Mastering Productivity Vol 2: Information Reference System

1. Introduction: welcome to this second course in the information organization. Siri's mastering productivity. This course image right here really represents the second stage, and I'll show you briefly the previous stage. This is where you have unorganized information and back. It's organized into in boxes, which are these folders right here. Those were both physical folders as well as digital folders, whether it's in your email inbox or it's in your cloud drive Dropbox one note. Ever note all those different places where you can put information within containers. The second step is taking the information in those in boxes and putting them in final locations. And what you see on the right side is four different colors blue, red, yellow and green. And those represent the four areas of your life. The 1st 1 blue is your professional life. That's your career. If you own a business, that's your business area. That's professional. 2nd 1 is personal. That's red, so that relates to how you manage your home, how you manage your finances, how you manage kind of the being the CEO of your life, all the sort of management stuff you have to do. Uh, the third area is relationships. That's the yellow folder. And that has to do with keeping track of your relationships of individuals relationships with with groups. Or, if you organized groups keeping track of that as well as your relationships with companies , both companies where it's, ah, trades person, like a plumber or an accountant or a lawyer or ah, general contractor or, uh, whatever it ISS those relationships at a small level, but also corporations that you have relationships with and keeping track of. Those, uh, especially has to do with contact information. So mailing address phone, email, those basic piece of information you need. Where do you store that that goes in relationships? The last one is health. This is keeping track of your medical health. When things go wrong is as well as making sure you're maintaining things and improving your body and your health so you'll learn how to put together personal health record, which is something that's really valuable. You can take it with you any time you go to a doctor, and you have everything you need with you so dealing with all that paperwork at a hospital , not knowing what you need, what you have, where it is personal health record is extremely valuable for solving those type problems and just making things a lot more streamlined. You also keep track of any sports that you're involved with any sort of activities you do mental health as well as physical health. So all of that stuff goes within that final fourth Boulder. The reason why this course is so powerful is you're gonna get a folder structure that contains over 300 different folders where I've gone through and exhaustively figured out what are the right category. So there's the least amount of overlap so that there's, uh, one place to put each thing. And as you start to use the system, you're going to notice that you no longer lose things. It's very easy to find something little. Problems that crop up don't become huge problems where you're searching for out, you know, hours just to find a single document. Everything comes becomes a lot more simplified. You can take on more, or you can spend a lot less time just maintaining the day to day things. So this sort of system has been requested from my students much more than any other course that I've ever had people request or just information. So this is something that I've been working on a long time. I test on myself and with others, and it works very, very well. Uh, people find that it just has a huge improvement on, uh, keeping those messes, whether it's on your computer or your hard drive or in the cloud or in your email. Uh, this is something that helps you stay at inbox zero. Uh, this is something that helps you keep Evernote and one note organized. The amount of time people waste by not having organization systems is in the hundreds, if not thousands of hours throughout their lifetime. It's all those little things that cause you a little bit of stress. A little bit of overwhelmed give you that headache because it's it interrupts you from what you really should be doing, uh, to really be productive. And to be successful, you have to be spending most of your time on the work that provides the most value. So if you think about what's the work that you do, that's $500 an hour work versus $100 versus $50 versus $10 versus $5 an hour work Well, a lot of this organization paperwork keeping, finding things. That's $5.10 dollars in our work, and yet people spend a lot of time doing that because they don't have a system like this. So a system like this allows you to spend more time doing that high value work, which means at the end of the day, you have more time for your family, your friends, and doing the sort of things that you really love to do and at the same time doing the work that you love to do and being in the flow and enjoying the time that you spend working each day. A big part of that is having a system like this that allows you to do the stuff that you enjoy and stay in the flow that have constantly switching tasks, trying to find things and constantly running into those little roadblocks that cause small problems to become big problems. So I'm very excited to finally be publishing this course. It's been in the works for a very long time, several years, and I hope you enjoyed. Let me know what you think and make sure you participate in the discussion section and any ideas that you have, so I look forward to seeing in the course, and if you decide to enroll, I'll see on the other side. 2. Overview of the system: Let's get started with system. You can see everything at the root level right here on this screen. This is showing you all the folders that are gonna be involved. And the way to visualize this is Imagine you're in Google Drive or you're in Dropbox. Or if you use one drive or something else, imagine you're in that drive and all the unorganized folders that you have there, some are labeled properly. Summer knew they all have different schemes. The first thing to notice about this is everything has a number as a prefix. Now, why is that important? The reason it's important is for two reasons. The first is just by having a numbered prefix. You know, when you're using this system, you know that that information has been properly organized or at least organized to some degree. So the way you keep track of things and the way you handle anything that isn't organized is Let's see, you download a file and you're not sure where to put it or you're on your laptop and you want to just get something over to your desktop. Well, you can just throw it into this main folder right here. and now you know. Okay, everything is basically in its place except for this one folder, and I've got to figure out where does this go? So that's part of the great thing about this system is, for most of you, it's not gonna be a one and done where you just sets everything up in a couple hours, and then you're done. The way it's gonna work is you've decide what are the most important parts of my life that I want to organize first. And what are the things that I can wait and do later on? You'll tend to find that either There's something extremely important stream of important aspect of your life where you're losing a lot of stuff where you're losing time searching for things. So you want to handle that. First. There may be other areas of life where you just don't have a lot of documents. You don't have a lot of information, so you can put that off toe later because part of the way this system works is that it's reducing your search time any time you're trying to retrieve information or even an object . But let's just talk about information you have a few places, you can look for it. It's either in your head. It's either a memory that you have. And it could be a good memory where it's instant access or could be something where you really have to think about. Another way you could retrieve it is in somebody else's mind, So you go talk to somebody when you ask them a question. In other ways you can go on the Internet. You can type your question into Google or Cora or Yahoo answers or metaphor, litter or stack overflow. And you can get an answer that somebody else has already asked. Uh, or you can ask a new question, or you can go to any sort of printed medium so you can go to a book. You can go to notes that you've taken before or pieces of paper, medical documents, financial documents, legal documents, Whatever it is, you can also go to your computer so you can search within the files that are on your computer. You can go into ever Notre one note and search there, so the question really is when you're searching for something and it could be a specific document you have a specific piece of paper or PdF in mind, and the question is, just how fast can I find that? How fast can I get it? Other times it's more abstract. So it's I'm looking for some ideas on this or I'm looking for that step by step checklist I created a few months ago or the research that I did on the subject a few years ago. When you have something like that, it's even harder to find that because you're not even sure what you're looking for. So the value of the system is once you have things organized in their proper place, there's really only a few places it could be. For example, if it's notes that you took, all those notes are gonna be going into Evernote or one note so you don't need toe. Look on your computer in all those files, all you need to do a search. One note or Evernote fits a piece of paper. It's going to be in your file cabinet system, and it's only gonna be in one place. If it's in your email, you're gonna have the labels working in your email, so that's gonna be organized. So no matter which place you look, there's really only going to be one place you can even look for it. Part of the problem with searching is your not just search. You're searching everything, and what really makes search powerful is if you can narrow down and Onley search a small area. It's like if you lose something and you know it's in one or two rooms of your house, you don't have to search the entire house. You search those two individual rooms with searching online or searching when you have tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of files is there's just so many results. It would take you hours just to look through all the results. So it becomes a problem. Even if you have a great search engine or search algorithm. There's so much stuff toe wade through to find what you're looking for. So that's why doing having a system like this keeping things organized is so important. And so what we're gonna be looking at here is the same system you're going to apply in all these different domains. So one note and Evernote you're gonna be using the system. You're to be using it in your email, you're gonna be using it in your physical file cabinets. You're gonna be using it for your files that are stored in the cloud. You're also gonna be using it for stuff that you're not storing in the cloud. If you have large files, those would go on an external hard drive, for example, So not or what manifestation is fishes physical or digital information. You're gonna be using this exact same framework, this exact same system, and I'll give you a quick run through of what we're looking at here in the next video. 3. Quick Tour of All of the Folders: Now let's look at each one of these folders. Briefly. So in the previous course, you learned about thes two folders, your current months folder, and, uh, I'll scroll down to the bottom of this. All right, this is where you're downloading stuff is where your pictures air going from your phone video and audio this where any larger files are coming in and then you have your physical in boxes. So this is all the contents of all your inbox is for the current month, and there's actually one other important thing this skeleton folder structure so that these folders always remain empty. And what you do is once you at the end of the month, you cut and paste all this stuff into the the month folder. So it's the year dot the month, and you don't necessarily want to cut and paste all these over. Usually, you're just going to do these ones and you'll leave the large files alone. That really is up to personal preference. How exactly you want to process your large files for a lot of people. They just want to keep them here and then monthly organization. This is where all your files for each month are going to be stored that are waiting to be organized. Okay, said those air your inboxes. Next, it's systems. Now this folder is empty because there really shouldn't be a lot of stuff in year. This folder is exclusively for organizing the other systems. So your business or your career, your professional work, that's its own system. Everything related to that system and running those subsystems goes inside that folder. The only stuff that goes in here is things related to coordinating between the systems and applying certain ideas or principles toe all the system. So if you come up with an idea of oh, I want improve everything using this strategy that would go into the Systems folder this course right here is a system about system. So it's at that higher meta level, and it can often be tempting if you don't know how to organize something to think that it's a system of systems or it's metta when it's really not, so will be talking about that more. A lot of stuff that you think goes into systems really will go into personal all right, next there's work and the way this is split up is innovation, marketing and operations, So this is filled in with sample information. But whether you you work in a job or your own your own business or combination, this overall structure will work for you. It just needs a little bit of massaging based on exactly what you do. But this is basically what is the problem solving that you do day today. Marketing is how you communicate your skill in solving those problems. So if you work in a job, that would be maybe keeping a personal website that an employer could look at, uh, keeping your resume, keeping up a blogger where you talk about innovations that you've made and then operations are What, what what are all the tools that you use, or all the other miscellaneous stuff that isn't directly related to solving problems in your profession, But it's related to like your computer that you use to solve problems or your printer or your office. All that sort of stuff, the software, your operating system, all that stuff goes into like, let's say you have a visa so that would that would be an issue that would go under legal so this is sample. You don't need to have all of these, but that's the purpose of them. Ah, the next one's personal. This one is a lot more in depth, so I'll save it really for later. But you have You have things separated and numbered in the same way. Eso These are the different aspects of your personal life. There's really a ton of stuff here. One of the things you may have heard me talk about before taking this course is the distinction between physical property, intellectual property relationships. So this is where you keep track of all your relationships with individuals. This is where you keep, uh, who are that aren't business or work related. Uh, then the social groups and you may be thinking, Well, isn't there's family here and there's family here. Social groups is how you manage the larger group, or how you or just information about that group or anythings that's related to managing the cohesive whole, um, or anything that goes beyond a one on one relationship. And then this is relationship corporations, um, or, you know, corporation of wanna trades person and then your community health. Ah, this is right here is a big deal. Your personal health record. This is a way of organizing all your health records so that you can just carry this with you either digitally or physically. Bring this to every doctor appointment and always have everything you need. And this was created by consulting. Ah, nonprofit companies where all they do is help people create their own personal health records. So this is really valuable. And, ah, this is something you can use every time you go to a doctor. Uh, and then all this other stuff is just managing the different aspects of your life that relate to health and also like your pets. So anything you can think of here and then also like any sort of team that you're on. Ah, and I also make a focus of not just your physical health, but also your mental health. Um, so all that stuff is in there, and then you have side businesses. You have your Children. Um, and this could also just be any other person in your life, for you have a large management roll over their life. Uh, or just a large influence where you you wanna have a large system. Um, and most often like for these for these companies, um, these side businesses that you have, you're going to duplicate the same overarching structure and use it for your side businesses. So with your Children as they grow older, you basically will just copy and paste these four systems and help them. You know, you create a shared folder with them, they start using the system themselves. They can eventually make it private. Um, but you can use thesis Tums that work for any individual and put it in there. So any time you have a large ah, a large responsibility and folder where you're gonna be doing a lot of activity, you wanna have that as close to the root meanings close to this this top level of level folder as you can, and the reason why is at least on Windows. And I'm not sure if this is true on Mac or not. I don't think it is, but there's limitations on how long the file path and folder path can be. And I believe it's 256 or 260 or 266 characters. Um, and you can run into problems by having too many sub folders. And you also just want to avoid more than three levels whenever possible of complexity. Because your brain just has a really hard time keeping track of it. So you'll notice some of the design decisions I made. You might think, Well, that should be a sub folder. Well, the reason I didn't do it that way is because your brain works better when you minimize the amount of sub folders and keep the hierarchies shallow rather than very deep. Um, you can go deeper over time as you get more experienced with this sort of thinking and system, feel free to adapt it to your own uses, but especially at the beginning. This is a lot to take on, and you're basically reconfiguring your entire brain in terms of how you organize all your information. All your ideas, all that content in your brain is going to be really organized based on the system. So