Pro-ductivity.

How do the best podcasters remember everything they’ve ever read?

They gather all that information in one place and refer to it whenever they need inspiration or ideas.

During the Renaissance Period, people used to maintain a book called the ‘Commonplace Book’.

Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts.

Here is my commonplace book:

There’s a lot more pages, I don’t wanna reveal it all. 🫣

This page contains all of the information I’ve found interesting, compiled from podcasts, books, YouTube videos, documentaries, talks with real people, websites and the list goes on.

Each of these small texts you see in the above image are also pages, in which I have further sub-branched more and more pages.

It’s like a never-ending knowledge tree—the branches keep branching out everyday.

And none of this knowledge came from stuff that was taught at college.

This is purely me going down internet rabbit holes, copying and pasting interesting shit in this book.

Thing is, this inflow of information is never gonna stop.

As I had mentioned earlier in one of my dials, ‘Education doesn’t stop till the day you die.’

Week in the Life

Let me tell you what I usually do these days.

Every Sunday, I plan out what I’m going to do for the next week.

I use a technique called ‘Time-Blocking’ which basically helps out map out my whole week priority-wise.

Time-blocking is basically you setting aside a few hours of your day to do a certain task, or just for deep, focused work.

(Click the link here, it’s a great video kinda explaining what it’s all about.)

I write once or twice a week for an hour after I come home from work at 12:30 a.m.

The rest of the days when I’m not working, I either watch YouTube; feeding the CP (commonplace) Book or I do some deep work on this another project I’m working on.

I wake up at 8:30 in the morning, head straight to the gym, come back at around 11, then do some focused work or just read a book before I leave for work.

This is how my week’s set up.

I could go into way more detail but I don’t wanna bore you.

Let me know if you want me to go in-depth into more methods and practices I use by replying to this e-mail or drop a DM.

Notion: My Second Brain

If you haven’t heard of Notion yet, here’s your window.

Notion is basically your phone’s Notes app, on steroids.

It has a ton of different capabilities and features available, and it’s free of cost.

There’s ton of YouTube Videos on how to set up a perfect Notion template for whatever your need and niche is, so check it out it’s great stuff.

(I would recommend Ali Abdaal)

Start by watching this video to get a more general idea of what Notion is all about.

Here are one use case where Notion has really come in handy, Journaling.

Keeping a Journal

I have kept kinda like a personal diary where I just blurt out thoughts about the day.

I started this back in June 2021, where maintaining a physical diary was just not (and still isn’t) a good choice.

And as you can see on the bottom, there’s been 457 entries.

I’m human, and I miss days, sometimes a whole month too actually 😂

• On the right, I keep tags of the month and year so it’s just easier to filter out when I’m looking back.

• Also, I tag emojis with some of them, to symbolize what kinda day it was, just something I came up with my own.

The reason I feel writing diary entries like these is so useful right—it’s just a medium to channel whatever you are feeling.

Whether that be a voice note or a written text, you are mentally dumping all those thoughts into your head onto something else, which does in fact help you think more clear about the problem you’re facing.

Journaling these entries, especially after a bad day can clear out your head before you sleep. (it’s when I usually write)

And also it being digital, I can access it whenever, wherever, from whatever device. Win-win.

(This is not paid promotion for Notion OR Ali Abdaal I promise, I wish it was xD)

Reading List

Here is another small example of how I keep a database for all the books I’ve read:

As you can see, I list out all the books I’ve read, gonna read, gonna buy, or have finished with different tags.

I then rate these books out of 5 stars so I know what books to come back to and what not.

Also, each book title here is a page in itself, and if you click on it you can see a detailed summary of the book, written by GPT which I then proceed to modify based on my own understanding of the book.

This is just a small peek of how I function on a day-to-day, and some of the many systems I’ve built in place to maximize my productivity.

To install Notion on your desktop, click here.

Let me know if you guys are interested in this type of content, I can surely cover more on an edition I’m planning to write where I talk about ‘Flow State and how to achieve it.’

Send a reply to this e-mail or drop a DM @newsletter.dialedin, about what you want me to address, or any specific content you want to know more about.

Thank you, and I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. 🧿