🤯From Mental Clutter to Clear Focus. Organize your genius for fun and profits.

TUNE IN TO LEARN:

Can you imagine unlocking the full potential of your mind? Being paid for what you learn?

This episode will transform your approach to managing information inside your head, your personal knowledge, ensuring you never feel overwhelmed by mental clutter again, which stand in the way of your upward success.

By harnessing the power of knowledge management systems, inspired by experts like Tiago Forte and David Allen, you'll learn how to track your successes and failures, creating a sustainable path to personal and professional growth.

Drawing on insights from successful entrepreneurs such as Alex Hormozi, we emphasize the significance of structured documenting of your journey in driving continuous improvement VS an up-and-down rollercoaster with no predictable pattern.

Discover the game-changing concept of a "second brain" with Tiago Forte's PARA method and learn how to leverage your mental storage for clarity and focus, allowing for enhanced decision-making, creativity, and efficiency.

Join us as we guide you through mastering this system, bringing order to chaos and turning your life’s vision into reality.

The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of your Brain's Coach podcast. My name is Angela Shurina, I'm your host, I'm your Brain's Coach and it is my job here to bring to you all the best, the recent cutting edge, most important, useful and hopefully relevant and applicable life-transforming brain-body tools so you could take better control of your thoughts, of your actions and, most importantly, yes, your actions. So you could create the life you truly love living, so you could start progressing towards the most extraordinary vision for yourself and your life every single day. That's what we are all about here and today, folks. It's about getting organized. Organize your genius for fun and profits.

Speaker 1 0:59

I remember reading, actually, the first time I encountered this subject, this concept of knowledge management, when I watched a video by Tiago Forte, one of the top leading productivity experts and coaches. He had this video on big thing, about how we all need to take care of our second brain, or our knowledge system outside of our head. We recently interviewed David Allen, one of the top world's recognized productivity personal and organizational productivity experts and also coaches, and he has this amazing system that he scaled globally. So David Allen has quite a few quotes about how our head that is a quote your head is a crappy office, or your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them, ideas, not for holding them. So our mind is for creativity, for thinking, for problem solving, not for storing a lot of data. Yes, there are people, champions of memory, who can seemingly store unlimited amount of information in a very structured, well-maintained manner, but this is not the case for everybody and for most of us, mere mortals, more information means more clutter and overwhelm in our head and we even fail often to just remember our own experiences. You know, I was listening to a podcast with Alex Hormozy the Game amazing podcast for entrepreneurs, business owners who want to get down to business instead of somehow existing in this what these days call startup theater, where you're talking about business but not really doing the business, growing profits and adding value and impact. So, anyhow, alex Kharmozy, on his podcast, was sharing his experience of documenting his business entrepreneur and his journey in general, and he shared how his successes started to soar, to go higher and higher and higher when he started documenting his journey, his failures and also his successes.

Speaker 1 3:32

Very often we manage to hopefully, we usually are better at learning from our failures Like why didn't it work and what can I do better? Why did I fail and how can I do better right, why did I fail and how can I do better next time? So failure is usually more painful and that's why we remember it better, even though if we don't document it, details will get lost over the years. But then successes when we get success, we just brush through it and like, ah, it's because I'm so awesome, that's why I succeeded. Now there was probably a strategy. Yes, there is some element of luck, but there was also probably a few elements that you did right. They came together that could be reused for the purpose of your future successes in different areas of your life, like Alex Karmozov was talking about.

Speaker 1 4:23

One example. For example, in your business, if you decide to hire, let's say, sales director, and that is the first time you decided to do so, and the first time you're probably gonna fail and the sales director is not gonna be everything that you want him or her to be or that they can be. But then you learn and then, after a few iterations, you find your perfect sales director and after that point you're like, ah, this is what it looks like, what the golden standard for sales director. And then after that if you document your journey, if you understand exactly what makes a great sales director, so after that you're going to be looking for those specific things to hire that golden standard. So this is just one example.

Speaker 1 5:15

We have so much experience and knowledge that we accumulate, but we don't. First of all, we often don't even bother to stop and reflect on why certain things happen successes or failures and how we can use this information to multiply our successes and reduce our failures. So we don't even do that, leave alone documenting it in a structured manner, whether that's writing, whether that's our podcasting that these days can also then be analyzed with AI and be searchable and transcribed in a very effective manner, right? So we don't document and we lose that knowledge, and then we might end up going in circles or up and down, up and down, and that's why, for a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners, as Alex Hormozia shared, the journey, business journey feels like a roller coaster, because they simply don't track the knowledge that they accumulate, the knowledge that will help them to not just stay on the above a certain level, but keep growing, not ever going back to past failures or lower moments in terms of our successes.