it's going to take a while to get used to it, and I minimize Ah, the depth because if you go really beyond those three levels of hierarchy, you're just gonna forget and you can lose really really important stuff because you just stored it too deep. It's like digging too deep down in the ground and bearing stuff. It's just it's gonna be really hard to find later on and even remember that it was there. And so that's why with any air, any any folder where there's gonna be a lot of sub folders you want to bring that out. And, uh, there'll be some more stuff we go into with that later on. You also have this shared folders. So you were gonna have shared folders with a lot of different people, especially if you're doing a lot of collaborations. You're sharing files folders with people, so it's important to have a personal one and then a professional one. And you keep all your shared folders with different people. Uh, with professional, it's going to be usually colleagues, partners, um, freelancers that you hire to do various things and then for personal, that's gonna be family friends and then other people that you run into, uh, just during the course your day. So that's really Ah, that's really what you're looking at here. Number one, you've got your inboxes. Number two, these are your made these Air Corps systems, and it's really the core four. This is really a minor planet, and then you have other side businesses stuff. You have your kids or other dependents where you're doing a lot of management of their life , and then you have shared folders, so that's what you're looking at. And of course, you can add additional stuff here. But before you ever add something, think about. Does this belong in a sub folder? And you may be thinking, Well, I want it in the root directory for ease of access. Well, there's other ways to do that. There's a system of promotion where you can take something that's a sub folder and bring it into the root folder and maintain the the hierarchy system so you'll learn how to do that later on. That's it for this video I'll see in the next one 4. Systems System: Let's talk about the first folder systems. This doesn't have anything, isn't in it. Why is that? The reason why is because this is purely for those projects that involve applying things other systems so really Onley things like this right here, this course and then also things like a table of contents. So one of the things you can do is keeping a table of contents of where all your other systems exist. And this is something you can do with Google documents, especially so this is a great way to organize stuff and Google documents is create a spreadsheet table contents, and you can link out to any other systems. It's a good way of keeping track. It's beyond the scope of this course, but it's something that you can do. It's also something you can do in one note and Evernote. Both of those allow you toe link between pages and especially if you're using one note. This had some really powerful features where you can basically organize it, almost as if it's an internal website, kind of like a internal Wikipedia where you're storing all your knowledge and your interlinking it and specifically you choose certain higher level concepts which obviously are going to start out with these four right here and then underneath those you have the major projects that you're working on. You have minor projects that you're working on. So the whole point of these is that these get copied over toe all your other systems thes get copied over to your Gmail. These get copied over and for example, in Gmail, you can use hierarchies with one note you can create hierarchies. One of the disadvantages of ever note is that it doesn't have a strong support for hierarchies. You can only do a few levels, and to get beyond that limitation, what you have to do is use a special numbering system, which will cover late later on, when I show you how to promote certain things to this root level directory that are buried within a sub folder or a sub folder of a sub folder. So that's all this is for. This is for keeping track of the systems or individual techniques or strategies, or things are gonna change or, for example, keeping track of your progress. So when you're in one note, especially or Evernote, that's where you're gonna be keeping up with the progress of how your work, how you're implementing the systems and organization across all these other places. So when you're in one note, you can create just a one page summary of how much progress are you making? Which of these four subsystems have you started? Which ones are you in? The middle of Which ones have you completed? You can keep track of the progress of implementing these systems, implementing these strategies and these organizing principles. So, you know, as the weeks and the months and even the years go by, where are you? Because just the nature of your short term memory is that you're gonna forget how much progress you made. You're gonna forget how much you did and how much is left to Dio. So it's really, really important that you're keeping track of all that. And that's the kind of stuff that goes in this folder. 5. Biz System overview: Now let's talk about the work folder. I talked earlier about the three main sections. Innovation. You have marketing and you have operations. This is particularly well suited for running a business. But even if you're not running a business, even if you're working inside a business, you can think of yourself as an intra preneurs. And that's just a play on words of entrepreneur. Except you're applying a lot of entrepreneurial strategies while working within a business , and more and more, having these sort of skills is very important. Why? Because the whole workforce is changing. People are no longer getting jobs where they work the same job for 10 2030 that years or their whole career. You get a job, and in a few years you're thinking about your next job. You're thinking about doing something else or technologies changing, and you have to be updating upgrading your skills. That's part of the reason why accelerated learning is becoming this huge thing. It's because in the past, people didn't have the same need to educate themselves and continually educate themselves and be lifelong learners. That was something you did because you enjoyed doing it wasn't something that was a necessity toe. Have a job to keep a job, to get a raise, to move into a new area of a business or take advantage of a new type of technology. So it's even more important now than it's ever been before. To think as an intra preneurs, to think as somebody who's not just set for life, where you just have toe worry about. Okay, how do I do my job and it doesn't change much. You have to be innovating, and you also have to think about how are you marketing yourself and not just having a nice resume and some letters of recommendation and doing a little networking. But it has to be something that you're continuously doing. You're making sure that you're keeping connections. You're making sure that your networking with people you're making sure that you have some sort of public presence, that your contributing the conversations online. Maybe that means going on Cora and answering questions. Maybe it means publishing things through LinkedIn or creating your own Blawg or doing something else or doing some a little bit of consulting on the side. Whatever it is, that's all marketing. That's all communicating with other people and really with the community about what you do and who you are in what skills you have, speaking at conferences, even teaching. Everybody has skills and everybody can teach those skills. So putting things on YouTube or teaching through your blog's or posting as a guest on other people's blog's or doing a podcast or being a guest on a podcast. All of those things involve you putting yourself out there putting your name out there, and that's all marketing, that's all. Communication. That's all things that go above and beyond. Doing your job and communicating your skill, your knowledge, your expertise with the larger community. The next piece is operations. Those are all the support things that you do in a corporation. You have whole departments surrounding each one of these in a small company. You have one person who's either full time or part time or consultant or coming in, um, from a different company where they're taking on those roles and managing those responsibilities. Now, when you're either a solo entrepreneur, you have a small company or you're working as an employee inside another company, you've gotta have you've got to manage all of these things. You have to have a basic working knowledge of all of these different areas. So maybe you don't need to know a ton about accounting, but you need to know at least a little bit so that you can maintain your supplies so that you're ordering things in. Your home office is properly stocked. You have to be able to manage your computer. You have to know what software updates protecting anti virus, all those things you have to make sure you understand what's going on. So all of these factors, at whatever scale you're at, you have to be thinking about them. And the more organized you are, the better you're gonna perform, the better you're gonna dio and the fewer headaches, thes things they're gonna cost you. So if what you really love to do is innovate and really work on your job and be the best you can be than the solution to taking care of the marketing and the operations is systematize it, get organized, do it once, figure it out, and then make it a habit. Make it something that you can do quickly and easily, and it's not gonna cause you headaches. You're not gonna be doing it at the last minute. Create those systems by using unorganised ation ALS system like this so that you've covered all your bases and just putting together a one pager on each of these things. That's what I always say is when you don't know what to do when you need to make a plan. When you just want to get a little bit of information, just do a one pager. And I actually have a course coming out on this one pager strategy for taking notes, creating systems and getting things done with just a single piece of paper. And it's a system that I use in my business is that I use in businesses of my coaching clients and when I do consulting, and it's incredibly effective. So each one of these things, even if it's not something you do regularly and you only think about it a few times a year , get those thoughts down on paper because I guarantee you you're gonna forget whatever those thoughts are. And what happens is you forget you make the same mistakes over and over and over again. You have to use this system It's not something that you just copy and paste the folders and then you're done. You have to take the thoughts out of your head from each one of these categories, even if you don't have much. Even if there's not much going on, maybe you don't do it. Maybe you've never done public relations before or you've never done sales before or you've never thought about branding. Well, that's OK, but put together, you know, 102 103 100 words or five or 10 bullet points of of the very limited amount that you do know. Just write that down, and that's your foundation. That's your starting point when you read a book on sales, those notes go into that section in one note or a never note or if you take. If you scan them in, let's say they go in that folder. So when you're online and you download a PdF about sales or a mind map, it goes in that folder. So that's how this stuff works. And actually, one thing that I should mention is that there's a distinction between learning projects and this stuff right here. So when you're doing a learning project that stays separate. So if you're learning about sales, that material doesn't go here. Where goes is in your learning project that's specifically designed for learning about sales or learning about really any subject. So why why is that? That's this is something that we're going to run into multiple times throughout. This course is the question of duplicate categories. Will. There's multiple places I could put this. How do I decide? The way you decide is you're learning projects. Ultimately, it starts with questions of How does this work? What about this? What about that would about this role model? How does this person do what they do? What's the system that I should use? What are some techniques? What are some strategies? Your project starts with questions, and it ends with answers and solutions and things that you can actually use and take action on. So those things that you create those final products, whether those air internal products or external products that you're selling or things you just use for yourself, things that you share on your blawg things that you share with your friends or your colleagues. That's a major way where you can start to use things that you create for yourself. To market yourself is create little resource is share them with other people. So and this is something that I learned about the military intelligence community and system for the United States is, whenever they collect intelligence, their end result is creating an intelligence product. That's what it's called, and that product gets delivered to a decision maker. And that decision maker uses that product so that product might be a Pdf might be a word document, but it's all that information brought together in one place. Easy to read, easy to use. That's what you want to be creating with your learning projects. So you create maybe a checklist for yourself of how to get prepared for a sales phone call or a sales meeting or sales presentation. A checklist of things to prepare and run through your head, things to say things to bring. Make sure you have all your materials. That's the final result that would go into a folder like this 204 sales. So things that you can take action on things that you can actually use those end results of your learning project. That's what goes here and you can even make a copy of it. So keep a copy in the Learning Project folder and they put a copy here, and obviously you want to put a date on that. You want to put a version on that? So that's how this stuff works. So each one of these areas, you wanna have at least one learning project for it. So look at 201 AdWords and PPC, which is pay per click. You pay a certain amount every time somebody clicks on your ad that can be in Google that can be in being That can be in Facebook. So you might have a different learning project for each one of those platforms. And that's perfectly okay. You take the final results from each one of those, and then you save it, and you put it in this folder and these air folders that you can use by yourself or you can share with other people. So most of the time you want to be using those separate share folders like I showed you here shared folders, personal and shared folders professional, but you can also share these folders or sub folders So that's how this folder structure works. You have innovation. That's where you're taking care of what you actually creating. What are the day to day problems that you're solving, that you're getting paid for where you're using the skills you're getting paid for this stuff that you're not really getting paid for but you have to do. That's what goes under operations. So that distinction is never going to be 100% black and white. But really think about what are your special skills? What should you be doing? What is this stuff that you can do? But you can't pay a college student 10 or 15 bucks an hour to Dio or somebody in another country, even less to do that. So think about what is your $100 an hour work? What is your $50 an hour work? What is your $25 an hour work? What is your $10 an hour work? What is your $5 an hour work and try toe figure out ways where you can either automate it or by software or outsource it to another country or just to somebody who makes less per hour doesn't have as much skills and get really clear on what are the skills that you're using that you're getting paid for. And if you own your own business, what are the skills that you're using that really bring in the money that really helped develop and create those products? And one final thing that I want to mention is the distinction between marketing and innovation. The truth about marketing is marketing should really, uh, should really flow through your entire innovation process. And the reason why is part of marketing is figuring out what do people want? What problems do they have and how does your product or innovation or development solve those problems? So, really, at the beginning, you're doing a marketing process of figuring out what people want, and then you go and you innovate and you test and you show a few people and you get some feedback and you iterated, you do it again and again. You come out with your final product and you put it in the packaging to create the website . You put everything together and that's the traditional marketing that we think of. But it really starts at square one of doing that research, learning, learning about people learning about your potential customers and what they want, what they need, what's going to make them want to buy whatever it is that you're creating. And that customer, if you're working inside of a company, that customer or the end user is may not be the person who's purchasing the product, and that may even just be somebody who's evaluating your work. You ultimately have to sell your idea to them. You ultimately have to get them to sign off on it, even if that's not necessarily what would benefit the end user the most. So you have to think about all these different levels of Who are you communicating with? What are you? Who are you creating this thing for? Maybe one person may be multiple people so different things to think about. But this this structure right here is incredibly powerful for simplifying your business, simplifying what you do for work and allowing you to get a lot of clarity over the systems that are running your business or running your work and, uh, breaking it down into categories so that you can really easily find what you're looking for . And you always know where to put stuff. And if you don't if a category doesn't work, create a new category 6. Organizing Personal Property, Care Taking and Home Management Info: in this video, you're going to see how to organize your personal life. So let's get started right here. You have the first section, and each of these sections are delineated like this. So they're in all caps and you can see they're spaced out. So they're easy to read. We start with planning up top. Then we get into caregiving Home management, managing your physical property, managing your intellectual