This Practice Will Put You Ahead of 99% of People (But It’s Not Easy)

There's a way to improve your memory, productivity, and creativity on the amount of time that it takes you to write a short email. And the way for this, as Jin Jarin might say, is to take notes. Now, some of you may want to stop watching right now because you're thinking this is too simple, or it's disorganized. I don't have time to write down a bunch of stuff. And even if I did, how would I keep it organized? How am I going to reference this kind of stuff? And in this video, I'm going to show you a simple, notebook system for capturing and collecting and curating your ideas, your thoughts, and your takeaways into something that you can use every single day and will make it so that you're never afraid of the blank page ever again. The biggest mistake that people make with their notes is overthinking them. They add friction to the process right from the start, testing different types of notebooks, tags, databases, apps, tools, all the things that you don't really need in order to just start writing things down. What you need to do is capture first and then curate and organize later. Again, it sounds really simple, but the breakthrough happened for me when I stopped overthinking and I just started putting pen to paper or pen to note card or pencil to pocket notebook and just wrote the things down and then figured out what to do with them later. This is powerful because every time you take a note, you're capturing that moment in your mind. You're working through it with your brain. That sounds obvious, but you are doing it in real time. This makes your ideas stronger. It cements them in your mind as something worth remembering later. And so by overthinking it and adding friction and adding much things like, well, I got to set it up this way and I got to add these tags and I got to put it in this database and I got to make sure that I update it. This makes it less useful.. And if I was to guess, and if, you know, this is a YouTube video, but if you made a comment or you, you know, wrote to me at the email address in my like channel profile, this is what's happening with a lot of people. You're overthinking it, you're underdoing it, and that is leading to a lot of frustration and thinking, uh, taking notes doesn't work. Steven Johnson is an author and technologist who's written about this a bunch before, and there's an article that I'll link to in the description below called The Spark File., and I've always really liked Stephen's description of the Spark file and the practice at which he like actually does it.

Capturing things before you know where they go. Like the, the idea, this is why I'm kind of opposed to even tagging things because I feel like you just wanna capture things, um, without spending any time. You want like frictionless capture as possible. And anytime you spend being like, oh, this idea connects to these 7 other ideas and I'm gonna build the tags and the link system to like make sure that they're connected. Like, to me, that gets in the way of just reading and thinking. And, um, and, but, but you do need to capture it.

