My Planning System For Note Taking & Time Management

00:00:00.000 | In the new book, "Slow Productivity," coming out in March, I talk about my growing interest in

00:00:05.760 | movies and how for anyone who does creative work, studying and building up a good appreciation for

00:00:13.840 | an unrelated creative field actually can really help what you're doing. And I write about in "Slow

00:00:18.320 | Productivity" about studying films as helping my writing. If I study good writers, it's too close

00:00:23.680 | to home. And it's kind of more of a stressful work and like, it's not inspiring. It's more,

00:00:30.240 | "I should do more of that," or it's more anxiety producing. But you study art in another format,

00:00:35.680 | you can come at that as like, "I don't do that art." So you can just appreciate it with open

00:00:39.680 | eyes and it gives you an injection of creative energy for what you're doing. So I'm a big,

00:00:43.760 | I talk about this a lot, not a lot, but I do talk about in "Slow Productivity,"

00:00:47.840 | studying an art that's not what you do will make you more inspired for what you do actually do.

00:00:53.840 | - All right. Speaking of which, we got questions.

00:00:56.480 | - All right. First question's from Mark. "What is note-taking for? I found note-taking most useful

00:01:02.640 | in the short term, grounding me in my current task or noting a few to-do's throughout the day.

00:01:08.000 | Almost all of them are immediately disposable. It seems like note-taking can become fairly

00:01:13.840 | navel-gazing and doing it excessively takes away from execution."

00:01:17.120 | - It's a good question because we see this a lot in our discussions of organization,

00:01:22.240 | "notes" and "note-taking" is an excessively broad term. It covers lots of different things. And for

00:01:30.160 | a lot of people like Mark, these things get all mixed up and they're thinking, "Well, I don't

00:01:35.440 | know. I'm sitting here journaling all day. Is this note-taking? What should I be doing? What

00:01:39.200 | should I not be doing?" So what I want to do here is step back and let's give a general definition

00:01:44.960 | for note-taking. And then I want to highlight what I think the three critical types of note-taking

00:01:51.360 | systems you need in your life if you work any sort of knowledge job. And then we can, from there,

00:01:57.200 | move on to talk about more advanced options. So let's define note-taking more generally to mean

00:02:02.880 | recording information on a durable written medium. So anywhere you're collecting information in a

00:02:11.200 | written medium that's durable, that will then, you have it outside of your head so you can

00:02:14.800 | reference it later. Here are the three types of this note-taking that I think are critical,

00:02:20.160 | especially for most knowledge workers. One, some sort of working memory extender.

00:02:25.600 | This is where I use my text file on my desktop of my computer's workingmemory.txt. This is for

00:02:33.520 | strictly expanding the amount of information you can temporarily hold on to as you engage with the

00:02:40.880 | inflow of information throughout your workday. So as things come in, you're in a meeting and people

00:02:46.000 | are suggesting next steps, you can just write this information down in whatever medium you use for

00:02:51.680 | your working memory extender, because it's probably more information you can keep in your head. So

00:02:56.560 | there it is. I write it down right there. Or I'm going through my email inbox and I need to

00:03:01.680 | remember different notes I need to act on, schedule this, get back to them. I can write it into my

00:03:06.160 | workingmemory.extender. These are notes that exist outside of your own brain, allows you to hold on

00:03:11.200 | and organize more information than you could do just strictly within the confines of your own

00:03:16.080 | neurons. Now, this is something that resets all the time. It's a durable form, but you reset it

00:03:22.880 | all the time. So as I'm going through a meeting, I'm taking quick notes on here's the five things

00:03:27.280 | I need to do. After that meeting, those notes will then get processed out of my working memory file

00:03:34.000 | into calendar reminders into my obligation system. So it's a temporary storage, but it allows me in

00:03:41.600 | the moment to keep track of more things that my brain can do on its own. That's note-taking,

00:03:45.120 | but of a very temporary type. Next comes what I just cited, which is your obligation tracker,

00:03:51.360 | some system to maintain all of the relevant information for every obligation on your plate.

00:03:56.560 | This is also note-taking, written durable information that you don't have to keep track of

00:04:01.040 | in your head. So somewhere here, all the things I have to do probably categorized.

00:04:06.240 | Here is all of the information related to each of these things all in this one place.

00:04:11.120 | You want that information accessible and captured somewhere. That's note-taking.

00:04:16.800 | Then finally, we get to what most people think of when they think about note-taking,

00:04:22.320 | and this is more where you're capturing key ideas about your work in your life.

