Managing Everything, All At Once

I had a great start to Monday. I was ahead on my work. I had a great gym session and I was making progress on the book. Just as I was getting comfortable with the work in the afternoon, I got a text. 

Hey, remember we have to go see the venue this weekend.

Oh, shite. This Monday was going to be bipolar. It was now going to transform from good to bad. I realised I had to explain to my fiancé that I was going to miss the final check-in at the wedding venue we booked. We had paid several thousand dollars and this was our last chance at making sure everything was up to scratch and we were ready to go on the wedding day. It was our last chance to ask questions. It was beginning to feel like my last chance in the relationship. I pictured myself in a tunnel, walking towards the light. 

A month earlier, a friend had asked if I wanted to go to the Tony Robbins ‘Unleash the Power Within’ seminar. I agreed, and he got me a ticket. It was a gift from a friend and I wasn’t going to waste this very expensive ticket. Plus, I wanted to see what Tony was all about. There’s a lot of hype surrounding the man and I wanted to see if there was anything I could learn.

On one hand I was going to let down my fiancé, who I would be spending the rest of my life with. On the other hand, I was going to let down my friend who had spent several thousand dollars on the ticket. I let out a big sigh. Ughhhhhhh. It was time to make a tough decision. 

I could have completely avoided this if I was better organised. I could have easily asked to move the venue check-in to another weekend, but now it was too late. Unfortunately for me, this wasn’t an isolated incident. 

I had trouble recalling things I had learned in books and podcasts so I couldn’t apply them when I needed them. I was absorbing so much but applying so little. I was doing market research on a new project and I knew the questions I learned in ’The Mom Test by _______ would have been perfect. But I didn’t remember the questions. 

I knew that there was an exercise I learned in the ‘4-Hour Work Week’ that would really help my friend, but I couldn’t recall what it was. 

There was something missing. Despite all this technology why couldn’t I find what I learned to apply in real life? Why was I forgetting things that I needed to remember? 

This frustration prompted me to research. What is the best way to organise my life? I don’t want to let people down anymore, and I want to be able to help myself and my friends. It doesn’t make sense to keep flying with the wind when it’s taking me to a place I don’t want to be. Is there a better way to do this instead of putting things down in my notes on my phone?

So I began researching. After I attended the Tony Robbins seminar. 

Step 1:

Your brain is not meant to be a hard drive of information. It’s not meant to remember everything. It’s built to innovate.

I was crossing the street after a tough day of work when I heard David Allen say that in a podcast. Once I reached the other side of the street, I stopped. I paused the podcast, and wrote down what he said in my own words. When I say ‘wrote down’, I mean saved on my phone.

Your brain is not meant to be a hard drive of information. It’s not meant to remember everything. It’s built to innovate.

Once I heard that line I couldn’t un-hear it. It was true. Instead of berating myself for forgetting things I turned my attention to finding a system that worked as a hard drive so I didn’t have to. There are a few systems out there, but here’s something to get started. 

I carry a four things with me everyday; my laptop, a Remarkable tablet, and a physical book I’m reading and my Kindle. I use none of these for this purpose. 

All you need is your smartphone. A phone is the best, because it satisfies two key requirements:

- it’s always with me

- it syncs with other devices 

It doesn’t matter if I’m at a client lunch or at a rave, I can take jot down what I want to when I want to. That’s key. I can’t tell you how often I’ve learned something from someone that I’ve repeated to other people or even put into this book as chapters. It’s vital that you store key things that you learn, digitally. It’s time to take control of your passive learning and apply it. 

Second, reduce the friction. The easier and less intrusive it is to take notes, the more you will be comfortable with pulling out your phone to write. I now cherish the few minutes at street lights because I’m taking down notes from the podcast that I’ve been listening to. Sometimes I would stop in the middle of the street or sit down at a park bench as my mind starts racing with the possibilities and ideas of how I can make this book great, or build my projects, or inject some music into my life. This is all possible because I have the least amount of friction possible to take notes. Here’s how.

If you have a smartphone, you’ll know what Widgets are. If you don’t, they are partially open applications on your phone so you don’t have to go through the challenging task of opening the app. 

I use an app called ‘Notion’. In it, I have a page titled ‘Capture Everything’. I unlock my phone and click on that widget on my main screen. It’s a 1 second process. 

You don’t have to use the application. You’re welcome to use any app that syncs between different devices so you can access things later, but you want something that is connected to the cloud. Something you can’t lose. 

That’s the first (and most important) step. Capture everything that’s important to you. Write it down in words that make sense to you. 

[insert picture of lightbulb in bucket]

I went to the Physiotherapist last night to help me with my Achilles injury. He gave me a few exercises to do for the next two weeks and I wrote them in the ‘capture everything’ folder before he was able to hand write them on a piece of paper for me. 

I have a note in there right now to ‘thank Dinesh’. It’s a reminder to myself to thank my friend for introducing me to someone who I met recently. 

I have another note which is about 6 paragraphs in length, which will become a chapter in this book. Something came to me while I was driving so I sat in the car and wrote it down while the muse spoke to me. I captured the inspiration. 

Your ‘Capture everything’ is your space for everything that matters to you right now. There are no rules. If there’s something on your mind, write it here. 

One word of warning, do not use your emails for this. I have tried this in the past and it gets messy. It also allows you to be distracted and lose your train of thought when you see something in your inbox that surprises you. Remember, the goals is to have as little friction as possible between what’s in your brain and what’s going in your notes. 

I’m sure you can see the benefit of this exercise already at work, where you have unrelenting questions, challenges and small things to do that can be easily forgotten. When you have a breakthrough on a complex work project while having a shower, this is where you capture your thoughts. When you’re out for a walk and a solution to a problem comes to you, this is where you capture it. Don’t let that moment pass. Your subconscious mind wants to help you. Let it. 

