always recommend people to do is to head on over to the Chrome Web Store if you guys using Google Chrome or Firefox extensions, if you're on Firefox and look for the Evernote Web Clipper. The Evernote Web Clipper is basically a quick and dirty way to automatically scrape on entire page. Some pages, as you see here, are not allowed, typically one, this by Google, but basically every other page on the Internet. Let me just head over to one of my blog posts here is instantly and easily scrape bubble and you can save this or clip this to your Evernote if you know it's an interesting article or it's a good idea or something like that. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later on in the class. All right, and with that, we are now on the Evernote app. Of course this might look a little bit different from what you guys see if you guys are on a Mac, I'm currently on a Windows, but 99% of all buttons, all placements, and so on and so forth are going to be the same. So the very first thing that you will see if you land on Evernote to begin with, is you will see your home. Now your home looks like this. I have this nice little coffee mug with an Evernote to little t packet here. You may have that as well. You can actually customize the way that your home looks, if you would like. Now most of the system we'll be talking about does not actually use your home. So you won't be using it very often, but just to run through it at the top here we have a list of all the notes that you've been working on recently. And they also have an AI tool which recommends notes based off time of day, semantically related content and stuff like that, which is relatively handy. Underneath that we have a scratchpad. You can think of this like a notebook in a real life. This is just a quick way for you to jot down some ideas and return to them later. They'll still be here. It doesn't automatically delete, like let's say a notepad or something like that. It'll also tell you what was recently captured here and you can go through different modalities. So audio, e-mails, documents, images, web clips, and so on and so forth. Okay. So that is the home if we head on over to the left-hand side of the screen, starting from the top here is just your little profile menu just tells you a little bit about your account. Underneath that is one of the most useful features in Evernote, the search bar. This allows you to search through every single note that you have ever created, as well as apply optical character recognition to any handwritten notes or any images that you've taken. The search and look up times of this are incredibly fast relative to the number of notes that you have. So even if your total note count goes over 10 thousand, in my cases, I think I've been up to like 30 or 40000 before because I'm kind of a nerd. But even if it goes up super high, you can still find something incredibly quickly. Like for example, if I were to type math in here instantly within a second, you can now see a massive list of all of my math notes. And if I were to, I don't know, type math curriculum, let's say you can see something that I wrote on April 28th, 2020, where I was trying to teach myself math by going through a kind of a fundamental and basic principles. It searches things that are related to other concepts as well. So the search tool is fantastic. Underneath the search tool, you have one of the most common ways it'll be creating a new note and I'll talk about this in a minute. If you click this little down arrow on the right-hand side, you can also create different types of notes. We have just introduced a new feature called a task. It may or may not be around when you guys are watching this and that's perfectly fine. But most of your work will probably end up being blank notes because at the end of the day, you want a system that is simple and the lower the friction involved in the system, the more reliable and effectively you will take to it. So 99 percent of time it's going to be a blank note, but I will talk about that a little bit later. Underneath that you have essentially a dashboard containing all of the various notebooks in your Evernote. A notebook is just like a physical notebook. It is simply a collection of notes. Just like a physical notebook is a collection of pages that's bound together with some glue. Your Evernote is a collection of notebooks, which in and of themselves are collections of notes that are all bound together by the Internet. As we go down here, if we were to click on one of these, my inbox is empty action, so not seeing anything there. But if I click on the next notebook, you'll see I have a note layout kinda on the second tab here. This is basically separated into half and then another half. And the second quarter essentially lists your notes and various ways you can change the way that you want this to look. If you want this to, I don't know, look like a card or something like that. You can do that this way. There's a side lists and a topless as well. I, myself am most partial to the soul snippets look because it lets me look a little bit at the description just at a quick glance, as well as see the title of the card, which is easily the most important thing in Evernote. All right, So I'll talk a little bit about this note in particular. But if we continue going down, you'll see there's a section where recent notes pop up. Then there's a section for all notes. The simply lists every single one that you currently have in your Evernote. So since the last time I did a backup by 4,011 notes. And as I mentioned previously, there is a tasks feature here which may or may not be available when you guys are using Evernote. But luckily, we don't actually use the task, so it won't be super relevant to this class. Underneath that we have a giant list of all of our notebooks. So in my case is an inbox and next, awaiting an archive and miscellaneous. And I'll talk a little bit more about the structure of this because this is quite important. Underneath that we have tags. Tags are simply other ways to organize information in Evernote. So instead of using notebooks, let's say to organize notes, you can instead tag certain notes with various things and search those tags up later. In this class, we won't be using tags very heavily, but a lot of people do like using tags to organize things into similar kind of thought patterns and