property, your finances and your low priority finances and then other. So planning is really important. And this is part of, Ah, there's gonna be other courses coming out in the future where I teach short term, medium term and long term planning, Which are these three areas right here. So that's where you're gonna be keeping those files. And you'll notice that a lot of what you do day today if you have a notebook that you use or a planner or a schedule is just doing this sort of daily and weekly planning. Where a lot of people make the mistake is they don't plan at thes longer term levels, and so they're just going by whatever happens and reacting as opposed to being proactive. And then there's thes two meal planning an event planning and a meal is really just another event. But because it's something that happens so often, it really deserves its own category. So this is a situation where if you're thinking about what wire things organized like this , that could be a subcategory that could be a sub folder. Well, the reason why is when you have something really important and you're going to go to it very often. You don't wanna have to go into that sub folder. And remember, we always want toe eliminate levels of hierarchy if we can. You don't wanna have 567 levels of hierarchy just to be a purist. It's much more important tohave minimum amount of hierarchy so that it's easy to remember where stuff ISS because ultimately, if you're not using the system, then you're not getting any benefit out of it. So especially when you're just starting to get into this form of thinking, it's important to not get too caught up in that sort of stuff. As you get used to the system and after use used it for a long time. Then you can start to do that, but part of benefit of the system is you don't want to just be using it yourself, but have other people in your household and other people that you interact with If you have a business right work, try to incorporate thes same sort of ideas and same systems with other people. You can teach these systems to other people, get them using them and really transformed their lives because it just makes you so much more efficient, productive. And it gets rid of a lot of the headaches that come from these sort of tasks the next, uh, categories. Caregiving. So this is child care, general caregiving and elder care thes air, things that just involve How are you taking care of people? That's Ah, a fair amount of that is emotional caregiving, but also like if somebody as an injury or a sick Ah, what sort of systems or processes or steps do you have in place for that Eso. That's where you can keep that sort of information or ideas. You might quip something out of a magazine. You might print something out. You might. This might be something where you just keep notes in one note, and these are the kind of things where a lot of people don't even think about it. They don't even have a category for it, but it's something that's really important. So this is an area where, if you just write down the little things of what is your process or what are you used to? Or what if somebody else used Teoh? Um, you can get an idea a read for what their expectations are, and make sure that people in your household feel taking care of so these this convey this little as what are the sort of rituals that you have or daily things that you have to keep those relationships positive. And it can also factor in specific situations, like if somebody's sick or their injured or something else. So when you don't take care of it than those sort of interruptions can cause major problems for you. Whereas if you do a little bit of planning ahead of time, you can be proactive. So some of the some of those acute things mainly come up a few times a year, but you multiply that out over how many years of your life you're gonna have toe be caring for other people. And you're talking about dozens and dozens of situation. So it really for those sort of acute situations is really important, but also creating a culture in your household and also assigning roles for who takes care of what who takes care of who or who takes care of, you know, certain services for certain people. Um, and you can figure that out for what works best for your home. And a big part of it is just thinking about this stuff and writing down your thoughts, coming up with ideas and just do little things to improve home management. This is basically maintaining your home and then improving your home. These are the various areas home cleaning and maintenance, home improvement, and I'm reading these out. So if you're listening to this on audio, uh, you can get a feel for it. Home improvement, interior design, real estate holdings. So this is where you would manage if you have multiple homes, multiple properties security. So fences or burglary or, ah, surveillance cameras, whatever sort of systems you have for security storage. So where do you store things? Um, in your basement, in your attic in closets. Do you have a specific storage room? What is your system for organizing objects? That's something that we go pretty deep into in the course that's parallel to this one, which is organizing your objects as opposed to organizing your information. So that course will be coming out. And, ah, that will get that specifically addresses things like storage so you can keep track of where all of your objects are. And it makes sense yard work. Eso that's the last category for home management and that just deals with anything that's outside the home. And, uh, I have mentioned in other places that part of the inspiration for this course comes from how the White House staff is organized and the executive they call it the executive Residence. And what's really interesting is that in any very large home or mansion or castle and or palace or the White House, there's a large staff of people that take care of all of these things. Home management is a huge one. Ah, but also all this other stuff. So the president has staff that takes care of all of the stuff, and I'm talking about the United States here um, but the the president has staff for all these things. So, uh, these air like the gift unit. The reason why I named it that that's under physical property, which we're getting to next is because the White House has a gift unit and they're in charge of, um, cataloging all the gifts that come in or card storing them. And they go to the museum, uhm evaluating them on. And also, I believe, preparing gifts as well. So, um, it's important to have a system like that for when you receive gifts from other people and also, um, sending out if you have a Christmas card or New Year's card or birthday cards and stuff like that Gifts. You wanna have a centralized location, where you keeping track of all that stuff? So the, uh like, for example, with White House, the National Parks Service owns all the land that is around the White House and underneath the White House. So the National Park Service takes care of all the yard work. Um, for the White House, the next section is physical property. So 31 is appliances in electron ICS, 32 clothing and textiles, 33 computers, 34. Gift unit, 35 hand and power tools. 36 property, 37 stationary male packing materials, 38 vehicles and transportation. One thing you may be wondering is, Well, what's the difference between electron ICS and computers? Well, a computer is anything that has a significant amount of intelligence to it and can do a broad range of things and has the ability to Teoh either type into it or speak to it or, ah, get things out of it that where there can be significant interaction. So something that isn't a computer is like a basic stereo or some speakers or a printer or a scanner, things like that where it's really a single purpose tool. It may have a touch screen and may have some, you know, certain functions that you can do with it, but it doesn't have really intelligence in it. You can't use it in a general way to do a lot of different things. So what counts under computers is anything that's a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, a cell phone. Ah, a smart cell phone. So really a smart I should say smartphone, Um, like a flip of flip phone and older phones. Those would go under electron ICS. But you can if you want to store them all in one place, you can store them under computers. Um, but like cameras that would go under electron ICS, anything that single purpose like that. But it does have, you know, it is electrical that goes under electron ICS. You really save computers. And the reason why they're separated is because once it can do general things and it's sort of a platform where you can install applications, that's when you want to be able to manage those applications. You need to manage that data. Manage backup of that data, uh, and set preferences and all those those things are things that you want to record in one note or in Evernote because eventually that computer is gonna have a problem with it or it's gonna crash or you're gonna lose it, and you need to get the data from it, or you get a new computer and you need to transfer things over. So that's why you record all this information in a separate place with a new Elektronik. You don't need that same level of management because it's just It's not an issue. Uh, now intellectual property. So there was a slight error here. That should be 43 Enough. 44 um, intellectual property. So and actually, I'll spend a bit more time on physical properties. So clothing and textiles gift unit handing power tools. So that's like your work bench. Ah, a lot of times that'll be in the garage in your basement. Anything that has to do with physical tools goes there, um, property, those air, just any other. Anything that's not a power tool or power appliance that's going to be a general piece of property so that that's a general area, that a lot of, uh, other things, they're just going to go into stationary male and packing materials. That really goes hand in hand with the gift unit. So when you're packing things up or sending things, you want to keep all that stuff in one place, and sometimes you'll receive things and you can reuse that envelope of that box for something else. So ah, this is big for your, um, your physical organization system, your object organization system, and then finally, vehicles and transportation. So this is keeping track of like your motorcycle, your cars, your trucks, Um, any cars that you rent or if you take a bus or plane either renting it or owning it, Um, an RV, uh, taking public transit, those air all fall under either vehicles or transportation. So if you do uber a lot and you don't have a car or you don't have a motorcycle and you would also put your bike in here eso anything that is human powered could also go into year . So that's, uh, that's how you manage that. And that's why it says vehicles and transportation, because you should be using this to manage, uh, vehicles that you you own. But also, we're moving into an economy where it's less about owning things and more about renting it and all the efficiency and energy that saved by having that sort of system. So, uh, you can be thinking about that in terms of really all your physical property as well as, ah, home management and the whole idea of owning property as opposed to renting. Um, I think over the next few decades we're going to see a lot of innovation where it's less about owning things and more about renting things and and the efficiencies you see through that 7. Your Information (aka Managing Your Personal Intellectual Property): The next section is intellectual property. Intellectual property is really just information. So I was, uh this was one of the tough things that I spent a while thinking about is how do I separate and make sense of the idea of objects versus information and intellectual property is really the best way to think about it. It's sort of a legal term, but it just means information and some intellectual property is is property of the comments or, ah, the property of of everyone. So copy right is not necessarily owning information as much as having a temporary, exclusive license over that information in a certain country or countries. So that's, uh, and a lot of what you create. Actually, most people don't know this, but anything that you create is copyrighted. Even if you don't file for copyright, always in the United States. So, um so any time you're writing anything down, you're creating intellectual property. So let's get into this. The 1st 1 is ah, 41 is mindset, culture and religion. And the reason I put all of those three stick together is because a big question in organizing information is what is an idea what do you do with an idea? What is that thing? Well, an idea or a thought is really just information that you're storing in your head as opposed to storing in a computer or on a piece of paper or on an audio or video recording. So the stuff that you operate with on a daily basis, how you make decisions, your values, your beliefs, that really is a mindset, uh, the sort of general common sense that you have that everybody has, or almost everybody has, um, that that isn't reliant on or you would think of as a special skill. So people have special skills cause it's a hobby or because it's for their job, um, or some other thing that they specialize in. But everything else, those kind of sort of common sense things that everybody knows that falls under mindset, culture and religion and religion is something that, especially in the past, encompassed a culture encompassed a mindset. So you just had a religion, and that, basically, was the culture. There wasn't really a difference between the culture and the religion, or it wasn't the gap wasn't as big as he used to be. Now, for a lot of people that aren't as religious, and for countries that are becoming more secular, people think about their mindset as more of a culture. Well, they think about their religion or just their operating beliefs as a mindset or culture. So 42 is personal tax, and this is anything that you write down either in a mole skin or in a ah, in Evernote. One note, even an email would fall under this. So any sort of random text that you create and then 43 is personal audio, photo image and video. So an image Would it be any painting or drawing that you do? Where is a photo is something that you take with a camera and image would also be if you draw something with a pen on a tablet? Ah, like an iPad pro or something. And the main distinction here for 42 43 is These are things that you're creating yourself, um, and for yourself or for other people, but mostly for yourself, maybe for your family. 44 is published media. So this is stuff that other people have created and published. Um, and obviously you're going to find things that are in a gray area where it's it's on a forum or question answer site or something else that would still go into published media. But you would just make a distinction between the publisher, and you could really think of the publisher as the website that it's on, or, uh and that really cover it. In most cases, there aren't a lot of people sub self publishing, physical things, physical pieces of paper. You do have books, but for the most part, self published stuff is going to be digital because it's just so much cheaper. Then you have software with with software and really, even with published media, you're you're actually not usually buying it. You're just getting a license to use it as an individual or as a company, or, um, or there's some sort of creative Commons. You're usually not actually buying and owning the code itself. You're getting a license for it, Um, so there is a bit of a distinction there, and then you have 46 which which is user manuals and warranties. You could put this under 44 publish media, but it really serves a separate purpose than most other stuff that you're most other published media that you're getting in, that it is really linked to a specific piece of property or hardware. Um, that you have in your house somewhere. So it makes sense to save all this stuff of one place, and basically the way the pipeline works is you get a box with stuff in it. You take out the appliance and you store that in one location somewhere in your house. You may have put some other stuff in storage, like extra cables or, uh, additional things that go with that appliance or Elektronik device. And then the third thing is all the paperwork that came with that appliance so it could be a dishwasher could be a washing drying machine. Could be a TV. Could be a boom box. Whatever it is, it's gonna come with user manual warranty, even little things. Um, they come with this sort of stuff, So you just get a file a Manila folder, put all of it in that and then label it, and it's really easy to just go in and find what you're looking for. 47 is correspondent, So this is cards that you, uh, that you send or receive, but especially those would really ah, those would really go under gifts. Um, any time somebody's sending you something and it's and it's as a gift and it doesn't have content where you're really it's meant to go back and forth multiple times. So correspondences when you're in an ongoing conversation with somebody. Ah, and you're exchanging information for either t connect with each other, toe or toe, learn about something or discuss something. Plan something work on something together. 48 is education. So this is where you keep all the files and information from going back to preschool to elementary, middle high school, college, anything after that and then also your lifelong learning. So this is where you're learning projects are stored, and then 49 is miscellaneous. So other stuff that you can't think of where would go. Ah, 49 is the place for that, but as much as possible really try to use thes other cattle 8. Managing Your Personal Finance Information: we start off finances and really so finances is 50 and then 60. Is finances low priority because there's more than nine different areas where you can, uh, where you can organize things. So first is banks. So this is where you keep track of your banks checking accounts, savings accounts. Then you have your bills. So, uh, and for banks, you may get statements in the mail or emails that are that are about a bank account so that those would go inside here 52 his bills. So this is bills that you get from companies where, uh, you have to send them some money. 