Time for action:

Create a ‘capture all’ or ‘brain soup’ or ‘capture everything’ area. Call it whatever you like. I’ve tested a lot of programs and here are my recommendations:

1. Notion

2. Apple Notes

3. Obsidian

4. Evernote

Check out YouTube videos and reviews if you like before you dive in, but set this up before you read on. Put a widget on your phone main screen right now so you can’t miss it. Here’s what mine looks like:

Step 2:

Now that you’ve got a place to capture everything, what do you do with it? Well first, you need to go through the folder and see what’s necessary and what’s not. A lot of the time you’ll find yourself deleting the stuff you wrote down (especially in your initial days), so that only the most useful things are left. 

To go through the folder you have to set aside time. That’s the key challenge for most of us. We don’t have time. 

Over the years so many people have said to me that ‘life was simpler when we were younger’ or something along those lines. I want to be as carefree as I was in high school. Plenty of people look back to when times were easier, but they don’t think about why they were easier. Here’s my theory: there wasn’t as much to manage. There wasn’t all this responsibility. The level of input you had going into your mind was easily manageable. You were learning and applying that learning by doing tests and exams and assignments. But now, when you learn something you can’t just do a test, or an exam, or an assignment (not that you want to). The information just stays there until it can be used. 

I’ve read a few books on sales over the years. The stuff was useful for complex sales transactions, but I’m not going to use the techniques until I’m working in the sales. I’m not going to use the techniques while I’m on holiday over the Christmas period. There is a lag between when you learn and when you apply that learning. So you need a place to store what you learn - and that can’t always be your brain. 

Here’s my pitch: You can save years if you learn to apply the things you know, when you need to apply them. You can save years in your career by recalling what you learned. You can save years by capturing the things that matter and using them. 

So a small time investment is critical to save time in the long run. 

Set aside time to address these things in your ‘capture everything’ bucket. 

The amount of time you should set aside depends on how much you have in your notes. For project reminders or ideas such as ‘do taxes’, delete that note and put a time in your calendar when you can do the activity. 

Set aside 15-30 minutes everyday to action each item. This doesn’t have to mean you sit in a room and go through these things. It could be on your daily commute home or when you’re waiting for your coffee at the cafe. If you’re on social media a lot, you already have a spare 10-15 minutes. 

Imagine waking up knowing that you have nothing outstanding. You’ve completed all the tasks that you were putting off for days, weeks and months. You’re returned the calls that you wanted, you’ve finished the reports, you’re up to date with your life. Imagine that feeling. The feeling of having nothing ‘pending’ for later. How good does it feel? This feeling is why you need a system. In a world where everyone wants your attention, it’s impressive that you’re on top of everything you wanted to do. Marketing teams are out there to surprise you and they are very good at what they do. But you’re better. 

Time for action:

Set aside 15-30 minutes in your calendar everyday. Just as a reminder. This could be when you’re grabbing your morning coffee like I said, or while you’re commuting to the office.

Do it now. Dive into your calendar, and set times. Make sure there is a reminder so you get notified when it’s time. Without this step there will be no progress. 

Step 3:

Now that you’ve captured what you wanted to and set aside time to go through the folder, what’s next?

Now you have options. 

Option 1: Do the thing. It it’s as easy as ‘add John’s birthday to calendar’, then you can do it now. It’ll take you 20 seconds, if that. Choose to complete the tasks that take next to no time. Once completed, delete it from the folder. Like the example I gave you that I wanted to thank my friend for something. It took me a few seconds and I did it then ant there. 

Option 2: Add everything that needs effort and thinking to your calendar. Once added, delete it from the folder. 

Option 3: Add it to your storage. I call it the ‘vault’. You can call it a ‘bank’, ‘hard drive’ or whatever you like. This will be your repository for anything you need to access. Like anything, it needs to be organised or it’ll become impossible to find things when you need them. 

David Allen is the one to thank for this approach. If you want to dive in further you can grab a copy of his book ‘getting things done’. It’s a classic. 

Step 3.5:

The Vault. 

How do you organise everything that you need? 

- Notes from a meeting

- Someone’s name you don’t want to forget

- Something you learned about WW2 that might come in handy some day

- What someone important to you cares about

- Your car’s licence plate

- Your goals for the next year

- Your team member’s profiles, what motivates them and what they want to achieve

- What you need to work on

- What you learned from the Graham Norton show

You get the idea.

Everything. How do you manage everything? 

Here’s my honest answer - I don’t know. 

When I started capturing everything and storing it in Notion, I was doing it differently to how I do it now. Over the months and years, my system has evolved to something that works for me. 

My containers look like the following:

[insert drawings]

Life.

Work.

Fitness.

Other.

There are of course sub-folders within those folders. Everything is searchable but as soon as I find there’s a better way to organise this, I might adapt it. I’ve read the book ‘Building Your Second Brain’ by Tiago Forte and tried the PARA method, but it didn’t really work for me. If you’d like to try though, it might work for you. 

For now, don’t dive too far into this. Get into the habit of capturing everything. Managing the information for later will take care of itself. You’ll have to find a way as soon as you realise you’ve learned so much and you don’t want to lose it. It’s a journey. It’s fun too. 

You’ll realise how quickly this will help you accelerate. Not just because you’ll get done the things you need to get done, but it’ll clear up your thinking so that you can focus. You won’t be dropping in and out of focus because you forgot to reply to an email. It’s honestly life-changing.

If all you take away from this book is this, it’ll be worth it. Unless…there’s something even more crispy in the next chapter….