kinda conceptual groupings and so on and so forth. Underneath that you have a shared with me tab this is just all the notebooks that have been shared with you. If you start incorporating Evernote more and more into your work or your businesses, I have in many respects, this will usually grow as you share notebooks with other people for various tax and stuff like that. And last but not least, there is a work chat here. You can see I've blurred out these e-mails, but essentially what you see is a giant list of emails with this chat kinda feature here. And I don't really ever use this. You probably won't use this in this course either, but it's definitely good to have if you want to incorporate Evernote more into, as I mentioned earlier, like a business or work use case, you also have a trash. I'm not going to talk about the trash because I actually never use it. And you'll learn why a little bit later on in the course. Trash is a big no-no and you should almost never trash anything, even if it's a note that doesn't make any sense or a note that you at the end of the day never really wanted to make in the first place. Reason why is because you want to be able to search for this stuff and I'll talk about that. As I mentioned earlier a little bit later. There's also an upgrade feature here. Evernote has a bunch of paid kind of upgrade plans. There's a basic, a premium and a business. For now, the basic is more than good enough for 99% of all use cases and you don't need to worry about upgrading. However, if you like Evernote, if you love the platform, Feel free to upgrade to premium or business. I, myself was a business for a very long time. But essentially one of the reasons why I really like Evernote is because it's so frictionless. You don't have to pay a crazy amount of money to organize your life. They're more than happy to offer all this value to you for free. And if you'd like the platform, if you enjoy, allow the contents and I guess the systems that they help you create, then and only then can you pay actual money to show that gratitude. All right, so that was essentially this left-hand side dashboard. I'm not actually going to dive into a specific note. So this is a quick little note that's already pre developed here. Actually what I'll do is just create a new node. I think that'll be a faster and easier way to show you. You create a new note. You'll see that this node has various options. There's a title up here, so I might write my new note. And then underneath that is a description field where you can write a description. So you can write a description here. The editor is a rich text editor that you guys are very familiar with. If you've ever used Microsoft Word or Google Docs or any real rich text editing platform on the internet. And it also accepts a markdown formatting if you guys know how Markdown works, and I'll talk about that as well. Moving left to right here at the very first thing you see is a blue button. As blue button here allows you to insert various modalities are various Evernote specific widgets into your notes. This is a very handy way to quickly insert information. Can see you can insert a table here. I wanted to make this table bigger. All I would need to do is click these little buttons and would extend the length of my table. You can also do the same thing and extend the number of rows in my table this way, if I wanted to, let's say insert a divider just to conceptually very data. I could do that here too. If I wanted to insert an attachment or a photo, I could do that as well and just opens up your own file explorer. So boom, there we go. Just attach a quick photo. If I want to add a checkbox in, I can do that as well so I can check things. Instead of using that, you can also just hold Command, Shift and see, and it'll automatically create a checkbox for you as well. I find that hotkeys are very useful in rich text editors. Otherwise it can take a little bit of time to kind of move around. There's also an audio recording feature. I'm not going to click this because I'm currently recording a class note screw of things. I know that because I've done this like five times now. But yeah, if you click audio recording, you'll see this little red record icon pop up and it'll actually save an audio forming an audio version of your note. There's also a codec if you guys code, so it just changes your font to monospace. Essentially it gives you a bunch of different kind of formatting options and stuff like that. We just delete everything here. Underneath that you have a sketchpad. If you guys have a tablet, I have this wonderful Wacom tablet that lets me draw and write amazing things on here. Once you're done with your artwork and click Done, it'll automatically save that and kinda nicely format that into your notes. So you guys are taking classes or you want to take notes for, I don't know, a webinar that you're watching. This is a perfect way to do it. And there's also a link to your Google Drive. You click this, it'll integrate with your Google Drive and allow you to select a note that you can easily kind of just copy and paste here and add a link to that. And one of the reasons why people like doing this is because it doesn't actually take much storage space to add a note versus at the entire file in here. So. River running low on storage space. This is a fantastic alternative. As I mentioned earlier, this is a rich text editor, so you have a normal text here, small header, large header or medium header, so on and so forth. You can change the text size as you'd like. You can change the font as well. They don't really give you too many options, but that's because they want you to focus more on your work than the styling or the way that it looks good. I'm just change the size of the font and then some of the colors as well. Like any other regex editor, there's bolding, italicizing, underlining and highlighting. And you can create bulleted lists like list one, list two, list three. Or you can simply drag and then convert that into a numbered list instead, which will automatically include those features for you. There's also a checkbox way, and I already talked about how to create one with the hotkey command Shift C. So if you want to create one, you just go Command Shift C and you can kind of create a checkbox that I use checkbox basically all the time to task one, task to task 3. And as I work