00:04:26.640 | It could be interesting ideas, interesting articles, brainstorms, concerns that you have.

00:04:32.800 | This is the broad category that captures what people normally think about in note-taking.

00:04:37.360 | I might be journaling my thoughts about things. I might be writing down my plans for how I want

00:04:42.080 | to improve my life. I might be capturing articles that are relevant to the newsletter that I run

00:04:47.520 | and things I want to remember. And this is where you're going to use whatever type of system you

00:04:53.760 | like to capture things in. You have a lot of different choices here.

00:04:57.120 | All three of these things are note-taking. You need some sort of system for each.

00:05:01.280 | So in my own life, I use a plain text file for working memory. I use Trello for obligation

00:05:10.560 | tracking notes, one board per role, one column per type of obligation, one card per obligation,

00:05:19.280 | all of the relevant information for that obligation on the card.

00:05:22.240 | And I use my Remarkable 2 digital notebook for everything else. Inside my Remarkable 2,

00:05:28.720 | I have dozens of different individual virtual notebooks for keeping track of

00:05:32.880 | ideas, reflections, concerns, et cetera. So those are the three categories, Mark.

00:05:36.960 | Do those three categories, different tools for each, different rates of refresh and reset for

00:05:43.440 | each working memory. You're resetting this every 10 minutes or so. Your obligation list you're

00:05:47.840 | working with every day. Your bigger idea capture is something you maybe go over

00:05:52.560 | in detail much less often. Hey, I'm going to have a summit now to rethink this part of my business.

00:05:57.040 | Let me go back and look through my notes. Maybe that's just once every few months or so.

00:06:00.080 | So that's really it. There are more complicated systems and methodologies. We have a lot of fans

00:06:08.880 | here of Zettelkasten type systems. We also have a lot of fans here of interesting note-taking

00:06:15.920 | software that really gets into the details of how you store notes, how you connect notes,

00:06:21.680 | the format in which the notes are stored. That is optional. It's more about your interest.

00:06:29.520 | If you like information management as a hobby, you can build more complicated systems around it,

00:06:35.600 | but you don't need complicated systems to successfully take notes. Those are the three

00:06:39.600 | areas you have to take notes. Just make sure those are all three covered with some sort of

00:06:43.360 | reasonable techno system, and then you're doing a fine job. I think that separation is key. Don't

00:06:49.760 | mix all this stuff together. Don't have a moleskin somewhere in which you're trying to keep your tasks

00:06:54.960 | next to your vision for living on a cabin in 20 years, next to a grocery list you want to remember

00:07:02.000 | when you go to the store. We need some separation for note-taking to keep up with the complexity of

00:07:06.480 | modern life. All right. What do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Reshab. As a 26-year-old

00:07:14.640 | software developer who has recently landed a well-paying job, I'm looking to pursue my interest

00:07:19.840 | in learning to play the guitar, drawing, and some days gardening. However, I'm concerned about

00:07:25.280 | whether it's feasible to schedule all these activities into a single week while maintaining

00:07:28.960 | a focus on deep life core fundamentals. In your expert opinion, would it be possible to balance

00:07:34.560 | all these pursuits effectively within a given week without compromising on essential life habits?

00:07:40.320 | Well, I think this is a objective question for which you can get an objective answer

00:07:46.160 | by becoming quantitative. So let's just work with your calendar. I'm assuming you're

00:07:53.040 | professionally speaking, you're organized, you time block your days, you have a clear shutdown.

00:07:58.080 | There's some clarity about your time outside of work. Play with that time. So start autopilot

00:08:05.840 | scheduling some of these hobbies. Maybe you garden on weekday mornings. Maybe you alternate

00:08:11.760 | a guitar practice session and what was the other thing? Drawing practice session on different days.

00:08:18.160 | You do it an hour before dinner. Autopilot this out. See if it fits. And if the stuff does fit,

00:08:27.040 | execute this autopilot schedule for a while and say, does this feel sustainable or do I feel like

00:08:32.000 | I'm constantly running from one thing to another or it's overfilling my time?

