Speaker 1: This is Ali Abdaal's second brain. First, let's start with Capture.

Speaker 2: So Capture is about getting it outside of your brain, social media, the world, and into some trusted single place where you can start to work with it. What are the different ways that you capture information? Okay.

Speaker 1: And then I'd go through and be like, yes, yes, yes, no, cut. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, cool. Film. Sorted. We just went through all four steps of code.

Speaker 3: What? No. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. All jokes aside, regular viewers know I have huge respect for Tiago, Ali, and Thomas, but their ultimate productivity systems can be intimidating for the everyday person. So in this video, I'll be sharing a simple two-step process that will get you 80% of the benefit with just 20% of the effort. I'll also share a lot of real world examples so you can see how I use this productivity workflow to manage a full-time job in tech while creating videos part-time. Let's get started. In a nutshell, step one, I literally capture all my ideas and tasks related to my work and my personal life into an app called Todoist. Then when I sit down in front of a laptop where there's a keyboard, I step two, organize all those ideas and tasks into their corresponding locations, Google Workspace, Calendar, Notion. Let's quickly break this down. Step one, capture. If you clicked on this video, you're probably familiar with David Allen's famous quote, your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. So you should do whatever you can to minimize the friction between point A, having the idea in your head, and point B, writing that idea down. I want to emphasize the app itself does not matter. I use a free version of Todoist because it has a very responsive widget. I literally just click the plus icon on my home screen and I can input the idea or task in less than 10 seconds. And that's all I use Todoist for. As a counterexample, I've tried using Thomas Frank's Notion template to capture tasks, but the loading animation and having to fill in one or two property fields added too much friction and that decreased my motivation to write things down. Onto a simple example. I'm on my way to work and a colleague messages me with a link to a document for me to review. I can't really focus during the commute, so I add review email copy and reply to Jane in Todoist and get back to browsing something actually important like memes. Another example, as I'm about to leave for work, I receive a message reminding me of a colleague's birthday on Friday. I immediately bring up Todoist, type in buy birthday present for Michelle today, and add another task, bring present to office on Friday. After buying the present today, I check out the task and thanks to Todoist natural language processing feature, it will remind me on Friday to bring the present to the office for Michelle. Pro tip, you should always start your quick capture with an action verb. This way you won't be left with something ambiguous like present.

Speaker 1: Not a present, it's the present.

Speaker 3: So on a typical day when I wake up, my Todoist starts off with recurring tasks and reminders I've input previously. Then throughout the day, new action items and ideas are added. Which brings us to step two, organize. The biggest pro tip here is from Tiago Forte. The wrong way to organize information is by where you found it. The right way is to organize by the location you will use that information. Jumping right into a simple example. For some reason, I'm super creative when I'm at the gym, like working out at the gym, not hanging out there for no reason. In between sets of 800 kilograms, I would have ideas on new marketing campaigns to run at work, advice I need from my manager, and content ideas for YouTube. I capture all that in Todoist, finish the workout, and when I'm back on my laptop, I add the marketing campaign idea in our team's weekly meeting agenda, email my manager with the problems I'm facing, and include new video ideas in my content pipeline page in Notion. As you can see, to make step two work well, you first need to identify suitable locations, then organize to those locations. I like to do the step on a laptop rather than on my phone because I just type so much faster on a keyboard, and navigation on the desktop app is usually much easier. Another example, I'm in a car and I come across a video editing tutorial. I save the link in Todoist, and when I get home, I add it to the post-production section of my video page in Notion because I want to watch it right before I start editing, where it is the most useful. Onto a more advanced example. At the government tax bureau place, I was told to apply for a tax refund in eight months by submitting three documents. The moment I was told, I opened up a Doist, added the date and the documents required. When I got home, I saved that information in a Notion page, and while that isn't wrong, I'm probably gonna forget about it in eight months. So in addition to this record, I block off a time slot on my calendar for eight months later, add the three documents I need to prepare beforehand, and link the Notion page within the description. In this instance, it's fine to keep a record within Notion, but my calendar is a place where that information will be used since my calendar basically tells me where to be and when. Funny story, a friend of mine missed the deadline and lost out on quite a bit of tax refund, so that's like a real life consequence. Not exactly a funny story, but I got to say I told you so, so, you know, silver linings. Anyways, at this point, you can probably see how this process plays out throughout the day, right? Capture, capture, capture, organize. Capture, capture, capture, organize. Capture, capture, capture.

Speaker 2: Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition.

Speaker 3: No, but you get the point, right? Pro tip, it's fine to skip the calendar and leave tasks that are not time-specific within Todoist. For example, it doesn't matter when I take my probiotics every day. It doesn't matter when I physically hand the present over to Michelle as long as I do it before I leave the office. The second those are done though, I check them off and allow my brain to forget all about them. The next example relates to inbox management because email plays such a huge role in our lives. Specifically, how the snooze feature within Gmail is so underutilized. When you receive an email requiring you to take action more than a week from now, for example, you need to present in next month's team meeting, you should snooze that email until the Monday of that week when it is the most relevant. In a way, when the email arrives in your inbox, that's like the capture step. And the snooze feature is the organized to location step, if that makes sense. I have an entire video teaching you step-by-step how to achieve inbox zero, so I'll link that down below. In summary, capture all ideas and tasks in as frictionless a way as possible, then organize those in locations where that information will be used. Once you're comfortable with these two steps, check out Tiago Forte's second brain video because capturing organized is actually part of his four-step process, capture, organize, distill, and express. Code. See you on the next video. In the meantime, have a great one.