my way down the checklist, like I this pre-travel checklist because I'm taking off on a trip and a few days, I can simply click Prepare luggage and automatically grade that out, letting me know that I've essentially completed that task. On top of that, there's also ways to obviously format the text. I'm not gonna go too much into an x and that everybody knows how this works. You can also indent. So if I want to indent this, all I need to do is click this, it'll indent button, it'll indent. And I can also out density by pressing. And there's also a more list here with a couple of other options. Strike through superscript, subscript, simplify formatting or remove formatting. If you have a bunch of wonky formatting with like 45 spaces everywhere, you can kind of like drag and then click Remove Formatting. And it will remove a lot of those kind of hidden characters from your text that you don't need to worry about. So I don't have any hidden characters in this text. I didn't do anything but you guys have I don't know you're copying and pasting from other file. This is a very quick and simple way to make sure that the text looks the same. The last and most important thing is the ability to share links. You click on this little Share button up here. You'll see that there's a way to share your notes with other people. So in my case, the shareable link is disabled, but if I click Enabled, give me an option to copy this link. I can then take this link out onto the internet, paste it in there, and I can actually see what my note looks like on the intranet. So if I have a bunch of interesting files or if I'm writing an essay or something like that, I can do so on the Internet and simply share the link that way. There's also a way that you can internally link your notes. And this is really cool. So we just have a really cool in here. Head on over to these three dots, go down to Copy internal link and copy the internal link of the page. So click Copy app link. You can also use Alt Control and L. And then if you go into another note, so this film first course, Evernote and paste the link. You'll see I have my new node up here. If I were to click this, this is now going to open up my previous note. And this is one of the most effective ways that you can conceptually group and order information in Evernote and basically create your own like web of thought, so to speak. It's got a Zell cast and if you guys are interested in, I do encourage you to look into it. All right, so that is internally and externally linking. Last but not least, I'm going to go through some of the settings up here. We have a File menu where you can create a new note and you notebook new tasks, new tag, and then you can import and export your notes. You click export your note, you'll see that it has several different formats. You can either use an HTML page or you can export it as an annex. Real situation which US export something as an annex as if you were to import it into another Evernote, let's say on another computer or something like that. For most cases, if you wanted to save a note of yours, you could use a single webpage and we'd simply format it's similar to a PDF, which you can then convert it into layer. You can also import notes. The way that you import them is, as I mentioned earlier, through an app dot e and e x file, if you want to export from another Evernote, let's add another computer. You can then import it this way. And that's a quick and simple way of kinda moving or false around. There's a way to sign out and there's a way to quit down here as well. The Edit tab is quite simple, but one of the things that I love about Evernote is they encourage you to use hotkeys. So they put the hotkey on the right-hand side of all of these menus. If you want to let say search your notes, all you need to do is hold Alt, press Control, and press F. So there's a quick and simple way to search through all of my notes. Let's say I'm looking for the word search. If I go to search ads FAQ, that is a note that essentially has been written all about search ads. Looks like this is some training that it took a long time ago on marketing firm demand curve, fantastic group. I click View. You'll see I have a way to move back with Alton left arrow or move forward with ultimately and right arrow that you can think about this the same way as moving forward or backward in like Google Chrome or Firefox, you essentially just go back to the last thing you were working on. So I'm pressing Alt and left a bunch of times. And now I'm pressing Alt and write a bunch of times going to move forward in time. There's a note tab here. This note tab simply has all the same options that we talked about up here. So as we see open a new window, share, move and so on and so forth. This node tab is open up a new window, share moves on and so forth. There's also a window which allows you just to close the Evernote or minimize it as well. And you can see they're also, oops, hotkeys for this as well. So if I wanted to close it, they'll just be Control W If I want to minimize the V Control M. And then there are some tools, there are preferences here that allow you to check your spelling, all typings, kinda real-time spellcheck, and then save data at logout, I will always encourage you guys to keep this on. So if you come here and you see an IV, you do not see a checkmark next to save data, logging out, make sure to click that button. It'll ensure that your data is saved, even if you sign out of the account and you haven't actually committed your note yet. They also have a Help tab here. And the Help tab has my favorite thing in the whole wide world, which is a list of keyboard shortcuts. So if you hold Control and press the slash key, This keyboard shortcuts list will pop up and I believe this is the top 50 or a 100 keyboard shortcuts and Evernote, if you memorize just the top three or four, you will be able to operate at a very, very high level of efficiency and I highly recommend that. All right, that was a quick run through of Evernote. You'll hopefully know have a strong understanding. Works what the platform itself looks like, how to move things around at a create new notes, elite new notes and so on and so forth. Do you guys have watched this video from start to finish? Congratulations. I know not many people probably can. It can get kind of dry, but don't worry, we are now onto the.