00:08:35.680 | I used to run this exercise with undergraduates who are trying to figure out

00:08:41.360 | their academic programs and their extracurricular programs. And I would say, we got to sit down and

00:08:45.520 | just build a plan for your proposal here. You want to do these five extracurriculars in double major,

00:08:50.720 | show me the time. Then they would go through and block off the time for studying and how long is

00:08:55.440 | this going to take and put on their meetings and the time to work on their activities. And it either

00:08:59.360 | fit or it didn't. And sometimes if it just barely fit, they would come back a week later and say,

00:09:03.680 | this is crazy. Every minute of my life is scheduled. So if it doesn't fit or it fits

00:09:09.520 | and your life feels too crowded, then you just pull back. You're getting an objective feedback

00:09:13.120 | here. You pull back and it doesn't matter if you're pulling back. These are hobbies. The thing

00:09:18.720 | is you want to be spending quality time outside of work on things that matter. The quantity isn't

00:09:23.280 | important. So if it doesn't fit or it barely fits, maybe you do seasonal pursuits. In the spring,

00:09:31.600 | I'm working a lot on my garden and in the winter, I'm spending a lot more time on guitar because

00:09:36.480 | that's sort of inside. And I do drawing in the fall. You could have seasonal pursuits. You could

00:09:41.360 | stack these one over another. Or maybe what you need to do is just slow down your ambition for

00:09:47.200 | these pursuits. And instead of saying, look, I'm going to do four hours of guitar a day and I want

00:09:52.640 | to be shredding in like six months, you say, I'm going to spend less time. Good, hard practice,

00:09:58.160 | like we talked about the deep dive, trying to move up the stair steps towards expert knowledge.

00:10:02.400 | But I'm just willing for this to take longer. A few years from now, I'll be a pretty good guitar

00:10:06.400 | player, but I'm playing just an hour every other day. That doesn't take up as much time. I'm doing

00:10:11.360 | so. I have a drawing class I take once a week. And on Fridays, I get out of work early and go

00:10:15.920 | to a park to work on the drawing. This is maybe I'm going to learn these skills slower, but that

00:10:19.200 | makes their footprint on my schedule smaller. And I have more give and more flexibility and

00:10:23.760 | don't feel like I'm overscheduled. So treat this like a quantitative question, get clear feedback.

00:10:29.120 | If it's too much, reduce or slow down. It doesn't really matter for your goal here,

00:10:35.120 | which is just to make sure that you're engaged in deeper pursuits. That's what matters. Not the

00:10:41.360 | speed at which you're getting better at things, not the quantity of things that you're actually

00:10:44.800 | going after. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Craig. I'm a college student

00:10:52.480 | trying to be more smart about how I study and organize my learning. I'm relatively new to this

00:10:57.360 | stuff. Strangely, most productivity tips on YouTube are about the top 10 to-do lists and

00:11:02.640 | note-taking apps. Will I be less effective if I don't use one of those apps? It seems like a lot

00:11:07.680 | of work and setup to learn all those apps to be efficient. And I dread thinking about the heavy

00:11:11.680 | lifting prep those apps require. What should I do? Well, I think my answer here at first is going to

00:11:18.000 | be ironic because you may be listening to this answer on YouTube, but I'm going to tell you in

00:11:24.640 | a second why what I'm about to say here is not oxymoronic. Don't use YouTube to get advice on

00:11:30.400 | studying. So when you're getting information, especially information on improving your life,

00:11:37.840 | you have to understand the incentive structures in place. And for people who are purely doing

00:11:44.320 | YouTube, so if you're a pure study habits YouTuber, the incentive structure is for views.

00:11:52.000 | That's what you look about. That's what we care about. I want more views on my videos.

00:11:55.760 | To get more views on your videos on YouTube, you have to work with the idiosyncratic properties

00:12:04.080 | of the recommendation algorithm. And you get into this feedback loop where your content

00:12:10.320 | morphs more and more towards what's giving you this better feedback from the algorithm.

00:12:16.720 | And after a while, it's the algorithm specifying your content. So you may be started out as a

00:12:20.880 | YouTuber saying, I want to help students study better because this is an audience

00:12:25.360 | out there that cares about this. And after six months of interacting with the algorithm,

00:12:30.960 | it's the top 10 to-do list apps or whatever, because this is what's getting them the best

00:12:37.120 | view numbers. The advice might have very little to do, however, with the nuts and bolts of becoming

00:12:42.720 | a better student. So the incentive structure matters. So if you want to become a better

00:12:46.960 | student, and this is going to sound very self-serving, but I'm going to say,

00:12:49.520 | read my book, how to become a straight A student. Now, why is that better? Because what is the

00:12:55.280 | incentive structure of books? When you write a book, like how to become a straight A student,

00:12:59.920 | let me tell you this from experience. This is not a, we're going to go hard out of the gate.

