Note to Self

You're listening to the uppercase life where we are notable people doing notable things. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. And today we are talking about notes. Notes. 

Some of you out there are thinking, well, I already take notes. And others are thinking, I hate taking notes. But what I can tell you for a fact is that all of you have a notes app already.
If you're listening to this, you have a notes app built in to whatever device it is that you use on a daily basis. Just about every computer phone tablet in the world all come preinstalled with the notes app. They assume you were going to need to take notes. But in what ways do you use your notes app? I want to challenge you with a couple of ways that I use mine, and I would love to hear your feedback on the ways that you employ a notes app to help you on a daily basis achieve your goals, your ambitions, and just be more productive in general.
So I personally am an iPhone user, but the principles I'm going to talk about in this, I have used in Evernote across multiple kinds of devices, including PCs. So it works in any notes app that I've ever used. I use notes in folder based segmentation, and so I will create folders for my notes and then have my notes under that folder.
And I'll tell you some of the folders that I currently have in my notes at the first folder and the one that I use the most often is called conversations. Inside of this folder is a note for every conversation, including phone call and sometimes in person, depending on the nature of the conversation that I'm having on a daily basis.
And this is a great record for me to go back and look at some of the important things that were said in conversations. Now I deal with client calls throughout the day and also with personal calls. And so it's important to me to not have to remember all of this stuff in my head. As soon as I'm given important information, I want to dump it somewhere so that I mitigate the risk of it just draining out of my phone ahead during the day.
So I want to dump it directly into my notes app and maybe from there it goes somewhere else, like into a project management tool. But first, it can go right into my notes app during the conversation, and I do this simply with a bullet list. I start a bullet list, and throughout the conversation I will mark out bulleted important things that I note.
And then if it's a client, I will take that note, copy and paste it into an email and just give them a summary of the conversation to clarify what it was that we discussed. Now, if it's a friend, they will not know. I'm taking this note, except they might know that I remember next time I see them, the information they gave me about the fact that their grandmother was sick or whatever.
Well, because I took the time to note it. I care about it. I want to be able to follow up on that. But I don't tell my friends and taking notes what we're talking on the phone. And I usually will not take notes if I'm somewhere in-person unless we're discussing a project because I do not want to have my phone out when I am face to face with a human being and having a conversation.
However, I may, when I leave that coffee meeting or whatever, pull out my notes app and take a minute before I drive away to note some of the things that they said so that I don't forget them. So, first of all, do I have conversations? And I use that when just about every single day. Another really useful folder I have is called Books.
Now I hope that you engage in reading books, whether it's through audio or just looking at or maybe you engage in reading articles, blog posts, something like that. In any case, if you're listening to this, there's a high chance that you are interested in bettering yourself. So you're probably looking at information about it. And the thing is, we get a lot of really good information coming into our head, through our eyes and our ears and whatnot.
But it's really hard to retain all of that. So if you have a note for each book that you read, you can mark down some of the high points, some of the things that struck you, whether it's notes to yourself about what you want to do based on what you read, or for me, a lot of times I just like to write down the really impactful things that I found in that book, things that really stuck out to me that I want to implement.
I'll put them into a bullet list in a note that has the title of that book and author, so that I can go back and find it at any time. And you can do this without even owning the book. You could just walk into a bookstore, sit down and with a notes app in a few minutes time, you can scan a book and really glean some important information.
You can take that note away with you and then you'll be able to reference where you found that. Who said that? Who was this quote from? And it's really nice to be able to do that. It also makes that reading process. It makes the retention of the information higher in your mind because you were writing it down. I personally have a poetry folder in my notes app I like to create and creating with words is important to me as an artist.
I create in many different ways, most of them visual, but sometimes I just want to write something interesting. Not boring, not commercial. I just want to sit down and write something that is creative. So I have a folder for myself to write poetry, to write stories, lyrics, anything that's coming to my mind that allows me to put my feelings and my experiences into a creative style note.
I have a folder in my notes app called Goals, and in this one I will create a note. Periodically. Sometimes I'll do this more than others depends on the phase I'm going through. In that moment, I will create a note that is simply the date of the time I'm making the note. So it just has the day, month, year of the note.
And then inside of that note I will put a very, very quick 5 to 10 bullet list of goals I have in that moment. And it's important to me not to think this through very hard. So what I do is just off the top of my head as quickly as possible. I put the five things that are the most important to me that day, and some of them may end up being long term, maybe that day I've been thinking about, you know, really in the long term, I want to, you know, write a book about this idea or maybe I'm thinking very short term, like I just really need to get this crack in the
windshield fixed for the car. I mean, anything from the very mundane to the big legacy building things, I will write them down just rapidly via bang, bang, bang in usually no more than five bullet lists. The thing that I find helpful about this is you can go back and you can track the things you're interested in and you know what you'll do over time.
If you start opening back up those goals notes and seeing what was it last year that was really important to me and that was consuming my thoughts in terms of goals. Did I forget all about that? Have I completely changed course? It gives yourself a self-assessment of sorts. And also, sometimes you can look back and just chuckle about it like, Oh yeah, that was apparently a really big deal to me there.
And it was I got it done. It wasn't that big of a deal, but that day just felt like it was the whole world. I think being able to see your goals over time, how they progressed, whether you've been pursuing them, is sometimes a good metric to help you evaluate your progress over time and the focus that you have on the things that really matter to you.
I also have a folder called People and in this folder I collect names of people. Names and helpful descriptions for me. So every day I'm meeting people, right? And you probably have this experience too. We get introduced to a lot of people and personally I am part of multiple organizations, either where I volunteer or maybe client organizations that I work with, or maybe just in the office space where I wo...