4. Offloading Your Memory: Okay to start, we're going to talk about offloading your memory with Evernote. Now the first question to answer is, why should we do this? Well, human memory is faulty. We forget things all the time. Half of you probably don't remember we had for breakfast this morning. And it's because modern society simply as so much information that our brains were never really geared up for. Memories are also subject to interference was essentially means sometimes unrelated memories will overlap or even completely overwrite other ones. Because you've ever tried learning multiple languages at the same time, you'll understand this very well. And ultimately in our super modern information dense era, people are spending way too much brainpower trying to hold onto a bunch of things that would be better taken care of by technology. So evernote lets us upgrade with technology. We get to bypass long-term human memory altogether by using a universal Cloud sync node application that is accessible on any and all devices and whose memories will never degrade, never interfere, and really only get better with time. And I'll talk about that in a minute. This means we're going to use Evernote to encode prominent thoughts, dates, memories, pictures, voice memos, handwritten notes, everything that you can think of, and they're all going to be instantly sync across everyone, your devices simultaneously. So unless there is a global apocalypse and the entire internet ceases to exist, your thoughts will be available for dozens or maybe even hundreds of years into the future, whereas otherwise they'd probably be gone maybe 30 seconds from now. All right, let's get into Evernote. Now I've set mine up in a very specific way and I'll show you how to do the same. But first, the general idea behind all of this, as we're going to grab all of the information that otherwise would be banging around our skulls 24, 7. And instead of having it bang around in our skulls, we're going to store it on Evernote. And once we've stored it, we're later going to categorize it in a different notebooks depending on its status. And that's going to allow us to be a lot more efficient and effective with our time. Like I mentioned earlier, Evernote split into a bunch of notebooks. Lot of people myself included back in the day, over-complicate their lives and try to create a million different notebooks for everything. But you're really only need four. And the first is just going to be our general storage area for like 99% of all incoming information called the inbox. So I already have the rest of the structure here, but I'm gonna go ahead and create another inbox right now, just for clarity sake, I'll call it inbox too. After I created, I'm going to set it aside as my default notebook so that any new quick notes we create while on the go will automatically be added here, which hopefully will help us save a little bit of time. Remember, automate everything is great. Now that we have an inbox, we have a place to store everything. We see that we want to hold onto it. It's really hard to describe how to use it because it's so ingrained in line and many other people's lives at this point. But it'll give you guys some quick examples. First, upcoming tasks that you need to do, no matter how tiny or how small. Take out the trash, gets a note, walk the dog, gets a note, do laundry, gets a note. By running shoes, gets a note, go shopping and get some known Finnish wafer deliverable, gets him out. All right, guys, probably understand what I mean at this point, any task you can think of should no longer be allowed to remain rent-free in your head. You should be giving it away as quickly as possible to Evernote because it'll be able to store it better than you can annul also free up your mind to think about things that are actually important. You can also store voice notes quite easily. Idea voice notes all the time. All you have to do is just pick up your phone, click, add any voice note and just say whatever's on your mind. So that's the first, that's tasks. The second thing is information that you want to remember. Let's say I'm reading a blog post that's particularly informative and by a very great and very handsome men, I can save this using Evernote Web Clipper and it will pop up in my inbox and necessary. Third category is work that's currently under development. Now I do a lot of writing and I know a lot of other writers use Evernote outlining tool. I actually do most of my work on the platform itself and I'll save the task here since it's backed up across all my devices and accessible instantaneously on my phone and tablet as well. The purpose of the inbox is to let you guys let go of your thoughts as quickly as possible once they're out and you're no longer responsible for them or you can later worry about organizing them into appropriate purpose. And the reason we do this is because after we've offloaded our memories, doing it in this way decreases the upfront friction involved in your productivity system as much as possible. And I find that the lower the upfront friction in your system, the more likely you guys are to stick it out to the long-term. That's it for this video. In the next one I'm going to show you what to do with your inbox memories, as well as how to organize them.