53 is budget. So this this actually technically could go up up top near planning because a budget is really just a way of planning for your financial future and setting out basically allocating resource is for the future. Um, and that's what planning is. Planning is allocating. Resource is, you can think of it is just time, but there are other. Resource is besides time, there's your capital. Resource is money. Resource is there's time. Resource is there's human resource is other people you're working with. There's any sort of object or software or information resource is that you'll need. So there's different. Resource is you need a budget is mainly looking at What is your You could really insert money, budget or capital budget, and you could have a time budget. You could have an information budget. Um, you know, you could you could think of a budget as just ah, sort of plan 50 fours credit cards. So just keeping track of, ah, credit cards and those sort of smaller, which is really just alone. Um, so it Yes, it technically could go under 57 loan 50 fives Insurance s O. That would cover any sort of insurance that you have health insurance, vehicle insurance, homeowner's insurance, life insurance. Any kind of insurance is is going to go here. And when we get into the health section, there's also a section for, uh, health insurance. So what you do is for anything that you need tohave, um, you just make a copy of it, or you can decide you go into this folder, and when you're creating your sub folders, you just say what say health insurance is gonna be 01 What you would do is if you want to keep this empty, You just see 04 health empty. So what this tells you is this technically exists. Eso if you come here later and you're wondering Well, where do I keep on my health insurance stuff? Oh, yeah, it's actually I'm actually keeping that in the health area right here. Okay, so that's how that works. So when you ever whenever you're wondering, Well, this could go in two separate locations. I don't want to get confused. You create an empty ah blank folder so that you can remind yourself later. 56 is investments. That's obvious. 57 loans. So that's probably going to be, you know, could be a personal loan. Um, a mortgage loan for a car. Big purchases, mostly is when you're looking at alone, but also loans that you give other people. So somebody asked for a few 100 a few $1000 and or they want a loan. Um, a piece of equipment you have or or something else. Ah, you just keep track of all that stuff here so that, uh, you know, you loan somebody a book, even that would go here. So, um, 58 his retirement planning for your retirement, and some of that would go under investments. But ah, not everything. So that's another situation where if there's overlap, you just create blank folders that say Okay for this thing, Goto go to investments and then 59 is taxes. Now we're getting into a low priority, so we're getting into 60 finances. Low Priority 61 is coupons keeping track of all your coupons. Some of you may keep a lot of coupons, and you may wanna have, like, a binder or an accordion or something where you keep track of all those other of you might not. Um, you may get all your coupons via email, and you may want to just have a label that you would use. So the label you would use would be, oh, to for personal period 61 period and then space coupons. That's where, and so you would be able to easily add this label to any coupon that you got and find those later on. 62 is customer service enquiries. So this is any time you have to call up a company and get some help with something you can easily keep a log of those conversations. You may need that later on. Um, to prove that that somebody said something to you or if you had a chat, you could copy and paste that. If you talk to somebody on the phone, where do you keep all your notes from all those conversations? Right here. So you have a place to put that 63 gift cards. Sometimes you get a gift card, you'll sign up for fi. Oh, sir, Comcast, Internet or TV, though the part of the deal was, they give you a 306 $100 gift card. You know how to get rid of it, or somebody gives you as a gift for, ah, holiday or if your birthday, they give you a gift card. So where do you put that gift card? Um, this is where you put it. Or if you maybe you want to re gift that you get a gift card, you want to give it, just get rid of it by giving it somebody else. Now you know where all the gift cards are. And this is also works for digital gift cards, um, and and store credit. So, uh, they're basically the same thing, but but something that's more of like a debit card that would also go under gift card. You also have rebates. So, uh, keeping track of rebates. Okay. I should be getting something three months from now. Ah. Where do you put those pieces of paper for the rebate? Where do you store that goes here? Ah, and a lot of these things, especially, are going to be mostly physical folders. You're probably not gonna have a lot in in your dropbox and digital folder like this. Receipts and packing slips so you'll get a receipt. Usually when you go to a physical store, sometimes you get a receipt over email. If you buy something digitally, sometimes you'll get it in the box when it's delivered, or you'll get a packing slip, which isn't exactly a receipt. It may not list the price of anything, so both of those things can be kept in the same place. Um, but receipts have a special shape, so they're usually about two inches, three inches wide and can be very long sometimes. So you have to have ah, special way to store those efficiently, and I'll talk about that later. That's one of the special things. Basically, you just taken 8.5 by Dion, Uh, a regular letter envelope where you folded in thirds and you put it in the envelope. You basically seal it, You you cut. Ah, the edge off one of the sides and you can just store them all for each month inside, that's all. I'll explain that later. Um, reimbursements. So for a company you worked for, you go travel, and you need to keep receipts of stuff and get it reimbursed later. That's who would keep that stuff. 67 returns and repairs. So yes, again. Technically, those go under customer service inquiries. But this is more about when you're not, um, when it's not just about getting some information from them or asking for help, how to fix something or get something toe work. It's more about there is a problem, and you either need to return it or send it out to get repaired, or have somebody come to you to get it repaired. And now we're nearing the end. So 9. Keeping Your Miscellaneous Personal Files Organized: 80 is for other 81 is legal. 82 is travel so legal would be, you know, a speeding ticket or going to a red light or parking tickets all the way up to any sort of civil or criminal litigation. It could also include interactions with your local government or state government That isn't tax related. So, um, just miscellaneous legal stuff. Ah, I didn't break this out in tow. You know, I could have done 10 different sub categories for legal, but for most people, they don't have a lot of legal stuff going on. So, um, 80 to travel. So planning, vacations, planning, travel. This is sort of leisure travel, or it can also cover travel for your work. And, um, if you're traveling pretty infrequently for work, you can keep your work traveling here and keep it mixed in with your personal. But really, that work travel should go. Ah, in your work folder in 01 Work not 02 Personal because it's not really personal travel. However, a lot of the preparation you're doing is personal in nature, in the sense that you have to collect your personal clothing and hygiene and whatever else that you have to bring with you to travel. So it is a purse. It does cover both both personal and professional. So, um, when in doubt keep is much as possible about your travel in personal under 82? And then, if there's certain aspects of travel when you're traveling for work, you can keep those either in a sub folder of 82. Or you can keep them as an operations level thing under work, and then you can make a file short cut. Or you can do the whole empty folder strategy that I mentioned earlier, entertaining and hosting, um, that that involves personal relationships, and it can be professional. Also, for most of you you don't need. Teoh doesn't make sense to separate those into different categories. But if you have a party during the holidays, or you like going out to dinner with people or taking people out, um, to go golfing or whatever, Ah, you could cover that under entertaining and hosting, this really has a focused on having people to your home or hosting a party, either in your home or in another location where it's a more personal private event and you're inviting friends and family 80 four's hobbies and Leisure. So this is any hobbies that you have leisure activities, A lot of situations. Um, with this sort of stuff is you may be thinking, Well, what is a learning project? When is my hobby a learning project? And when is it just something I do for leisure or as a hobby? So the way to think about that is a learning project is is focused on learning and creating finished products, and a product is not necessarily something you sell. But it's something that, uh, it stands by itself and can be used by you or by other people. So it's your taking all your research. You're taking all your experiments and you're learning, and you're boiling it down to a final booklet or manual or e book or one pager or five page document. And, uh, you know, you can print that out and it can stand on its own. So you would take that final thing. What what say you were learning how to sail or you're learning how to race cars. You're learning how to fly a plane you would have a learning project on and Sometimes it's you have one. Be like you take a course or you're doing Ah, you know of immersion experience in a limited amount of time, a day, a week, a month, 1/4 or maybe a year. And then really, you're not doing a lot of learning after that. And it's just leisure. So you have a learning project for the learning aspect of it, and then you would have an implementation. So you're learning Project would include stuff about Okay, this is, uh, like when you're researching where to buy a plane, what plane? To buy, what local airports and, ah, where to get fuel and where to get the various equipment that you I need that would go under your learning project cause you're learning about that stuff, but eventually would come to a conclusion of Okay, these these air the This is the plane that I have and these of the specifications on it. This is the instruction manual or the owner's manual and all that information about the final decision you made. And once you actually own it, uh, that would go under hobbies and leisure as your plane and actually that that could go under travel. Um, so if you were using it as a travel, if you were just going out and you would always go toe one airport and just fly around for fun and you're not using it to travel to get somewhere, it's just, ah is just fun to drive it a flight around. That's that's a different. So, um so then it would go under hobbies and leisure and and so those are the sort of those of the sort of fine grain distinctions that you can make on your own. But really think about it. Whenever you have something like this, think about what is the end result that I want. What is the end? What is the end goal that I'm after here? Think about what that final goal is. Think about what am I When am I going to go to this information and how am I going to use it? So when you're going toe, look at OK, I need the bait. I need the important information about my plane. You're not looking for all those instruction manuals and books and stuff that you read when you were learning how to toe fly a plane you already know that stuff, you're not going to go back. That's really reference information related to learn. And you might give that to somebody else if they wanna learn, or if you need a refresher or if you need to pass a test or something. But those air no longer working files, that's no longer something you're going to go to. And it's like you want to grab a folder to and then take it with you and go drive somewhere or look at it on your desk. You don't want to be taking some huge, um, you know, stack of of papers. So ah, just keep that in mind whenever you're planning out where you're gonna put information and when it can go in multiple locations, think about doesn't make sense for to be based on. Are all the different things in this category do they all have a shared goal? So in transportation and vehicles, the shared goal is getting from point A to point B. Hobbies and leisure are not about getting from point A to point B there about enjoying the process or the flow of something, so whether you're, you know, going jogging or your biking in a loop or your, uh, you know, exercising in some way where you are travelling. Technically, the end result is not to travel. If you're biking in a circle or a loop, or you're running and jogging in a loop and you're not just jump, you're not like running or walking or jogging toe work. Then it doesn't count is travel where I mean transportation. Um, and again, what I said about travel is that's really leisure travel, Um, and especially going on usually a plane. But it could also be a bus or by boat, uh, where you're doing it to get somewhere and then do stuff there. If if you're going on a cruise, for example, and it's part of a vacation thing and it's all organized by them, that would fall more under, um, traveled and other under transportation. So, uh, those air nuanced things, But but think about the ultimately what is the goal of this thing and does? And if it's an edge case, where does this more fit in in terms of what is Thea ultimate goal of doing this activity 10. Personal Information Conclusion Overview: So that's that's it for, ah, the personal section. And it starts with planning that's really planning your whole life. And then we've got some specific aspects of it. Care, giving, taking care of the other people in your life, special in your household. Home management. And then you've got your physical property, all the objects inside your home Home management is really about the home as a structure, um, the utilities coming in and out and then, ah, the yard outside and, uh, setting up that sort of structural and outdoor environment physical properties about all the objects inside your house and, ah, you know furniture, for example, would fall into property. Intellectual property is all your information, whether it's physical or digital or both. Finances is everything related to managing. Your financial resource is and and then you have other, which is just sort of miscellaneous, um, factors that don't fit in anywhere else. 11. Relationships - Organizing Information About Individuals: in this video, we're going to talk about relationships and the system in place to organize those relationships. The interesting thing about relationships is that what people think about relationships as a one on one thing, and that's how they organize their relationships. They organize them in terms of this is my role index, and here's the contact information for each person. But there's a whole nother area of relationships, which is groups and all the sort of dynamics that exist within a group. So this system takes into account both of those and looks at the different types of groups and organizations and as well as different types of individuals that you'll come into contact with. So what start up top at 10 for people. So the first and the way this is organized is 10 through 29 are related to people 30 through 62 or really 69 are related to groups and businesses, so there is Theo exception of a one person business. But just for simplicity. We treat a one person business as a corporation and ah, and so that falls under 40 and we'll get more into that when we cover groups, so people. The way this works is each person is assigned a six digit number, and that gives you the ability to manage up to, um, basically a 1,000,000 people in your network. Ah, and I really don't think anybody needs more than that. But you could obviously choose however many digits you need, and you could add a digit weight. Iran. Um so the way this works is when you're organizing information related to individual people , you create a folder for each person. And what that folder looks like is three digit six digit number and then first name, last name. And so you're the first person would be number one. Okay. And that's how it goes. So I have a whole course that goes into organizing, creating role index, organizing information, keeping track of everything. So, uh, that's beyond the scope of this course, But that's this is basically what it looks like. And if you just want to keep it simple, you don't need anything more than this. What you would do is an ever Notre one note. You create a page and any information about that person, and you put it in that page. Now, if you have a lot of information related to that person. You would create a section just for them. And that's what I do in one note is if it's somebody that I have a very weak relationship with, where it's basically we're just acquaintances, Um, where I know of that person, then I'm not even to create a section because it just takes up a lot of space and creates clutter. So I usually don't create one of these folders and less. It's somebody where there's information to be managed. Um, if there's otherwise, um, there's no need for it and it just creates a lot of quarter. So you have a folder here if there's a PDF or you want to create a shared folder. Um, actually, there's a different system for shared folders, but, um, one way you can do it is just put the shared folder inside here. Uh, if they send you something, you could scan it in and put it in here. Or if if this was your ah file cabinet, you would just create a full Manila folder and label it with this and, ah, put anything, any correspondence you could print out an email and annotate it and keep it in there. That's great, for if you don't talk to somebody very often, you can keep any notes on your conversation, Um, or if it was an email, print out the email chain and keep it in there. And then before you talk to them, you can get a refresher on what you talked about last time. Um, and this is something that you can use for professional relationships, where you need to keep track of everything, and it saves a lot of time and can impact the bottom line. But it's also valuable for mentors as well as mentees. If you coach or consult, it's very important for that. But if you're mentoring somebody you want to keep track of, what is your mentee doing? What sort of progress are they making any sort of metrics goals you have for them, resource is things you want to recommend, and then, if you have a mentor, you want to be doing the same thing. And if you have a mentee, you wanna teach them this system. Um, but you want to be keeping track of taking notes on each conversation you have with your mentor. What do they recommend to you and, ah, make sure keeping track of that all. And then before your call, you just spend half on