Speaker 1 6:36

It's kind of like you know, with nutrition and fitness, a lot of people going through this yo-yo patterns their whole life, like when they lose 10 kilos, gain 10 kilos. And what is it at the core? It's inability to learn from your own experience. Now, if you know what leads to you gaining 10 kilos, well, document it and make sure you have systems and new skills and set of behaviors, guardrails in place so you don't go back there and when you start noticing this tendency or specific behaviors, you're like, ah, I know where that goes. I don't want to go there. So let me introduce more successful element, the one that I used when I actually lost those 10 kilos last time.

Speaker 1 7:25

So documenting our journey, structuring our knowledge, is so crucial to success in our modern world. And, hey guys, you probably heard this phrase well, at least from me, from this podcast, knowledge worker, where we deal more with information than anything physical, and that's how we deliver value, that's how our work is done dealing with information. The secret, new secret on the blog is it's not anymore about information. It's not about knowing what. It's not about what you know. It's about how can you make this useful in your life and in the lives of others. It's not about knowledge workers, it's about wisdom workers, it's about curation, it's about structuring, it's about application of knowledge that you possess and accumulate. But hey, surprise, surprise, you cannot do a lot with knowledge if it's somewhere in the cloud, in this very haphazard, not structured, spread out fashion all over the place and you don't even remember where you put what, how to search things.

Speaker 1 8:43

You know folks in my profession as an executive coach 360, in my profession as an executive coach 360, someone who helps people, leaders on all levels, to dial in all the not optimized aspects of self, whether that's health, energy level, stress management, to the way people work and organize their goal achieving process, and also information and how things are done and decision-making right. I'm the kind of person who helps, who brings a very specific solution to a very specific problem in people's lives, and I depend on constantly upgrading, updating my systems, on constantly learning to bring better and better solutions to my clients so they don't have to read countless books, listen to countless podcasts, being aware of all the research that's happening, but instead they get the applied, very personalized and customized solution to go effectively to resolve specific issue effectively in the best possible way known to humanity. That is what I do. But in order to do that effectively, to be paid for that, to see the unseeable connections, to connect the dots that nobody even sees, to bring these solutions based on sometimes thousands of different sources of information, in order for me to do that well for my clients, I have to manage what's in my head really well and, to be honest, I'm not that great at it yet. I'm not that great at it yet. I take my notes and every time I read a book or listen to a podcast, I put my knowledge and information in my physical notebook. And then I also have storage on Google Drive where I put all of my projects, collaborations some stuff is projects collaborations, some stuff is sorted and stored on things like canva, where I designed, for example, presentation and put together different solutions for my clients as well. Right, so it's all stored, just doesn't have good enough structure, and I approximately remember where to where I put stuff. On my computer it's easier because you have your hard drive and it's searchable, but even then I'm not that great at naming things to easily find them and retrieve them and reuse them for different projects present or in the future and just simply have the solutions at the tips of my fingerprints for myself or my clients to be used, applied and making my life or a life of my clients better. So I definitely can do better and I am going to do it better, starting with PARA.

Speaker 1 11:51

This is a system created by Tiago Forte, the one that we mentioned at the beginning, who created this concept of second brain, a well-managed knowledge system outside of your head. And again back to David Allen and get things done system. Your head is a crappy office, so you need to create the one outside of your head. That, by the way, also frees up your working memory, the one that makes thinking, decision making possible, creativity possible. So if there is too much stuff stuck in there, you're not going to be that efficient thinker, decision maker and creator. So you need to free up as much space as possible there and you do that by unloading the information that you're trying to store there in places outside of your head, again hopefully well-structured.

Speaker 1 12:47

This is what Paris system is designed to do and maintain, so you could also then search, retrieve, apply that experience, information, knowledge that you accumulate as you go through your life, so you could apply it in your life, in your business and for your clients and get paid for that? Because you create easy, simple, effective solutions. We are not paid to know more. We are paid to create order and effective solutions in the lives of our clients. Nobody wants to know everything you know, but they'd like to loan, so to speak, or borrow your brain to get the solutions that they seek. I'm talking about clients and people. You end up working with, partners, etc. So, anyhow, back to par system p-A.

Speaker 1 13:47

That stands for Projects, areas, resources and Archives. It's a system of creating folders, like literally folders on your Google Drive, on your computer, perhaps on your note-taking app like Evernote, one of my favorites. It's a system of organizing all the information that you have into usable storage in a form of folders. There is one additional folder, that's inbox, that during the week, for example, you put everything there not that well structured and then, once a week or so, you go through this folder inbox and you put All this stuff in other appropriate folders according to the system Projects, areas, resources and archives.

