Use Two Notebooks, Change Your Life

this is a notebook you've probably owned a few of them before but how can using one change your life well in this video I'm going to explain how some of the most influential and creative people in the whole world have benefited from something that you can buy at any Corner shop I'm going to talk about the systems that they use and the Neuroscience that underpins them and by the end hopefully I'll have convinced you to use not just one notebook but two first of all though why use a notebook at all so it's easy to

point to all the people throughout history who have used the notebook to plan their schedule or organize their thoughts but most of them had no choice these days there are hundreds of ways to store your ideas digitally and most of them are more convenient than a little book that you carry everywhere so what's the benefit well firstly there's some evidence that simply writing things down by hand makes them more memorable than dictating or typing them one recent study from Tokyo University shows that brain activity is higher when you recall information that you've written out by

hand with the study authors suggesting that the more complex spatial information that handwritten notes contain can Aid memory in another study the authors suggest that taking notes by hand helps students process the information in lectures bear because it forces them to make conscious choices about what notes to take rather than just writing down everything verbatim and this is something that I found when I'm taking notes from books if I highlight paragraphs on my Kindle it's easy to forget them but if I go back and write them down in actual notes then I'll remember them as

Raymond Chandler one said when you have to use your energy to put those words down you're more apt to make them count and this leads us to point two which is that it lets you clear out your brain so if you're anything like me you probably go through your whole day remembering things you need to fix or jobs you need to do or people you need to stay in contact with and if you don't have anywhere to put these thoughts then you have to carry on throughout your day kind of juggling them around in your

brain with everything else you're doing in psychological terms What's Happening Here is that when you've got something important to remember your brain is afraid to forget it and so it keeps going over it and what cognitive psychologists called the rehearsal Loop obviously the rehearsal Loop evolved in an era when we didn't have any pens or paper and so it's almost too good at remembering things and it'll keep bringing them up while you're trying to concentrate on what's actually important and so what Dave Allen the author of getting things done suggests is having a system for

writing all of these things down which gives the rehearsal Loop permission to let your brain go and focus on something else Allan calls it clearing the mind and the idea is that it sort of reassures your brain that it's okay to forget all of those other things it's trying to juggle as long as you have a trusted system for capturing them all but it's also important to remember that you think better on paper so in his book presentation Zen G Reynold talks about visiting a senior director at Apple to get his input on a project

the director said he'd sketched out a lot of ideas and Reynold was surprised when he got out a notebook to show them off the way he explains this now though pen and paper lets you get your ideas out of your head and into a space where you can physically see them and that lets you relate to them better than if you're looking at them on a screen once you start scribbling it's easy to make a kind of visual map of all the things you need to focus on and prioritize on what you need to do

it also Al helps you to focus on what's important because writing things down takes more effort than typing or cutting and pasting it forces you to distill your ideas down to their core rather than like just transcribing stuff it's also harder to get unintentionally distracted if I'm filling in tasks on a spread sheet it's easy to tell myself that I need to go and like check something online which 10 minutes later turns into me looking things up on social media but if I'm writing in a notebook I have to like physically put it down and

go back to my computer to find something that's distracting and this relates to the the next point which is that you need an ideas Park so Ryan holiday talks about the idea of a commonplace book which is a place where you write out by hand all the most meaningful quotes from whatever articles or books you're reading and I think that can be really valuable but gram allot's productivity Niner introduces another concept I found really valuable which is having an ideas part which is where you just scribble down any notes or thoughts that don't really fit

into your current list of priorities these might be headlines for articles concepts for things that you'd like to try out or even even threads that you're going to write on Twitter this is a kind of place for stuff that you don't want to do immediately but also that you don't want to forget about and you can do that online and it definitely works but there's something that I found about a physical Journal that really encourages Serendipity like thumbing backwards and forwards through a load of notes can encourage you to see connections that you otherwise wouldn't

when you're looking at a document maybe you'll be flicking through to find one thing and something else will catch your eye and it'll encourage you to put two thoughts together and you'll come up with something amazing and the value of a good notebook is everything goes in that one place so it's not like you're going to jot it down in an email draft or some random Untitled document and then forget about it and never see it again and it's also a good place for what all cot calls a watch read hear list when you come

across good films to watch books to read or music and podcasts to listen to and that brings us to a notebook will help you make friends so there's actually a scene in Captain America the Winter Soldier that gets this idea across perfectly after they've both been doing laps around the Washington Monument Steve Rogers tells Sam Wilson that he's been catching up on the decades that he's missed and Sam responds by telling him to listen to Marvin Gay's seminal 1973 album troubl man and then comes the important bit cap immediately pulls out a notebook and writes

down the suggestion along with a load of other suggestions that show he's done this a bunch of times before and I actually still remember the first time somebody I was talking to did this I recommended something and he immediately pulled out his own little notebook and wrote down the suggestion to look at later that guy was a friend of a friend now we're friends and I do that thing myself and there's something really cool about somebody writing down a recommendation by hand cuz it kind of reassures you that they're taking you seriously and that they're

actually probably going to do it rather than like forget about it at the end of the night and doing it in a notebook is even more special because you're devoting physical space in something that you don't have unlimited space in to like put that information down in a place where you will definitely reference it incidentally if you want to check out some of the recommendations I get then I have a newsletter where I put all of the best things that I find in every week it's totally free there's a link in the description of this

video and I would love it if you signed up up so how do you put all this together well this leads me to my final point which is that you need two notebooks so I do actually have two notebooks I have one big spiral bound one that stays on my desk all the time and then I have one pocket sized one that I carry everywhere with me the big one is for day-to-day tasks it's where I write down all of my jobs for the day in a list that I can check off as I run

through I call it my first thing list because I take the first 5 minutes on my workday to write down the first thing that I need to do on every project and then tackle them throughout the day that's also where I can scribble down notes from like work calls or fresh things that come up and keep them open constantly no matter how many tabs I open on my computer so everything that I need to focus on is there at a glance and my mind says pretty clear because it isn't constantly scrambling to remember like 10

things by the way a benefit of spiral bound is that it will lie flat on your desk without you like crushing it open which isn't something you get with smaller notebooks and then the smaller one is for everything else so one example is that I've been using Ryan Hol day's advice to go back through digital Kindle notes and write out just the most meaningful ones in a notebook but it's also for notes ideas movies I might want to watch music I want to listen to recommendations from friends and everything else and if you're watching this

and Going H this guy seems like the sort of person whose recommendations I might be into then you can find a whole bunch of them here thanks for watching