hour or an hour preparing for that call to make the most out of it. Especially if somebody's, ah, high level person there times really valuable. But even if their time isn't technically valuable, all that really matters is, is it valuable to you? How valuable is that time to you? And that really determines and how valuable is your own time? Because it if you're wasting their time in your time by not preparing, then it really has nothing to do with how valuable their time is or what else they could be doing, cause he also have to think about yourself. Um, but that's that's how all these individual categories work. Family, friends, mentors, mentees, ah, neighbors and then acquaintances. So you can you can break it down into his many categories as you want, but I find that ah, you wanna have his few categories as possible to be able to easily find who you're looking for. What's really annoying is if you have like 15 different categories. That's how I started like all these different categories, and, uh, I'd be looking around different folders just to figure out where somebody where there. Folder waas. Um, so a good way of thinking about what folder to put people and if they can fit into multiple categories, is what was your first ah, relationship with them based on. So how did you initially meet them and put them in that category? And then Onley switch their category if something major happens where they, uh, where they really firmly established themselves in another area of your life? So I've had people who I worked for or who were clients of mine that have meant toward me. People that have bought stuff for me have become my mentors, and they, some of them, have become my mentee. So there's once they once there's a significant relationship where they've substantially moved beyond that initial role, then I will put them into a different category. But my default is, however you originally came into contact with them. Whatever that original relationship is, that's where it stays. Unless something else happens significant, where you're going to remember it for the rest your life that they switched over into that new category. So fewer categories, the better business related. So in your professional life thes air various people that you're gonna interact with and based on your specific situation, you can switch these up as needed or even eliminate some of them. So that's individuals. Uh, you should A one individual should not be both in family and in employees or in employers or whatever. Uh, somebody should not be both in friends and mentor or friends and mentee. Nobody should have, Ah, folder in multiple ah, of these, because that's going to introduce a huge mess. So you just have to pick what is the most prominent, uh, relationship that you have with them or the Met? Most salient. And as I said, the way to determine that is number one. The default is, however, you met them. Number two is if they made significant progress or change into a different sort of relationship with you. Now let's get into groups 12. Relationships - Organizing Information About Groups of People and Companies: so with the first group, his family, and remembered that there should be no folders in here where you're managing individual people. But the way you think about this is this would be your nuclear family. You could also use this to manage. Um, like, what? Say you have aunts and uncles and cousins where the cousins are underneath a certain couple that's your aunt or uncle or you have nephews or whatever so you can. The way you can break that out is in terms of other nuclear families that are related to you in some way. And so anything related to that, that group as a unit or as a whole that isn't wouldn't be captured with individual relationships, any sort of dynamics that exists there as a family, Um, that that would go in here, Um, so you can really you can break up your family tree into those nuclear units where it's parents and then the Children and yeah, it does. It can get a little bit more complicated if you have divorces and step parents and a dot like, Well, adoption doesn't really change anything, but, um but yeah, with divorces and separations and other stuff like that, it could make it a little bit more complicated. But when in doubt, keep everything in one group, try to avoid separating things out and trying to be super precise about it. Because at the end of the day, um, even though that that can be interesting as, ah sort of intellectual trying to get clarity Ah, at the end of the day, it actually just makes it harder to figure out when you have a piece of information. Where do you put it when you want to retrieve information where you go to find it? So when in doubt, keep it simple, keep it to fewer groups, fewer categories. Then you have this elementary school, middle school, high school groups. So what this means is groups of friends. It can also be a team. So you see here, Ah, soccer group, Um, that could be a group of people that play against each other if it's an adult league or if it was, um, if it's a team that you're on right now, you could have your team here. There's also you can also put the team under ah, health. So when we get into the health category. There's also spots for teams now. The differentiating factor here and it This may matter to may not, is it because you're probably want to pick one way or the other of doing it? And if there is a gray area than just put everything in either here in relationships or in health, and I would default to here. But what I'm getting at is if if you do something and it's purely or ah like 9 80 or 90% about just exercising and doing stuff, and it's not really about having a personal relationship with those other people that either are on your team or that you're playing against or in a league with, then that would go under health because it's just in activity. And, uh, managing that group really is not about managing the social relationships is as deeply, Um I mean, obviously, and especially if you're a leader. But even if you're not, um, it is important those social relationships are important, but they're going to be mawr or less important, based on what your goal is. So if you're, you know, in a softball league and you're just doing it because it's a bunch of people that you're already friends with or your friendly with or you work with them or you go to the same church or something like that, then it's really more about okay, this is a group of people that I like being around that I'm friends with, and we happen to do a sport as, ah, fun thing to do together. That's not the same thing as I just joined this league and I got put on this team and we're mostly about exercising together and doing something fun. But I don't really wanna see any of these. People are spent time with any of these people outside of doing that activity. So that's another way to test. Okay, which how to think? How do I think about this group So that it can really be any these, you know, stages of your life. Friend groups, Um, you know, that could be col leagues at at a certain job. So the interesting thing about social groups and relationships in general is it's It's so much based on proximity just where you live. Ah, and where you work and something, and other major groups that you're a part of like a church or religious group or, um, professional groups, for example, but for the most part is just based on where you work and where you live. And before you work your in school, which is basically a job anyways, so it really it really comes down to Where are you? Where are you located during the day? And whoever you're around, that's the very small pool that you're probably gonna create relationships with with the Internet and stuff like that. People are going beyond that a little bit, but it's still in the pretty early stages of that. So that's why we use this system. Because it turns out that even though you could have groups from a plethora of different sources, it turns out for most people, their families, their original group and then as they go through school, they develop friend groups by with people who they're either ah, in a class with Or they do some sort of extracurricular activity with, and then beyond that, it's colleagues, and then it's again extracurricular type of sports or activities. Ah, that they're involved in, and the best way to organize them is just chronologically. So when did you get involved in that? Um, and it can be helpful to to if you have a lot of these to keep, um, the more social ones separate from the more professional groups. And then you could shift 40 and 50 to 50 and 60 to create more room. That's That's really something that applies to any of these. If you have more than nine categories, then you want toe. Uh, you wanted to shift all the numbers down or up in this case, um, so that social groups and remember no individuals air going in here? It's only about organizing the group as a as a dynamic and especially if you're the leader of the group. Um, that's where it's really important to be thinking about this stuff. Or if you want to be a leader of the group in the future or take on some sort of some sort of role. That may not be the leader, but a leader, um, or organizer or whatever. So now 40 ah, 40 is about relationships with companies, and the reason why this is here is because you want to have all your contact information in one place, and that's Actually, a lot of what relationships is about is getting in touch with people. Um, yeah, it's also can be about storing e mails or correspondence or taking notes. Um, but that's usually for more professional relationship or business oriented relationship. And with court, when you're interacting with a company, it's similar. So there's gonna be a contract or there's gonna be receipts or records of things happening and estimates. Ah, but really you you wanna have contact information? So ah, so what? Ah, major purpose for this section is that you can keep contact information on the various companies or corporations that your interacting with or ever have interacted with in the past. So a major part of this is keeping track of, um, the contact information, usually a phone number email are gonna be the most important, but also possibly social media profiles and mailing addresses, fax numbers, and from those part that's it. Um, but keeping track of just information if you if you don't have somewhere else where you keeping it? This is where it should go, and you want to keep all your contact information. One place, ideally, in a spreadsheet now not gonna talk about that spreadsheet here because that's pretty involved. It's a whole course in and of itself. Um, but you're setting the groundwork here to be able to use that system later on. Ah, and then finally you have community. So these air not necessarily groups where you decide to be a part of them or decide to get together with a bunch of people. It's more you go somewhere and you're automatically part of that group if you're in that location. So I obviously got a little bit, um, future oriented with this. Ah, so you can remove thes if you want to, but ah, and I'll read it out If you're listening to this. Ah, actually should go back and read at all of these. So we start with people. Ah, 11 family, 12 friends, 13 mentors, 14 mentees, 15 neighbors, 16 acquaintances. Then we have business related individuals. That's 2021 is employers. 22 is col. Leagues and partners, 23 is business acquaintances. 24 is hot. 24 is missing. What happened to that? Um, 24 should be Ah, I'm just going to shift these up. I don't know why. I don't know why that happened. So 24 his clients 25 employees, 30 is social groups. And remember, this is about organizing groups of people, not individuals, are storing information about individuals. Not here. 31 is family. 32 is elementary school. Group 33 is middle school. Group 34 is high school group. And if you're in A if you're in a country or a situation where these don't apply, obviously you just change it to whatever your situation is. 35 is college group 36. Soccer group 37 is poker. Group 38 is banned. 39 his church, then corporations. And so you maybe think, Well, what if I move and have a different church? Well, you would have multiple church groups. You wouldn't put all the different churches, Um, in one category. Now, if you go, you know, if your go to a different church every week, um, or you rotate between a lot of them, then, uh, it would make sense to keep them all under one. Because you don't wanna have just you don't wanna have it cluttering up everything. So, um, if you have more than like five, I would say, put them inside a sub folder. That's a sort of ah, gray area where you have to make decisions on Do I want everything? Do I want a flat or do I wanna have sub folders? But have the potential to make it harder to find things later on than 40 is corporations 41 you know, some people would say, Oh, well, your band is a non profit corporation of your churches and nonprofit corporation. Um, but, uh, you know, that's just another gray area. So we're talking about functionally What is it? What is it doing in your life? Um, I mean, a band could even be for profit. Uh, so 41 is tradespeople. This is Pete. This is like blue collar, sort of usually individuals or small company. But it could also be a larger company. Plumbing, electricity, patrician, general contractor, construction roofing painting. Ah, all sorts of stuff like that. Service providers. That's more about providing information based services. But ah, you would think of as more white collar. So ah, landscaper, for example. Yes, they're doing a service, but they're more of a That's more of a trade. Um, Mason, you know, same thing. Blue collar versus white color. Ah, 43 end. Ah, this is another kind of interesting. Um, we talked about caretaker caretaking in the previous section. Personal. There's another color collar, which is pink collar. And these air jobs, like nursing or, um, like a receptionist or a hostess, um, or maitre d uh, where It's a lot of emotional labor, um, or caretaking type labour. And these tend to be undervalued in most cultures. And it tends to be that women historically have been. Ah, I have had a lot of those jobs. Oh, and they also often relate to things that are done around the house where they're not paid for unless you have. You know, like an executive, residents like the President, United States or a large mansion where you're hiring people to do child care or to cook for you, or to do various things and one of the and so you would you could think of those whose service providers I didn't want to put in 1/3 1 that was like pink collar, because you can separate them just into service providers. But it's an it's an interesting area, and I see in the future. Robots are an AI are taking over. Ah, some of these jobs and some of them are already like the Roomba vacuums so can vacuum your house. And there's robots that can mow your grass. So they're they're robots that are taking over some of thes tasks and especially right now in Japan, they're developing a lot of robots that can do emotional labour, have conversations with people. Um, take care. Helped take care of older people because they have some demographic issues where there's a lot of older people and not enough young people. Ah, to take care of them all or interested in taking care of them all. And as people live older and older, there's all these issues that we didn't have before. Um, so what am I getting out here? Well, there Ah, the white car versus blue collar is ah is a common distinction, but ah, the pink collar is also another interesting angle to look at in terms of what sort of work or labor is being done. Um, and it's also an interest. Interesting way of thinking about the mind. If you're familiar with the three. The Tryon brain Theory or the, you know, the lizard brain, the mo 1,000,000 brain and the human brain. The way you look at that is, uh, doing stuff with your physical body, like lifting things. And, you know, digging and carrying things. Heavy labor that's traditionally done by men. Blue collar ah, pink lay pink collar is traditionally done by women. It has more to do with emotional intelligence, social skills, but also work around the house. That doesn't require that same level of strength. Um, and then and then white collar labour is where men and women are equal in the sense that they have the same intellectual capabilities. And so and so those, uh, that's why part of, as our culture has, um, evolved in technology, especially has has created a lot of these opportunities. Um, we're not seeing the same sort of divisions between the genders and because, ah, some of those things are being taken over by technology or robots. We don't need people to be lifting and carrying things as much. We have machines to do that. And so things related to, um, you know, social and emotional skills and intelligence, those air very important and then interacting with technology, abstract thinking, mathematical thinking, stem fields, technology fields. That's where all the jobs airheaded, um so and those air the those of the human level. The minds of the three part brain theory is, ah, those those pink collar jobs have to do with that. Using those mammalian social skills, which is the That's the real advantage that mammals have over lizards and non mammals is they have generally more of a social unit, and they evolved to benefit from those social relationships and groups and bonding and stuff like that, Um, and then where humans really differentiate themselves the abstract thinking skills and language skills. So that's that's a white collar work. That's when there's the gender equality in terms of abilities and skills and ability, you know, ability to do that sort of work. So, uh, that's that's sort of the philosophy behind it, And it's gonna be really interesting to see, because artificial intelligence and technology is headed down the road of what jobs can we have a machine do instead of a human? And so it has to do with what is our understanding of how the human brain solves that problem and then How do you program that into Ah, computer? So right now we have Siri and we have Google assistant and thes chatbots and Facebook, where you can have a conversation and they're starting to gain those emotional skills and social skills to solve emotional and social problems. That's that's the language that you use an AI and, you know, NLP natural language processing. That's how to understand and create conversational stuff and then effective computing. Or that's dealing with the emotions, being able to read emotions of a human that the computers interacting with and then display emotions like the robot face conduce, splay, a smile or a frown or what, you know, blinking whatever emotions Teoh be able to communicate on the emotional