5. Building the Notebook Structure: Inbox, Next, Waiting, & Archive: All right, so we now have an inbox, we now have a quick and simple way to immediately offload all the heavy cognitive lifting that you guys have been doing over the last little while because I've been using this for a few days. Your brain hopefully feels a lot lighter and more capable because it no longer has to worry about carrying around all that irrelevant information. In the next step is to categorize relevant tasks and information. And to do this, we need to create three more inboxes. These are all the inboxes wherever we're gonna create an Evernote, which is what makes us a very simple and very efficient system. The first notebook we're going to create is called Next, this will hold all of the tasks that you need to do next. It's kinda built like this because it gives you a very quick and easy way to take in all your major tasks at a glance and then sequentially worked for them until they are all done. The next, not next notebook that we're going to be doing is called a weighting. These are tasks that you can't actually do yet until something else happens. But we still needed a place to put them because we don't want a bouncing around and around in our head all day waiting for that other thing to finish. Instead, we want to ensure that we can still put it into the system to benefit from the efficiency improvements that having one quick example of things to put here, it might be a reply to John's email. So if you can't actually reply just yet because we're still waiting for Samantha to reply first or something like that. I usually write the reason for the delay in the body of the note underneath, and I'll check it once or twice per day as necessary until it's completed. The last notebook is called your archive. Now this is where all of your complete a task will go, as well as all the information you want to remember, like blog posts or video links or quotes or receipts or ideas or really anything. Now this trips a lot of people out. Most people wonder why you don't just delete completed tasks when they're done. But the reason why you never delete an Evernote is because you guys still want to be able to search for those notes later. Evernote has a fantastic search function that allows us to go through thousands of notes in less than a second. And because of the fact that it also is optical character recognition, you can also search their images, PDFs and so on. I think you may need a premium version for that, but I'm not a 100 percent sure. Now this is easily the most powerful part of our system. It essentially turns Evernote into a new long-term memory storage. And the crazy thing is you can search through this long-term memory just as fast or even faster than you guys can actually mentally search through your own actual long-term memory in your head. This gives you productivity boost of like dozens of times and you'll never lose anything ever again, for example, this is my Evernote right over here. I have an inbox next waiting and an archive. I've set these up on her shortcuts instead of under notebooks, simply because I liked the way that it's laid out a little bit more. I like having inbox on top then next and waiting and archive. Little more sequential. But you guys can do the same by simply right-clicking on whatever the notebook is and clicking Add to shortcuts. Now if you guys don't like having it up and shortcuts is perfectly fine. You can use it in the notebook tab. I just liked the way that it's laid out kind of organically here as opposed to alphabetically here. Okay, So let's say I want to search something. Let's say I want to search the term meeting to see all of my meeting notes over the course of the years, I can either move my mouse up to the top left hand corner and click this little search button. Or I can simply use a hotkeys. I highly recommend you guys do Control Alt and F to automatically open up that window. And then I can just type in meeting. It'll automatically find all of my notes on the left-hand side are. That allows me to go through these in more depth. And you can see how it's instantly pulled up every single time I've ever used the term or conceptually linked to that term with related words. And I can very quickly and easily go through this entire store in moments to essentially update myself or look for whatever I am looking for. Obviously, the efficiency benefits of the system are greater if you're a little more specific with how you write your titles. In my case, I just wrote meeting notes. Meeting notes. So probably not the most effective way to title a post. Neither isn't meeting. Instead, I probably should have written something like meeting to 17 2021 and then business name right after. But you guys understand the point. I can instantly go through every single post I've ever had every single card of ever created with the term meeting and ultimately get information that I wouldn't otherwise be able to use that information now from the past in the future. Whereas if I were using my own feeble human memory, I probably would have forgotten 99.9% of all that stuff. And that would have been no way that I could have gotten that back once it's out of my brain, it's gone forever. And that's one of the really cool things about Evernote. It makes it so that once you've forgotten something, it's not gone forever. There is an actual tangible trace of that information. And a lot of the time, just by reading that information, you can both be inspired or you can get back into the same mind state that helped you write that note in the first place. So now that we have our notebook system setup, here's what your daily workflow will probably look like over the course of a day as you guys see things that you want to remember, or if you guys have tasks that come up, you will quickly jot them down in inbox. And this means you'll no longer have to think about when it comes time to do the work maybe later on that day or maybe when you sit down at your desk, you then spend about a minute sift through your inbox and give each note a destination, whether it's next, waiting are archived. And the entire system takes approximately five minutes per day to manage and the productivity improvements of having a long-term memory store on the Cloud to be able to go through at anytime, as well as a centralized system for managing all your notes, your documents or images, sketches, so on and so forth. At least several 100%. If you guys have ever wanted to be the sort of person that never misses a birthday or never shows up late to something are always seems like they have their stuff together. This is the system that will do that for you by offloading your entire brain and letting Evernote handle a lot of the minutiae in the background, you're effectively automating your memory and your ruthlessly prioritize and what's important to you just on a much larger scale. If you guys can combine this with what we talked about in the second lesson on your goals and your sub goals at the end of the day, this will be a robust, consistent way to attack tasks on a daily basis. Never let anything sift through the cracks. And remember basically everything for the rest of your life.
