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've used a 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 better 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 once 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 when you've got something important to remember your brain is afraid to forget it, and so it keeps going over it in what cognitive psychologists call the rehearsal loop. Obviously the rehearsal loop evolved in an era where 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. Allen 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, Gar Reynolds 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 Reynolds 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 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 spreadsheet, 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 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 Graham Alcott's Productivity Ninja introduces another concept I found really valuable, which is having an ideas park, 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 threads that you're going to write on Twitter. This is the 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've 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 Allcut 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 Gaye's seminal 1973 album Trouble 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, because 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 the best things 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. 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 five minutes of 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 stays 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 Holiday'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 the 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, 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.