level. So, uh, and then you have programming and logic and reasoning and probability and stuff like that that allows it a computer to think abstract ideas and recognize objects. That's computer vision. So those, uh, you know, all this stuff is connected and the way the way computers are going to take human jobs or replace humans is there going toe? Um, they're going to develop these skills and, ah, the people who are programming these artificial agents are separate the brain out, out into these different categories, and then different people are working on different aspects of the problem. But artificial intelligence is a huge area, um, related to machine learning related to accelerated learning. So it's definitely something to pay attention to. And ah, and think about in the long term of where where society is going, where technology's going, where the economy is going, where jobs and work are going. Uh, okay, so let's get back to the corporation section. We did 41 42 43 stores. So, uh, keeping track of stores and then 44. Is there any other company where you don't know how to categorize them? And And that's that's another big thing is if you don't know what a categorize something have. Ah, have a section there. Have a folder there that's at the end that just is miscellaneous or other so that they're not just sitting, um, in some random place or in this root directory where ah, they're not organized. You want toe. You want to always have stuff organized, even if it's just in a miscellaneous folder. The final and we talked about communities so you can get rid of these. Um, but, you know, if you're a citizen of multiple countries or you just live in multiple countries, That's why I included this to show you how it would look, um, country, State city and the neighborhood. So those are the various levels, and some of these ah may be more relevant than others. You may live in a certain county. Um, if that's relevant to you If that if there's a community people think of themselves as being part of a certain county, um, or or section of the state, then it might make sense to organize something like that also. So I can Massachusetts. You may think of yourself as being on Cape Cod. Eso there's there certain things like that regional where you where you could have that level also. But for most of you, you don't need that. And even even this level of detail may, uh, you may not use it that much, but if you live in multiple occasions you have homes in multiple locations. Then you would wanna have a separate, Um, you you would wanna have separate one. So, like if you had left in two different states. Um, but those states were in the same country than you would not have country, too. Um, and this is really only for places where you have an established residence or when you spend a significant amount of time regularly over multiple years. So this isn't just for like, travelling unless, you know, let's say there were, ah, some people who travel a lot. They have friend groups in various cities and maybe they want toe. You want to keep track of, um, there's certain people who maybe you never talked to them unless you're in the city. Ah, or there's, ah, stuff like that. You could create a social group. Um, we're not a social group, but a people group for that specific city. The reason why is because you're gonna put all the folders for those individuals in that city folder. Um, you would not put them in. You not be putting individuals folders in here because remember, this is only for organizing the dynamics within that group. So if there's certain dynamics within the group of people, um, who live in a certain city, you would put that here or us and It's really just about that. It's not about like details about that city that would go into travel that would go in your travel under personal. So remember this is about organizing your relationships, and you do have a relationship with the government. So that is like, if you want to keep track of contact information for certain departments within the government in a certain city or state or whatever, This is how you would do it, um, and you keep track of the, ah, the dynamics of that community within. So you know the neighbor. So, for example, Ah, what say you have your on a driveway, um, or you're on a private street and there's some potholes in that street. Um, you and some other people in the neighborhood would have to get together to pay for that private way to be repaved, so this would be the place where you would organize that sort of thing. Let's say you're putting together a block party. Um, you would organize it based on that neighborhood, so ah, and then the other. The last thing is, if you previously live somewhere that moved, you would just keep track of things chronologically, Um, so that's that's really all there is to it for their relationship section and will be moving on to the health section next. 13. Health - Personal Health Records and Food-Water-Air Supply Related Information: in this video, you're gonna learn about how to organize your health information, and we're going to start off with this very important subject, which is your personal health record. And this is a collection of documents more than 10 that are going to get you to the point where you have a single collection of folders that you can bring with you Teoh any and every dock doctor's appointment or any other health professional appointment you have. And you'll have all the information you need and you're going to see the way that I set this up is a little bit different from how I set up other folders in that there's some of these decimal points and these are things that you can make sub folders if you want to. But I wanted to be able to make the video without using some folders. And so I put these in here so I can talk about it, Uh, and you can see everything in one place. So let's start with the personal health record. This, uh, has your legal information any directives? Um, and if you're younger, you may not have thought of getting this stuff taking care of. But, um, if you're incapacitated or if you die or if you're in a coma or other things like that, you need tohave thes things in place. Or else, um, it's it'll just go to your closest relative, or, um, I'm actually not 100% sure on what the legals are in various countries. Um, but if you want to set that up, you need to Ah, you need to get some forms. You may want to talk to a lawyer. Uhm, identification, health insurance really important. Um, this right here is where you going to keep track of, um, you're any treatments? You've gotten your test results blood type educational materials. So when you get pamphlets, all that sort of stuff goes in here and you can even separate it out by the specific, uh, thing you're getting educational materials about. You could also if you're thinking about what if I have a learning project, Uh, well, then you can you can move this stuff over to a learning project. But then the question is, Do you need those education? No materials when you're going to and from various doctors. If you don't, then I would move them over to the Learning project. But if you do, then you don't want to have to go digging through all of those learning projects or bring all those learning project folders with you just so you have your educational materials. So this is something that you can use a sort of an inbox, and then you can lay there later. Organize those materials into your final learning project. Resting places. 17 is contact, so you want to keep track of email addresses. But if especially phone numbers of anybody you talk to any contact information that you need should go here. Interaction logs. This is where you keep track of any interactions. Take notes while you're talking to your doctor. This is a really basic thing that most people don't do. Just bring in no pad with you, even if it's just your phone. Just take some notes in your phone. Um, write that down, get it in your phone and then get it into ever Notre one. Note. Once you get home and then you can have all that information in one place, see the advice you got? See whether you're staying on top of things or not because there's no way you're going to remember this stuff so it can feel like in the moment. Oh, well, I don't want to write stuff down. I should be able to remember this, but the truth is, you're not gonna remember it, so make sure you're taking notes any time you have an interaction like that. Um, that kind of thing can also prevent mistakes if there's issues with insurance companies later on. The fact that you were taking what's called contemporaneous notes can help you if there's any sort of issues down the line. Um Elektronik Health. Rick uh, access portholes. Eso. That's what some doctors you can get access to your medical information through some Web service that they have set up. That's a gear. So that's keeping keeping information so you can log into that you're any mental health records, and then 19 is for other. So anything else that doesn't fit into one of these neatly that you want to be bring with you each time. The next section is food, drink and air, and this means what are you putting into your body? You may think well, air quality that's not an issue, but in certain cities, it really is an issue. If you travel to certain cities, then you wanna be thinking about that. And you can also get your air quality test that you can get air purifiers thinking about humidity and the dryness of air, especially in the winter, which can cause respiratory issues. So having the ideal air quality can make a huge difference, especially if it's too dry, and that usually happens during the winter. But it really depends on your climate. But let's start back at the beginning garden, so creating food yourself what kind of food you create yourself. Can you keep a small garden? Uh, almost anybody can have a few plants just in their windows, and people often, Um, even if it's just herbs. People often overestimate how much recent re sources are required just to get a few plans going. So it's something that you can start small and then eventually bigger, bigger, depending on how much real estate you've got available, 22 isn't as a really big one is food shopping and supply When, when people think about eating healthy, they usually focus on making choices when they're going into the freezer, or the fridge or the pantry or wherever they keep food. But the reality is most of your decision making needs toe happen before you even go to the store. Because once you're at the store, people tend Teoh, just go through aisles and pick out whatever looks good as opposed to a having a plan. So having that plan and only buying good food is going to ensure that that's the food that's going to be going into you. So this is an extremely important part of your information system is making sure that you have a plan and I actually have a system that I may release at some point that, um, basically wise you to schedule buying certain things. You can even have them delivered if that works on your budget, but deciding where to store things, how toe by things in the store, how to organize it all, uh, having a checklist in a way to make sure you don't forget stuff. Uh, all of that is going toe go into that system. So that's something to keep your eyes out for and let me know if that's something you're interested in, because right now that's Ah, pretty low priority among a lot of other courses I have in the works Water. So water in the same ways air quality is make sure you're keeping an eye on the quality of your water drinks. What sort of stuff are you drinking? That can include, um, that can include alcohol, but really, that would go under recreational drugs. It it's it's sort of Ah, it's a nuance difference. So there there's plenty of stuff that, um, contains drugs or things that will have an effect on your mind that you might not consider a drug like caffeine. But, um, those sorts of things Ah, at a basic level, you can just be keeping track of what sort of drinks do you wanna have stocked air quality food appliances? So this is like a blender, anything like that, where you plug it in and use it. Preparation hand tools is like knives. Anything else that you're gonna be using to handle food, food serving equipment is dishes, um, utensils. Anything that's involved in one way to think about it is 26 27 are what would be in a restaurant would be in the kitchen and then they put on the counter and then food serving equipment. Be anything out in the dining room. Ah, and then food storages, saving leftovers and having things for later on. So that's that's what's involved in organizing your food, drink and air. 14. Health - Organizing Info on Physical and Mental Activity, Pets, Drugs and More: The next thing is physical activity and you'll notice this has a twin in mental activity and down the line, also with body care, internal and external physical activity starts with 31 cardio 32 weight lifting, 33 flexibility. Those are what I think of as the trifecta of how toe make sure that you're well balanced with your body. So making sure that you're not ah out of bounds and just focusing on one of these exclusively is a really good idea. Make sure that you are have a consistent practice that covers those three bases. 34 is competitive and 35 have to do with sports on activity so competitive versus non competitive. Um, obviously, there's some gray area there, But, uh, just to give you an idea of how to keep things, um, how to group things if you have a lot of different activities or sports that you dio and then teams, So if you're on a team, then that's Ah, you have some room for their for those forties mental activity. So you got short term memory focus. Sleep. Sleep is a big one. Energy energy is a big one. A lot of that has what your energy has to do with the precursors, which are how much sleep are you getting? Um, are you get? Are you staying in the flow? Do you know how to remove obstacles to getting into the flow? That's something I talked about in my creativity course, but I think I'm gonna, uh, actually created course just on getting into a maintaining the flow because it's so important. Uh, and that has to that really goes hand in hand with focus. But a huge thing is, uh, just the food that you're eating. The food that you're eating has a huge, huge effect on how much energy you have. So that's one of the most important reasons to eat healthy. Even if you're not somebody who who cares as much about looking a certain way. Ah, energy is really directly related to food. I'd say food is the number one thing that affects it. So make sure that you're focusing on that energy and looking. If you don't have good energy at certain points in the day low energy or you could just need to take a quick break. But it could also be systemic issues with the food that you're eating and also possibly things that you're drinking. Or drugs like caffeine or getting a dependency on something like sugar. So look into those type of things because those have a big impact on mental activity. 45 competitive mental sport. Um, that that gets into the definition of what is a sport. But, uh, I'll leave that there. 46 noncompetitive mental activity. Yeah, Obviously that could be anything, But, um, this is things that you would do to specifically exercise your mind in some way. So a crossword puzzle, for example. And then any sort of team activities that you've got going on, um, 50 and 60 body care, internal and external. So internal looking at your hormones, dental hygiene, reproductive health, respiratory digestion These are just some recommendations you should put in. Whatever. Um, whatever makes sense for you. Body care, external skin care, hair care styling and cosmetics. So, um so, yeah, uh, you can also add additional to that if if you need to seventies providers. So this is where you can keep information related to specific people, and you may be thinking, Well, how does that overlap with Ah, the contact information and everything else. Well, this is where you would go into more detail. So in here, it's really just Ah, the minimum amount. Just exactly what we're talking about. But with with physician, this is where you could put stuff that you don't want to be hauling back and forth every single time. You want to have a more long term location for it. And any set of more in depth information would go here. Also, if you're researching specific position Ah, a new physician or dentist or whatever, then you could do that research and create a number just for that research. Last one is recreational drugs, drinking, smoking, 83 other. So, um, I'll leave that up to you. Um, but it does make sense to to have a place, toe store, any sort of information on that. And then lastly, 90 is pets. So, um, pet One pet to each pet will have a folder. And depending on how much detail uh, goes into caring for your pets, you can you can directly take, for example, this personal health record, and you can just copy and paste this skeleton structure and put it right into the pet folder and you just replace this with the name. So that's that's all there is to it for the health. Make sure that Ah, make sure that you're putting time into this. Make sure that your taking everything you know and taking, um, any time you have an issue, make sure that you're putting the details into year. So, for example, you may have a symptom of something happens and you're not sure what's going on. So you just kind of forget about it or you think to yourself. Well, if it doesn't go away after a day or two, then maybe I'll I'll look into it. Well, a day or two goes by and you forget what exactly the system symptoms were when it started, and and that's a mistake. So this is a great way to keep track of. If something goes wrong and there's an issue, then you can immediately make a little note of it. And you know where to keep those notes. So, uh, that's why it's a really easy way. Teoh keep track of things like that. Um what? See, is there anything else? That's really it. So make sure that you're keeping track of timelines of things. That's that's a really big thing in any details, how things feel, because it's really easy to forget that stuff, and especially if you're not feeling great. It's even worse trying to remember what happened and and, ah, the interactions you have with doctors. You can learn a lot about yourself. You can also request health records from your doctor from hospitals you can't necessarily like if you go to the emergency room or you go to a hospital. That's not, um, if you're hospitalized for some reason, you need to go to that hospital to get records. You may also need to ask your health insurance company for records, and those records should go in here. And this is something that you can also do for your Children or anybody else who you're directing their care. So