6. Integrating Evernote with Voice Assistants: Android, iOS: And the last few videos you guys learned how to use Evernote to decrease the friction associated with inserting information into your virtual long-term memory store. In this video, I'm going to show you guys how to go even further by integrating Evernote into your mobile workflow using assistance like Google Assistant or series. So first of all, if you guys have an iOS device, congratulations because every node is already very well integrated with Syria. In order to quickly add a new note, all you have to do is activate Siri and then say Evernote, create a node called whatever you want. Syria will automatically open up Evernote and create a new note with a title that you specified. Now the reason why this is so great is because it decreases friction even more. Now instead of you needing to unlock your phone, search for your Evernote app, click the app icon, the node n type in whatever. You just hold down one button, the Siri button, and insert the memory in like two seconds. Instead are a long list takes to commit something to your actual brains. Long-term memory, you guys in school might be studying idea for 20 minutes and then you'll still forget it tomorrow. But now you can put it in your virtual brain and less than five seconds and have it for the rest of your life. If you guys have an Android device that works too, it just takes a couple of extra steps. First, define an application that lets you link services together. And my favorite for this as IFTTT, which stands for if this then that once you guys are there and you guys are signed up, all you have to do is create a new workflow that links Evernote and Google Assistant together. And then you can actually add your own custom dialogue for Google Assistant to use to save your notes. In my case, all I simply say is Evernote and then whatever the note title is, and then it'll tell me, Hey, Nick, Evernote saved. At this point, you guys now have a voice activated productivity system that automatically does the heavier lifting of creating these notes for you. And now instead of the maybe three or four minutes per day you'd spend entering the stuff in. It will literally take you only 30 seconds. As your personal system grows in complexity, it'll begin improving your own efficiency more and more as you guys learned to share the resources between the past, the present, and the future, and all in all it, you're going to benefit from the improved memory and the incredibly fast lookup times.
7. In Closing: All right, That takes us to the end of a quick class on offloading your brain with Evernote. In this course, we went through a very simple productivity framework that lets you guys offload your brain to the Cloud, improving your memory, your scheduling, and your quality of life. We started by talking a little bit about automating whatever you could add a ruthlessly prioritizing whatever you couldn't. And after that, we talked about the four notebooks. You need to set up an Evernote to decrease your friction and allow you to store information seamlessly. I'm a huge fan of productivity in general, and I've several other courses on the same topic that I'm sure you guys enjoy if you're interested in improving further. So feel free to check out the rest of my page for those. Aside from that, it has been an absolute pleasure and I'm hoping I got to benefit your life and your productivity in some way. But at the end of the day, learning is only learning if you apply it actively. I don't just want you to watch this course and fly away like a little bird. Instead, I want you to apply the concepts that I've showed you guys by filling out your own daily task log, as I mentioned the second video and setting up your own Evernote system from front to back. When he does you're done, please share your daily task log and take a quick screenshot of your own personal Evernote with the rest of the class. And you can use this sort of like a mental benchmark for the beginning of your big productivity journey. And we deceive you guys come up with you have any questions or somebody like me to follow up on, please feel free to leave me a comment or review and I'll be more than happy to do so. Thanks so much again and I will see you guys in another class. Bye for now.
NICK SARAEV, Communication, Productivity & Tech