00:13:05.680 | There's going to be a number one New York times bestseller. I'm going to be on the today show

00:13:09.440 | talking about this book and every major podcaster wants to have me on. That is not the play. When

00:13:14.480 | you write a book on student advice, the play is this better work. So some people will buy this

00:13:22.080 | because they heard about it from me or saw it on a table. I'm embarrassed to admit this Jesse,

00:13:27.120 | but when that book came out, it was for my first, my first year at grad school at MIT,

00:13:30.880 | I would sometimes go to the Harvard co-op as they call it the coop. And I would it was on tables

00:13:38.080 | kind of hang around. People would pick up the book and look at it, but that's like how people

00:13:43.120 | discovered it at first. I didn't have a social, there was no social media back then. It wasn't on

00:13:47.680 | a big podcast. People would find it on tables and then it's all word of mouth. And what is going to

00:13:54.080 | make someone recommend a book to someone else? This worked, this made me get better grades.

00:14:00.480 | You should read it. My kid's grades got better after they read this. So what you want to look

00:14:04.480 | for, if you want to align incentive structures with advice here is where you want to find a

00:14:08.640 | book on student study habit advice that just had a quiet entry into the marketplace and over time

00:14:15.440 | sell, sell, sell, sells. And I just looked it up before the show. I think the sales on how to

00:14:21.680 | concentrate a student is approaching 250,000 copies. A book that has never had any major

00:14:27.600 | promotion has never been talked about on a single major podcast show or had any footprint on social

00:14:32.720 | media. That's all word of mouth. So there you verify the incentive there for me to make that

00:14:38.800 | book sell that many copies. I was obsessed about this better work, what really works.

00:14:44.000 | So books have a better incentive structure surrounding their information than YouTube does.

00:14:51.360 | So you buy my book or any other book that has sold a lot of copies that focus on this topic,

00:14:55.360 | you're much more likely to get advice that works. And you're not going to hear anything

00:14:59.120 | about note-taking apps or to-do lists in that book. My book gets right down to the brass tacks

00:15:04.240 | of what are the different academic tasks you have to do? What is the right way to do these? How do

00:15:08.720 | you take information from a textbook and learn it efficiently to the point that you can do well on a

00:15:13.200 | test? How do you write a paper? How do you break that down into multiple steps so that it's a good

00:15:18.000 | paper that you're going to get good grades on? How do you learn mathematics to the level that

00:15:21.520 | you can sit down for a mathematics exam and get a really good score on it? Well, here's exactly how

00:15:26.000 | you want to organize your notes. Here's how you should study. These would make excessively boring

00:15:31.760 | YouTube videos from the perspective of the algorithm, but they also lead to notably high GPAs.

00:15:37.920 | All right, so now let's come back to the oxymoronic fallacy early on. Aren't you hearing

00:15:44.320 | advice now on YouTube? Well, here's how I exempt what we're doing here is that if you're watching

00:15:51.120 | this on YouTube, what you are seeing is the video of a podcast, right? The podcast is the game here.

00:15:56.640 | We put the video of the podcast on YouTube. Podcasting has a good incentive structure.

00:16:01.920 | It's similar to books. There is not an algorithm to please. In other words, there's not a hard,

00:16:10.400 | inscrutable, complex feedback mechanism that drives your content in podcasting. It is just

00:16:16.560 | like books. If someone likes your show, they will tell someone else about it and your audience grows

00:16:23.120 | a little bit. And that's how podcasts grow is people find what you're talking about to be

00:16:29.520 | effective enough that they will then go on to tell someone else about it. So that's what I think saves

00:16:35.280 | us here if you're watching this on YouTube is that what we're trying to do is get more podcast

00:16:39.360 | listeners. And I see that the exact same way as trying to get more book readers. The stuff's got

00:16:43.600 | to work. We play some tricks with the, uh, the thumbnails and the titles to try to get some

00:16:50.800 | algorithmic juice. Our YouTube guy does that, but the content comes out of the podcast.

00:16:56.720 | So I think incentive structures matter. So keep that in mind. So, uh, peer YouTubers are not

00:17:04.400 | necessarily a great source of advice on a lot of topics. You want to find sources of advice

00:17:09.600 | where the incentive structure is for the advice to work. That's what's going to make it actually

00:17:13.440 | do better. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.

My Planning System For Note Taking & Time Management | Cal Newport

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