that's a really valuable thing to do. And there's laws, at least in the United States, where you have the right to your medical information so you can go to a hospital or go to insurance company, and they can charge you administrative costs to make copies and stuff like that. But you can request that information, and, uh, you can request all of it. You can request specific parts of it. So, uh, make sure that you do that, make sure that you you spend the time. This is this is, ah, project in and of itself to get your most people do not have well organized medical information. So this is a project that you'll probably spend a few weeks on if you want to really go deep with it. But getting all your information organized, it's gonna be Ah, um it's especially important if there's other people that you're caring for to make sure that you have a personal health record set up for them also. So this is something where you can be keeping track of other people's health issues. Ah, a spouse, um, a child, a parent or another relative. And you can be keeping all this information and you can handle multiple people's stuff and not get overwhelmed because you have a framework and you're using the same framework for each person. So make sure that you start now, take the opportunity now to start to think about okay, what are the most important aspects of my health that I can start taking some action on. Just having this year gives you an idea of Okay, Where? My week. Where am I strong? What am I focusing on? What am I not focusing on? Take that and pick two or three things that you can start to work on and improve in the next few weeks or months. And then over time, what you want to do is just work your way through this entire structure. So work your way through it and eventually have at least one page for each of these. If you think about how important each one of these areas of your life of your health are, each one of these deserves at least one page of thought. And that's really true. For every single folder that you're gonna see in this course is each one of thes deserves at least one page of time for you to think about it. Do a little bit of research figure out what's going on, what the current status is. So that's part of how you can look at this. Is Thies. This is ah, pretty all encompassing an exhaustive picture of what's going on with your health, whether it's what you're putting into your body of cute care, anything related to a hospital in your personal health record, how you're exercising sports teams, your mental and physical activity, uh, taking care of your body internally, externally, recreational and your pets. So, really, everything is here, So take some time and your long term goal is you should have at least a one pager on each one of thes subjects to make sure that you really understand all the facets of your health . 15. Concluding Overview of All Sections: in this video, we're gonna wrap up with a few of the final folders and, uh, do a short conclusion of this section. So right here we have the start of and I already covered these briefly. So this is just a reminder. The format of the system inside each of these side businesses or responsibilities is going to be identical to this in terms of operations, marketing and innovation. Those were three areas that you want to manage. Then you have a child, or but it can really be Andy dependent. And then inside there, you can mirror this exact five part system and you can share this folder with your child or other person and, ah, keep that shared and then go back and forth and show them how to use the system. Final areas, shared folders. So it's a good idea to keep the separate because what can happen is you put some big files in here. You share them, then you lose track of it. You're wondering where is all my space going in my drive? Well, it's a lot of times in these shared folders because sometimes they'll put stuff in the shared folder and It's just hard toe. Figure out where all that space is going sometimes. So Ah, it's helpful. Toe. Have them here. And then any time you're wondering Oh, I want to share this folder with this person. You don't have to go finding that person in here. You just go inside either Personal professional. Find that folder and it's easy to clear this stuff out afterwards. Um, so as much as possible. Also, try to keep those individual shared folders, um, organized in themselves with the same sort of numbered prefix system. And another thing is, ah, the way you set up a shared folder. You you want to use their six digit number, but you don't necessarily want them thinking about Oh, what's that six digit number in front of my name? So this is just for your own personal use, and then inside what you do is you put their name first and then you put your name you put shared folder. This is what you share. Uh, not this, not this folder. Um, so that's how that works. And, uh and so finally, what's do? Ah, quick recap. Current month folder where you're saving everything each month at the end of the month, you're going to take this or possibly just This is what most people do is just this. Cut that paste it in the relevant folder and then, ah, that gets organized in batch mode, which will be talking about in the next section. And then these things air paper source, the's air working files. Ah, meaning that whether you're on your computer or physically, these are just files you're working on right now, and later they'll get put back where they belong for large files. Oftentimes they're so large that they're going to take up way too much space. So they need to be organized internally. Meaning all your pictures need to be organized within this one folder. All your videos need to be organized within this one folder or even on a separate external hard drive. If you have a lot of video because video can take up a lot of space, a single hour of HD video can easily take 2030 50 100 jakes, depending on, uh, what format your recording. But easily 2025 gigs. So, uh, that can eat up space really quickly. Same thing with Cam Tasia captures so screen video capture can take up a lot of data really quickly. Webcam tends to not as much. Um, So what you can do with these sort of files is within the folder. Keep track of, uh, keep track of individual events. And this is another area where I maybe it's really beyond the scope to get really in detail about how to organize pictures and events and stuff. But, um, that is potentially another area where I'm going to create a course just on how to do that , Uh, and do it really well. So if that's something you're interested, let me know, because that's another thing that's pretty low priority right now in terms of all the courses I have, uh, slated up. So in the next section we're gonna be talking about once you go into a folder like this, how do you organize all that stuff and put it in its final locations? So we had systems. That's where your just keeping track of how you organize things that apply to all your main systems and as well as any of these also. But these air really your core systems core for then you have work. You have innovation, marketing and operations. And this is true whether you're an employee or you run a business. Multiple businesses. You just have multiple of these folders. Personal. This is a really big one. This is where we spent the most time because there's a lot going on here planning things out as well as looking into the past. So when you're planning things out, you're also looking into the past of What did I do in the past? What can I learn from that? So planning is it seems like it's just future oriented, but it's also in the past. Care giving. This is another really important one. This is emotional labour. This is taking care of people when they're sick or just the sort of day to day things. Um, not just acute care home management. This is taking care of the home, the interior and the exterior, the structural aspects of things, not individual objects that you can pick up carry around. But, um, the things that, uh the utilities, cleaning, improving, keeping, maintaining and improving Really? Ah. And then physical property and intellectual property. We spent a lot of time talking about the differences there, and that's a large area of management finances. Another huge area of management. This is the one that by far people spend the most time on because it's something that you continue. We have to keep up to date on it. And, uh, it's not as easy to let it slide as some of these other things where if you don't manage it , not as much will go wrong. And then you have your other section and we discuss that relationships. This one's break broken down into two sections. You've got individuals whether they're, uh, people that you know in your personal life or their business related. And then you have social groups and we included corporations as well as personal social groups and communities, uh, geographically organized communities and basically governments And ah, that's another area in the future. It's going to be interesting as we start traveling to other planets and the moon, Um, how things are gonna Ah, that's really the new frontier. There hasn't been any really, for the most part new land to occupy for decades, and so it's gonna be interesting to see what happens, and then finally, health. So the big thing here is your personal health record, but you're also looking at what you're putting into your body every day, your physical and mental activity, your body care internally and externally providers who you have and then recreational drugs as well as pets and managing information related to those. So that's it. That's that's what the, uh, that's how the system works. And what would be valuable at this point is to test yourself to just see, Do you remember the main thes capitalized titles? Do you? Do you remember those big picture categories for each area of your life? Because in total, there's between 10 and 15 of them. So, are you remembering these big ideas? Those are the big branches of your knowledge tree. Are you remembering all of these? And if you're not, and if you wanna have ah, nice reminder of thes is take out a blank piece of paper and draw mind map, and that will easily fit on a single piece of paper. So and then you can post that somewhere post next your computer. Look at it every day, and within a week or two you're gonna have that nailed down, and that's going to give you those major branches that's going to start to build a lot more clarity in your life of where things go, because when you're getting started out, you don't necessarily have to build all of these. If you just separate things into innovation, marketing versus operations for a lot of you, that's going to be an improvement for personal. If you're just splitting things into these major categories, that's going to be an improvement. You're gonna be able to find things easier. You're gonna know where to put them. It's not gonna take is much time. You're not gonna have piles of stuff and clutter anymore. Everything will have a home. Everything will have a place to go. Also, all those little scraps of paper, all those little things you can't think. What do I do with that? Now you least have some basic structures. And really, these four right here are the ultimate basic structure. If you don't even have that level of organization, that's where you start. The second level is the's big areas, and then the third area is these, uh, these final sort of sub areas. So that's that's how you tackle this if this is a lot, uh, to process right now, which I'm sure it is, then take it one step at a time. And, you know, if you've got tons of stuff, you can just make piles on the floor of okay, that goes in a relationship that goes into personal, that goes into health that goes into work, um, and take your existing organizational system and start to break it down into these categories, and then you'll have a few things that are on the fence gray areas, those you have to sort more in depth. But this is going to give you a feel for this is this is what you're working towards and thea amount of freedom. This gives you the amount of stress it eliminates, where it's just really easy to find stuff. You always know where to put stuff. It's It takes a huge burden off, and it's something that's going toe work for you for the rest of your life. So I highly recommend as soon as possible, start taking some actions, start making some progress, and then over the coming weeks and months, this is something that you steadily chip away at and you just each day, each hour you work on this, you're removing permanently more and more stress from your life. And this is a systems level improvement that's gonna pay dividends for the rest your life so really important to start immediately, start getting some momentum and keep track up here in systems of what sort of progress you're making. Implementing this system into your life one step at a time. If you have any questions, as always, leave him in the discussion and I'll get back to you. 16. BONUS - Basis of Organizing Your Learning Projects: one thing I'm gonna very briefly mention is how to organize your learning projects. This is something that is going to be a course in and of itself because there's a lot involved in really doing it right and keeping track of things, because really, what it comes down to is project management. And as many of you know, project management is the whole field. In and of itself. Being a project manager requires certifications. I mean, it doesn't require, but there's a lot of methodologies, a lot of them coming out of software development and now spreading to non software development industries. But that's just beginning. So to really do project management well and learning projects are a kind of project is you need toe really put some considerable time into understanding what it means to manage a project and how to do it at scale. So when you have hundreds, if not thousands, of learning projects, how do you keep all those organized and have a systematic way of doing it? Have ah, templates you can use so that it's the same structure everywhere you go. So right here I'm just going to spend a couple minutes with you showing you the very basics so that you can get started. And then when you're ready for that course and it's out, you can take it to the next level if you want to. So within personal, we're gonna go to 48 education and you have your learning projects right here to go in here and you're going to use a four digit number system for your learning projects. So you're first Learning Project is gonna be oo 01 And this allows you I have 10,000 learning projects. So how do you keep these organized? Well, this one will just be our sample. Uh, what's called this? Okay, that's what say That's your 1st 1 And and so you may think, Oh, I'll just each time have a new project. I want to learn Java script and I want to learn Project manage. So you're thinking, OK, here's here's how we'll do it now. The problem with this is you're not gonna remember these numbers, and you may be thinking, What's the point of these numbers? I'll just do it alphabetically. Well, the I mean that that is a good idea in theory. But in practice it presents an problems. Uh, you you wanna have these number prefixes on everything. So if you have a bunch of existing learning projects, you can add numbers to them, and the ones that you number will be enough medical order. And then the ones you add after that won't be so right now, these air not in alphabetical order. So we've make this too, and we'd make J k l M N o. All right. Now, the problem with these is they're not in the same category. So you want to do is break things down so that their each in their own category, this is ontology, and this really comes down to what sort of subjects you're interested in. And the way that I do it is anything from, oh, 20999 Our personal interest, um, and unorganized. Then from 1000 ah, to 1999 are business related. And remember that correlates to work right here. 2000 has to do with, uh, personal anything that would so like finance, for example, always personal finance that would fit under there relationships. So a book on relationships or social skills? Um or networking that would also go under relationships and then health. So these here for inmate four main ones, then, uh, one thing that I spent a lot of time on is what I called modeling reports. So studying specific people and you can put a person if they specialize in a certain field , you would put them under here. But if they don't, um, or it's just more specialized than you put them under here. So, first, if there's certain types of people, then you can give them a specific number. And what I do is ah, I use the rest of these numbers to organize different mediums. So, um, this would be athletes, musicians, actors and actresses and then, um, actually, for 9000 I've been keeping this empty for a long time. And then, um, I made this Scinto technology and, um so 9000 is one that you can keep empty and and leave it open for later. Could be one subject could be multiple subjects. You decide nine 1005 100 on is gonna be related Teoh art and just studying art. Um, so there's there's a bunch of ways to do it. Reserve these four numbers for your core and then Ah, from 0 to 999. Those could be whatever you want. And from 5000 to 9999 can be whatever you want. So, um, I'll give you there's gonna be a lot more once I create the course specifically on learning projects including, like, how do you organize everything inside here? All your files and then also in one note, wherever note, how to create a one pager for each project. And how do you organize those projects So that, um, keep everything organized. You can leave something come back months or years later and you pick up right where you left off. Um, rich ive information quickly. Interlink various projects that have inter relations keep track of resource is you're using people that you've talked to or that would be useful to talk to, um and potentially even set things up so that you can outsource certain parts of a project . So all that and much more is going to be in my course on organizing learning projects. This is just a taste and the final thing I'll show you is how to promote a folder because I told you I'd show you how to do this earlier so we could just cut and paste this and put it in the, um, in the main folder here. But then it's not clear that this is actually a sub folder of a sub folder. So what we do is we start out with, oh, to that represents that it's part of personal and then 48 because it's, ah, part of education and then 10. So this hangs out right here. And if you forget what 48 is, you can just put education in there or you can put CDU and then you can remember, Okay, that's why that's there. And now this is what I call a promoted folder, and you can have a few of thes. So if you're working on a major project, you could pull those out. It's also a way to handle uh, your Children, for example, is if you don't want to list them like this, you could go into relationships and ah, and family so you would list them as 03 11 and then you would put the six digit number that you have for each person. So 234567 03 11 345678 Okay, And you could have that for a sibling for friend, family member, somebody that you're working with. If you just want to promote a short term and then when you want to put it back, you know exactly where to put it. Cut that folder, go into 11 paste it and then just delete that prefix and it's back to how it was before. So that's Ah, that's how you promote a folder and keep it organized, so it's easily reversible. But if you want quick access to something, if you also want to shorten the file path, this is another way to do it. And, uh, that's really all there is to it, so I'll see in the next section. 