Speaker 1 14:40

Projects anything that is a concrete task, however short or long-term is, with specific outcomes and specific deadlines. Then you have areas, long-term areas of focus that need to be maintained at a certain standard, like your health or your finances. Areas of your responsibility. Then you have resources. This is kind of like a repository of everything that you're curious about your reading, learning, your hobbies and stuff that, yeah, you're just interested in but they're not necessarily need to be maintained at a certain level. Those are not, again, areas of responsibility, but just more of your curiosities, stuff that you can share with other people or use in your projects in areas of responsibility. And then you have archives, past projects, files not immediately relevant and useful but possibly could be useful to and reused in your projects. Your areas of responsibilities, or sometimes they become more active, pursued, and that's where you put some stuff out of archives into your resources. So this system is flexible. It's super simple.

Speaker 1 16:00

If Tiago Forte, the designer of this system in the book that is linked, by the way, in the show notes the book's name is the Para Method Simplify, organize and Master your Digital Life. So in the book Tiago Forte makes it really simple to start using this system. He suggests you know everything that you have till now. Just make it into an archive and you can search archive. It's there. You're not going to lose anything. But you just start with this clean sheet of paper, then create your folders from inbox to projects, to areas, to resources and archives. And in your inbox you put ongoing what's happening when you don't really have time to structure it throughout the week, but at the end of the week you get the files out and put them in other folders projects, areas, resources and archives with good names, so they're easy to find and reuse and so you can use it to direct better your journey, whether that's business, whether that's health, whether that's what else, relationships or any hobbies. And so you could start becoming more wise, not just possessing a lot of information. And so you could start becoming more wise, not just possessing a lot of information.

Speaker 1 17:42

You know, I like this saying by Derek Sivers or Sivers actually, I'm not sure how you pronounce his name anymore. If more knowledge was the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six-pack apps. It's not the knowledge, folks, that is valuable, especially now. Anyone can get any knowledge they want. Well, if they know what to search for. It's not the knowledge, but how you apply that knowledge.

Speaker 1 18:09

And most of us have areas where we keep going in circles, and the reason why we keep going in circles is because we don't document, organize, structure in any way our life experience in different domains, whether, again, that's relationships, health or business. I don't know about you, but I definitely do not want to go in circles. I want to grow, keep growing, keep getting better, becoming more and more valuable to my clients and the world because of the experiences and wisdom I create and accumulate to help more people, help them better. We are paid to create order in the chaos of other people's lives, but before we can do that, folks, we got to get organized. So, and power system is just something I wanted to share with you. This summer. I have an audacious project to organize all of my knowledge and systems for bringing value through coaching, workshops, etc. And so I'm starting with organizing my digital inputs and what I have in store, and I'm starting it simply. I'm going to dump everything in the archive, create better structure and, from now on, have a much better process of managing my knowledge for wisdom, fun and profit. That's about it. That's what I wanted to share with you today.

Speaker 1 19:41

Guys, welcome to the era of wisdom worker we are living knowledge era. Now Welcome to the future. Check out the book very short, the Para Method Simplify, organize, master your Digital Life by Tiago Forte. To conclude this episode, I'd like to share this beautiful quote from Tiago Forte. What matters now is the ability to elevate your perspective above the fray of the day-to-day noise, remain in a place of calm perspective and, from that place, to orchestrate the people, systems, tools and flows of information surging around you. In a world of plenty, guys, one of the most valuable skills is to help yourself and others make choices that create meaning, fulfillment and results. How good are you at it? And without organizing what's happening in your head, that is not possible, and that's what people are paid big bucks. So let's get paid. Let's organize your genius Hope you found this podcast incredibly useful. Now you are inspired and motivated to pick up the book and start using Paris system or any other organizing system. Just have one so you get capitalized on your wisdom as well, personally and professionally.

Speaker 1 21:22

Don't forget folks to share this podcast Screenshot. It tag me, share on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts. Wherever you find your podcast, share it with at least one person If you want them to also get organized and get better. By the way, when you teach it, when you share it, you get to learn it twice. A lot of people ask me how do I learn better, how do I retain information better? By sharing and teaching it to other people. So please do share. That's the biggest present and gift you can give me, angela Shurina, the host of this podcast. And till next time, well, have an awesome weekend and use some time like an hour to get organized and capitalize on your genius and wisdom. Talk to you soon, stay tuned and stay awesome.