And he's just writing his notes, writing his ideas, his sparks of things that can become books, just chronologically in the Google Doc. There are no tags. It's not in like a fancy Notion or Airtable database. It's just him writing one thing after another as it comes up. And one of the things that he does as a way to remember is that he goes back and rereads the whole document like every 6 months. And this is where, again, if you make the commitment to write it down, this is— hold on, the thing that I want to show you, the thing that I'm doing— one sec. See, right when you're like, all right, I'm gonna get organized, I'm gonna be the guy who has everything in its place and everything has, everything has a place and everything in its place. So here is just one part of my Spark file. This is maybe 300 note cards. And you've seen me do some of these if you follow me on Instagram, you've seen me do some of these on Instagram, just like reading through them and connecting the dots, pun intended, for you. And I'll go through and I'll read these. And the other thing that I'll do is when I need to write something, when I need to come up with a new video idea, I just start going through these cards. Yeah, I can put them out, I can like move them around, I can really, again, pun intended, connect the dots, I can see the connections, where things should be going, and how something that I never thought might relate to one topic actually has a really strong connection point with another. And it really becomes fun. It's like Lego pieces. It's like you're putting something together that you didn't think would work before. It's like assembling a puzzle, and the pieces are things that you've put together. Like, some of these are 4 or 5 years old, and of course you've all seen my notebooks over the years. I have notebooks going back 15 years now. To keep this really simple though, the more that you write down your ideas, your thoughts, your takeaways, the better your brain will get at making those connections naturally. And you'll start to think about, oh, I talked about this, I wrote about this a couple of months ago. Like, there's this thing that I, I wrote about a couple of years ago even. And if you are going to track in your notebooks and you keep them around, it's like, it's not as quickly as typing a search query into Notion or whatever you're using, but y'all, it doesn't take that long. Like, go pick out your notebooks and you, if you've written down dates, just go through and be like, okay, it's this one, I'm gonna flip through it. Field notes are 64 small pages. You can look through that in a few minutes. You have a few minutes. That's one of the other things that I want you to realize with this type of practice, you have a little more time. You might have a lot more time than you think. And the internet and social media and just life in general has conditioned us to think that we don't have time to do things. And you have to proactively pull away from that way of thinking, that way of impression that the, the world is putting upon you, and think I've got a few minutes to write this down. I've got 10 minutes to look through old notebooks and journals and note cards to try and find something that is going to spark an idea for me in a way that just like typing in a direct search query will not. It's looking through notebooks, it's looking through note cards that will give you that sense of, oh, I didn't know about this discovery that direct searches will not. It will not happen. So by giving yourself a little more time, by opting out of the busyness and the belief that you don't have enough time to do everything and everything has to be go, go, go. Y'all, I'm as susceptible as that to anyone, but it's something that every day— this is one of the reasons I like to write things down is because it's fighting against that belief that you don't have enough time. I want you to hear me say you have enough time. This is a way that you convince yourself of that, that you actually do it every single day. All right. So if you're watching this and you're thinking, Matt, this isn't much of a system, I can't follow this. It's not like second brain or feel-good productivity, or it's not like— you're right. And that kind of stuff is much better on the internet than what I'm telling you here. But also, that's kind of the point. The truth is that most systems that you see are created for marketing and not for implementation. Yes, they are still useful. I mean, I, I talk about the GAP a lot. One of the reasons I like the GAP though, is that I keep it very intentionally simple. I used to have like this 4C note-taking system. It was like capture, curate, collect, communicate. I think those were the 4 Cs. I worked on a Notion database out of this for quite a while, and it Like I was saying at the beginning, it's, it's too much friction. I just, every time I'd write something down, I'd be like, okay, I gotta need the tag and I gotta do this thing. And I just stopped taking notes. Don't let fanciness and the belief that, oh, if I don't do it this specific way, then I won't get any use out of it. If you just write something down, it will be useful because again, it's like you're signing a contract. You're, you're signaling to yourself. That this matters. There are levels, there are levels in this, as the kids say, that of like how much something matters. But if you just write it down, then it's going to be, it's going to be something that sticks with you because you've made that commitment to put pen to paper. The system, if you can call it that, is to just start and to stick with it, to keep taking notes. As you continue to do this, you'll find good ways to organize them, even if it's just in a pile. Because then you get to flip through them. I promise you, if like, if I read through— let me put it to you this way. I've been writing things down for 15 years. I mean, longer, but in terms of my recorded accessible history, notebooks that I have moved with, like from Asheville to Nashville to Jacksonville to the next town that ends in -ville that I'll move to, I'll carry the all of this written these 15 years. And if I made the commitment to read all of those, it would take me less than a day. It might only take me 4 hours. Now, do I have 4 hours? Maybe I don't have that amount of time. But when you— when I think of it that way, that there's, there's 15 years, there's 5,000 days of entries, and I could flip through those in one day. Like, think of the comparison there.. And the way that I'm going to feel, the things that I'm going to recognize, the connections that I'm going to make through doing that, you can't get it, can't get it any other way. Okay, here's my challenge to you. Take a note every day for the next 10 days. Don't overthink it. Don't try and over-organize it. Just write down an idea, a lesson, a takeaway, an observation that you want to capture. Now I'll be honest, it takes more than 10 days to see a big impact on this. But if you just get started, I think you'll find that it's kind of fun to write things down. And if you do need a little bit of help and you need some hints on this, what I want you to do is check out my 5 Ways for Life-Changing Journaling video. It's right here, super popular, and a lot of people like it. I think you'll get a lot out of it too. Now I do think like note-taking is a little different than journaling. We can talk about the differences between those in another video, but thanks for watching this one, and let me know in the comments if you've taken any notes recently.

Bye.