17. Organizing Your Digital Files: in this section, you're gonna learn how to organize your files from your inboxes into their final locations in your system. So on the right here we have your inboxes and this is in the monthly organization folder. These here in boxes for each month. Some of them are physical, some of them are digital. And then at the end of the month, you just go in and you cut and paste, especially all of these. And if you want to, these also you cut and paste these into the monthly location, and that's what it would look like. And then you go back, you go into the skeleton folder and then whatever you cut and pasted, you can now copy and paste thes empty folders. Thes air. That's why it's called a skeleton, cause these are just empty folders. You copy and paste these, uh, in here to replace whatever you just cut and paste it out. So now your files are resting here and you've got to organize them and you can see I put done in brackets next. This one. So as you're going through an organizing stuff, it's easy to keep track of what have you done what's not done and when you finish a whole month, you had done to it, and you can also use. Ah, and I've experimented with using a spreadsheet to keep track of this stuff, and that can be helpful. The problem is, if you stop using the spreadsheet at a certain point, or you forget how to use this spreadsheet or you can't access it or whatever and then you come back later, Ron, it can cause a lot of headaches because you're not sure what's really been done and what hasn't and so as much as possible, I like to use a non spreadsheet system. I like Teoh organize folders and files so that I can keep track of what's done and what the status of things are. Just with naming folders in a certain way. That way you can just come in here and make changes quickly. You don't have to open your browser, open a spreadsheet file. Go. Remember where that file even is. So this bracket system works really well, so that's done. We come into computer to, and we've got some A folder full of tax forms. PDF Soon we've got a file that's tax related. So we know that's financial, and that's gonna be under personal. So we go down to financial and there's taxes. So we dragged those over and and it says move because thes air on the same folder. Ah, I mean, on this on the same drive. If he's run a different hard drive thes two folders, then dragging them over like that would copy them instead of moving them. So, OK, now we're done with this folder and to make your organization easier, What you want to do is if you're gonna download a bunch of files related toe, one project or one area of your life, put them in a folder when you're downloading them. That will make your life a lot easier. And another thing that makes your life easier is to organize your files by datemodified. That way, you can see Oh, I downloaded a bunch of those files at the same time. Those files are probably related to the same thing. So then you just go through and organize all those um, being able to separate your mobile images and screenshots from your photos really depends on if there's a difference in the dimensions or the, uh, file type of those photos versus those images. So on the iPhone, um, the photos are J pegs, but the images and screenshots, uh, images can really be anything but Screenshots will be PNG files. So that allows you to mostly separate the two with photos. A lot of those photos will just be photos of events where you don't really want to organize that You just want to save them and maybe look at them later. But sometimes you're taking like, a picture of, ah document. And so you wanna you. It's like instead of scanning it in, you're just going to take a picture of it. Um, so in a case like that, then you would want to organize that photo into a location or, um, other other situations like, let's say you get a box or you get a made a little pamphlet that goes with a certain piece of technology or appliance that you just bought. Well, you would take that and you go into personal and you go into personal physical property. And let's say it's an appliance. You would dragon drop that into here and you create a specific folder for that appliance. Now, Uh, what's a good way of creating those folders? The easiest one is to use the date. So what say July 15th and you bought a blender? Okay, So, uh, and And if you if you know the what would it a brand be? What say it's an Amazon blunder? So you the best way to do is put the brand and then put ah, the model or whatever it is. And that's just so you can find you can find it later on when you're searching for it and just organized things chronologically. So if you don't know how to organize something, the best way to do it is just throw a date on it in this format, because that will allow you to sort everything by year than by month and by day. So this is a really great system to use. And ah, this having that date prefixes useful in a lot of situations. Ah, your mobile notes are usually gonna be in Gmail. So those you would transfer over toe one note or to a spreadsheet from Gmail. Ah, your videos. You're probably not gonna organize those for the most part, if you have a certain learning project where you're creating videos like What's your Practicing a musical instrument? And you want to, uh, you know, you have webcam videos or you have videos from your phone. You could then put those in, ah, in the Learning Project folder for that. Or, um, if you were practicing some sort of physical exercise or or skill your golf swing, you could put those in the Learning Project folder. The issue still is, though, that that can take up a lot of space. And it's it can be hard to figure out, Um, once you've been, you know, saving fold videos for months and years, they start to just build up. You have no space left, and it can be really difficult to go and and time consuming to go through and find all those little pockets of heavy video files. So, uh, it's usually better to just keep these, Um, unless you really know what you're doing. Keep keep these within their own. Uh, especially these last 2 13 and 14. Keep those within their own folder. And don't don't bring them into this. Uh, don't bring them into your core system here. Just keep them within within this folder. Um and that's it. So photos and images when you want to bring those over. And also, if you want another thing that you can do is keep a perfect archive before you organize. So that's something that I do with images. So what you would do is just create a zip file out of all the photos out of all the images , and that would be your backup. So then you can organize all the photos and screenshots and images. You can go organize those in your core system, but you're still gonna have a backup of those as a zip file. So that's another way to handle if you wanna have backups and that's it for monthly. That's it for how Toe organize those in boxes in terms of the paper sourced in boxes, These air just going to go into their final locations, um, in your physical or they're going to get scanned or, uh, you know, recycled or whatever. You might have a bookshelf for you keeping books and disks. You just need to have a final, um, location for these and ah, lot of those locations I talked to you about in the previous course. You can just use those, um, and then once you've scanned stuff in or taking a picture of it, you can either recycle it or, if you want, you can just choose another drawer to keep to store all this stuff in or put it on a bookshelf. So, um, usually what you want to do is you want to get this. Like for male, for example, males is often going to go into personal, and it's going to go either under intellectual property or finances. That's what a lot of your mail is going to go in. So, um, that's, uh, that's how your unorganized, those physical files most of them should be going somewhere in your core system or getting recycled. And, ah, you do that on a case by case basis and ah, now let's move on, Teoh Doing this in one note 18. Organizing Your Digital Information in OneNote (Applicable to Evernote): in a previous section. We talked about setting up this meta folder, your inboxes. And actually that was the That was last course. So you learned how to set up these. But you also need to set up your other four, uh, core notebooks so no one work. Oh, too personal. Both e relationships. 04 health. Okay, so now the question is, Well, what goes inside all of these? Well, what say we want to start with personal? You just start matching whatever folders are here. You just create sections for each one of those. So planning new section A one yearly and multi your planet, okay? And you just go through and you do all of the's, and I might It's probably faster to just copy and paste each one of them. Um, okay, so you just go through and do that. And one other thing you can do Teoh to make thes um, easier to access is you can add a section group. So you could you could have oh, planning be the section group, and then you drag each one of these sections into that section group. So then you can collapse all of these. So That's like, um, 10 cared giving. You know, you can see you. It's nice to be able to see everything in one place. And if you mess up the the ah hierarchy, you just drag it and drop it on this, uh, notebook, and it will go into the root directory. So what this allows you to do is instead of having to scroll through a big menu of all the options, you can keep them all collapsed and then just expand the one that you're looking for. So that's these air really, really useful. And these air something that doesn't exist in Evernote now it's not at the time of this recording. Um, the the hierarchies air more limited, and they don't allow you to create basically infinite hierarchy. With these section groups, you can create a section group within a section group. Um, so where would that be relevant? Will, let's say taxes. 59 taxes taxes for you might have a lot of different sections, Um, and and you might want to separate. Ah, you might want a separate section for each one of those and you would want to still number . These always remember to do that. But, um, if you're when you're first coming up with them, you can put him in. Ah, just have him go in alphabetical order. When you when you think you've gotten the names of all the sections you're going to use, then you can add the prefixes, toe, all of them at once. That way, you enough to constantly be re labeling stuff. So ah, and then also another thing is, always remember to put a general or what I like to do is a meta, uh, meta one. So this is like there are some things that'll that'll go into a subcategory of taxes. But there's always going to be some stuff that's really about taxes in general or things that apply to all these different subsections. So you always wanna have that general or that meta folder inside? Um, any larger thing like this so that you have that higher perspective, that higher view that you can you can use to bring all the other smaller things together into one system, and you can collapse notebook. So Ah, these notebooks come with with one note and you can just close those. And so the way this works is you have your inbox is here, and, uh, this is gonna be a big one is just the to do's thes air, these air anything that you pulled it. You don't know what else to do with it. It would come in here and then, uh what Say it was something from the i. R s tax website you just pasted, Um, a copy and paste of a web page. Uh, you would take that and you go to your taxes and you just drag it over. And that's how you process your to do's Ah, and all these others. So you just start at the top and then you keep going through. Um, another thing is, if you want to keep I all your conference notes for an entire conference together, you have Facebook marketing. So what you do is you copy the hyperlink to this and then you go toe work. Ah, you'd have a section group 02 for marketing, and then within that you'd have ah section what safer Facebook marketing. And then, uh, what you do issued, say notes from other sections. Uh, conference notes would be one type of notes, uh, mice and this, um, you could have book notes, and then you just paste that in there like that. And now you have. Ah, um, Now, you don't have to have duplicate content. You don't have the same set of notes in two different places. Instead, you just use a link, and you may be worried. Well, this isn't like a normal link. What if I move? What if I move this? Uh, what if I moved this page? Well, we contest that. What's moved this Not just to a different place in this notebook, but what's just move it to a different notebook. So now it's in here. What's check if that links still works City, It still works. I'm not sure exactly how they implemented it, but I found that this works really well. And you enough to worry about moving stuff around. You'll still be able to find it. Um, so that's how you're gonna process stuff. Just go through all your inboxes in meta, get them into their final locations, and some of these inboxes, you may want them to be permanent. For example, conference notes. So, um, that's really that's really all there is to it. And Ah, that's gonna let you process all your stuff. So you're just gonna go into each of these folders and create the same exact system in here ? And if you're using Evernote or any other software, you just used the exact same system and for a ah ah, software that doesn't allow you to you uses much hierarchy. What you can do in those cases is basically use a variation of how I talked about earlier to promote a, uh, a folder. So the way you would promote this folder, for example, is, um so what? This is an example of ah of, ah, more hierarchy. So what if we can't create this third level of hierarchy for the specific types of taxes? What we would do is we put 59 in front and then, ah, those air taxes is underneath. Um, is one is one of the finances, But this folder is a sub folder of 02 Personal. So, uh, and everything that's in this folder, Zo two. So now we would just drag this out and ah, just add the 59 prefix. And as I said before, what if you may be wondering, what if I forget what 59 means you just add. You added in like that and they'll all line up and look good. So that tax putting taxes and there is optional. But see, now you can still maintain that. Love those hierarchy. It's just you're you're you're putting the hierarchy inside the file names. It may not look as pretty, but it gets the job done. So, um, this is how you create levels of hierarchy within a file name or a folder name or a section name. And you can use that for any situation where there is there isn't the ability to create a lot of levels of hierarchy. Um, let's say there was 1/3 what say you had different types of investments, So the first type of investments, um, would go in there, So that's three levels. And if you wanted to compress it, you would get rid of these two, and you would just use the numbers. All right, so that's the compressed version. So you're going to go through and create thes and just the process of creating them yourself is gonna start to drive home all of these categories into your memory So it's a valuable exercise to be creating these folders yourself in each of the locations, because that's going to get the the whole system that's gonna get you spaced repetitions. I mean, they may not be spaced out a ton, but they will be spaced out and typing it out with your hands. It's going to drive it into your memory, and that's what you want. Because you wanna have all of your thoughts, all of your ideas, all of your thinking, to be within this framework, this system, it's gonna allow you to move a lot faster. Um, the metaphor I like to use is when the interstate system was created in the United States by Eisenhower, and it was originally created to speed up transportation from the West Coast to the East Coast, and vice versa for military purposes to get trucks and equipment back and forth. But it's had a huge effect on commerce and trade between states that before then just didn't exist. And that same, uh, that same sort of thinking applies to your mind. If you wanna have a lot of cross pollination between different areas of your mind, it really helps to have a framework like this because you're no longer thinking about, uh I have this cloud of information in my head that's not organized. Now it's organized. So you can say, What would it mean if I went into this category and I went into that category and I tried to combine them? What sort of connections exist between those two categories? Well, you're your brain is already gonna be connected and organized like that. So you have to do is think. Okay, what are all the things in that section? What are all the things in this section and then start looking for the connections. If you don't have this framework installed in your head, then you can't even start the process because you're just grasping at straws. So really powerful system here, and, uh, it's gonna help toe create each one of these folders yourself and type them out because that will give you the repetitions 19. Organizing Your Paper Files: in this video, you're going to see how to organize your temporary files, your inboxes. So this is an example right here of an inbox in the back. You have empty folders that you can use. Here's my second inbox, and then you have empty. And then these just get organized into your final locations. You can see right here those air, some my learning project numbers. And you just put the range of numbers And, uh, you just put stuff in its final location. So that's really all there is to it. As faras, you just go through one by one, you label the folders and, uh so, like, I think I already showed you how to add these, and then you just label this with whatever's inside.