Projects Over Categories

Foreign.

Why should I focus on projects over categories?

This is really one of the biggest mindset shifts and shifts in behavior that I see people in my course have. And there's really solid research behind this, by the way. Here's how it works. Most people, when they think of knowledge, they think of information. The analogy they instantly think of, and I use this analogy myself, as a library, right? Isn't that where knowledge is kept? Isn't that the way to store knowledge? But I think a much better analogy for professionals, for students, for people who are intaking knowledge and then creating things is a factory. And this is hard for people to wrap their head around because, you know, we're taught, oh, now we're creative knowledge workers. We left behind the days of the factory. Factory has nothing to teach us. That's the old way of working. But a factory has a certain quality that is highly relevant to us, which is that it's linear. Things come in, they're processed in a series of steps. And then there's output. And output is really everything. Think about your business, your career, your studies, your success, your income, your reputation. Everything that matters to you is directly linked to your output. When you create something, when you have real concrete output, people can't argue with that. They can't pretend it doesn't exist. They can't take that away from you. When you have a real outcome that you've created, it is yours. That is a stake in the ground that you have put there. That's real, that's concrete. So let's look at this analogy between libraries and factories. Libraries have the Dewey Decimal system, which works great for libraries, right? You have the top level categories, you have psychology, and then it gets broken down into subcategories. Cognitive psychology, neuroscience, social psychology. And then each one of those is broken down into sub, subcategories, and down, down, down it goes into smaller and smaller and smaller little categories. And again, this works perfectly for libraries. I love libraries. It works for libraries because anyone can access that, right? Anyone can walk onto the shelves, follow those sequences of numbers and find exactly what they're looking for. But what we're talking about here is personal knowledge management, not organizational, institutional knowledge management at the level of the individual. You can't do that. And here's why. If you have a, let's say a folder or a notebook called marketing, and you put in there everything related to marketing, over time, that collection will only grow. It'll grow and grow and grow and grow. Maybe at some point you start breaking it down into categories, but at Some point, it becomes so massive, the volume is so big that it becomes. You can't even find what you're looking for. So then you create the situation where the more notes you have, the less valuable they are, which is the opposite of what we're trying to do.

So then why should I focus on projects instead of these library style categories?

So projects is the best unit of measurement for what I was talking about with outcomes or with output. Okay, what is your output as a knowledge worker? You could say it's different things. You could say it's ideas. But ideas, you know themselves are kind of ethereal. They're not very concrete. You could say it's goals. But goals are very long term. Sometimes they take many months or years to complete. We need something that's kind of in the medium term that we can use as a finish line and then regularly set the finish line and reach the finish line. And projects I've found through my work is just the best way of doing that. A project is. It's medium term, it's concrete, you can set a very clear objective. And once it's completed, the. This is the important part, you can check it off. It's the one moment that you can draw a big red line. You can check that checkbox and say, I did this, I completed this, and remove it. This is the key part. Archive it in your notes and remove it from the things that you're looking at every day so then you can take on something new.

So it sounds like what you're saying is that projects are production oriented, whereas categories are consumption oriented.

Exactly. Categories are abstract. They're sort of up in the air, they're sort of very abstract. Whereas projects are linear, they happen in time. They're very concrete, they're specific. And that helps a lot of people to kind of redefine their work in terms of projects. And because your work is best defined in terms of projects, you want to also organize your knowledge according to projects.

So talk about that. So what you're saying is that when you're consuming, rather than thinking about, oh, what categories this gonna go in, I am determining, can this help a project that I'm actually working on?

Exactly. Exactly. As you're writing things down, as you're capturing things, if there is a current project, and this is where it's really important to know what your current projects are, to have a project list. If something that you're consuming a piece of information has to do with a current project, put it directly into that project. Right. Don't save that for later, don't think, oh, I'll come across this later, do that extra bit of thinking right at the intake and your future self, which might just be in a few hours or tomorrow when you sit down to work on that project, you're already gonna have all the materials, all the resources right there ready for you.

So then because of that, it becomes easier to find your ideas because you were talking about earlier, if you have that marketing folder, my goodness, you're gonna have so many different ideas and it's gonna become overloaded. What is it about projects that makes it easier to sort through your second brain, find your ideas and take action?

So imagine this. You sit down, it's Monday morning, you had a relaxing weekend, you're energized, you're rested, you have peace of mind, and you decide, I really am going to do deep work this morning. I'm going to create something, I'm going to finish something in that moment. To me, that state of mind that's energized, motivated, focused is absolutely priceless. You can't buy it, you can't acquire. You have to just, you have to create it, right? It's an investment. So think about that moment, right? It's 9:00am you know, you have a meeting or you have lunch at 12, or probably sooner you have a meeting, 10:30, let's say in those, let's say, 90 minutes, you cannot start right then going and looking for things, right? It's a completely opposite state of mind. If you sit down at your desk and start rummaging through your file folders and your digital notes and some paper notebooks and do, God forbid, do any online research. By the time you're done doing that, your brain is fragmented, it's scattered in a million different places. And this is kind of a paradox, right? You can't start the research when you need the research that has to be done sooner. So this whole system, my whole approach, is designed for, when you sit down to just open one folder, one notebook, which is exactly the project that you have decided you're going to do this morning. And in that folder or notebook you only have things you've pre selected and curated for that exact project. It's kind of like a, it's like a writing room. Imagine if you could create a room that was only for that project. Everything about the room, the art on the walls, the way the table's designed, the furniture, everything is perfectly designed just for the state of mind of that one project. That's what each one of your project folders is. It's a cognitive environment. It's an information environment that you can step into and not have to think about absolutely anything else but that one project.