My daily productivity routine and how to build your own system and set up! Hope this gives you a general idea of how I actually use my journal. I’m launching ‘Stuff and Things’ tomorrow so if you’d like to buy a journal here’s your chance:) thank you for all your lovely feedback! #journalling #journal #booktok #books #journalsetup #productivity #productivitysystem #commonplacebook #selfdiscovery #learning #study #organisation #writing #foryou #fypシ゚ #foryoupage

Good morning. I would like to show you how to build a productivity system for yourself that will help you streamline your life and stay on track of everything that you're working on. A lot of people have asked me how to actually use a journal so I'm going to show you my system and hopefully that will help you. Now this is Stuff and Things which I'm sure you've seen before. It's a four-part journal system, each book serves a different purpose and this is like the center stone to the whole setup. So I wake up in the morning, I'm lying in bed, I listen to some Nora Jones, I open the curtains, very nice, very zen and then I work my phone out and in here I'm going to make a digital journal entry and it's just a stream of consciousness of everything that's on my mind. I write it down here, don't make it a task, don't labor it, write whatever you like, just put it down in here. Things that have been stuck in your head, things you want to do that day, anything at all, takes me about 15 minutes. I really enjoy this and it helps me clear my mind before I start the rest of the day. Then I go downstairs, I've had a shower, I'm ready to go, I'm having my coffee and eggs and I pull this out and in here I'm going to open the first book. This is Things and Stuff and in here I'm going to look at my calendar for the day, I'm going to see what I've got to do, anything I need to add. I'm going to tick off my habit tracker and then I'm going to look at my project board and this is key. In here you've got a holistic view of everything going on in your life, all the major projects are on this board and there's a little progress bar to show you where you're at with each of them. Scribble it along if you've made some progress or just have a look at it. Now you've got some perspective on what's going on and you're ready to think about what tasks you need to do to get towards these, unless you've got some specific plan for the day already. Now you sat down and you're having your coffee, let's show you an example. Every single day you are going to make a to-do list and on this to-do list you're going to put down specific achievable tasks for that day. Don't put in tasks that are going to take two weeks to do because it's not going to help you today, you need to be able to do these right now. Now it might be too many tasks for the day, it doesn't matter, as long as it's a nice idea, put it on here. You're going to tick these off throughout the day and you've got something to reference to go back to of what you should be doing, very useful. And down here you can write the two-week task, it's going to take you ages to do and you're going to reference it and it's going to go into your long-term goals or your habit tracker, your project board, whatever, I can show you how to do that in another video. And then over here, just write however you like about the tasks you're going to do. Say it's, I don't know, some write-up that you need to do, talk about what you want to write about, just, you know, you always have these ideas of what you'd like to say, put them here, no one's judging, you can write whatever you like, that's the beauty of it, it's very simple and it's yours, you can make it however you like. So you've done that, you're on top of the work you're doing for that day, this will keep you grinded and focused, very handy. Now your business journal, this is for me a business journal for you, anything that's the key focus of your life, like your main work focus, might be academic, it could be any job, whatever, have a book for it. And in here, this is your second brain space, imagine these are four separate brain working spaces where you're going to put the tasks that you're doing into these little bubbles and you're going to write them down in there and you can reference them, they're not going to run away, once they're on paper they're there to stay, your brain can't handle everything, stop trying to make it run around with five million tasks, put them down somewhere, stop thinking about them so you can focus on something else, that's the beauty of this system, that's what ties it all together. So in here I'm talking about what I'm doing, I've made these little posts and I think it's been quite cute, I like them, you might like them. So US and EU fulfillment logo design, I just use this as a workbook for stuff I'm working on at the moment, very cool, yeah that's just what I'm working on, like I said. So you've got that, that's going to help you do the work that you're doing after you've planned it, then you sat down at lunch, you've been thinking about something, this is your personal life, you might have some emotional trauma you're dealing with, you might be in love with someone, you might be writing a book, whatever it is, it's going in here, this is called stuff and things, this is all for you and you write what you like in there. Let me give you an example, right book writing, I'm writing two books in here, this is the ideation about the books I was trying to write about, one is a 72-hour romance with two people that meet each other and by the end of the 72 hours they're completely entangled in each other's lives and they're having this crisis about we're actually in love and this is quite premature, what do we do? Quite cool, I think it's a nice sentiment. And the next one is somebody who's overly aware of everything going on around them and they view the world in too much detail and they take everything as a life lesson and everything has some massive consequence to them and it's a coming-of-age story, I think that's quite cool, maybe you'll read it, I don't know. And then the last one, this is the one I think most people would be interested in, pile of stuff, this will have the biggest difference in your life, this is a commonplace notebook. So you're doing your work, you've learned something new, you're on the Guardian, you've seen an article that's quite cool to you, you want to learn that, you want to put it down and you don't want to forget it, that's key. So you're going to go in here, there are four topics I like to use for categorizing your work, life lessons, inspiration, ideation and learning, you can colour code them if you like. So you're going to put in a new entry and in here you're going to write down the author of whatever you just learned about, the source of where you got it, tag it with as many keywords and themes linking to it, write about the ideas, if it's a philosophy topic, put down the main, just you know, all the main concepts, anything you'd use to differentiate that note in the future or to point it out and learn it easily, blah blah blah. So for example, Russian architecture, I've been writing up notes from Dostoevsky, he talks about these countryside homes in, I think, where is it, Moscow, can't remember, quite cool, very nice, I've written about 10 notes about that and so I'm going to fill up this book with all these different things, I'm going to tag them well, I can go into the tagging in another video if you want. So you've done that, filled this up, you're going to get your laptop out and you're going to go on obsidian and obsidian is like a second brain, imagine my brain has got every major topic that I think about that has different subtopics linking to it, I don't know, say there's 100 of them, sport, big one, I've thought a lot about that, I've got lots of notes, 500 notes, say it's a big blob, it's taking up a lot of my brain and then we've got Russian architecture, I mean that's not a very big part of my personality, let's say 14 notes, that's a smaller blob, all these different blobs tied together and make up my brain, imagine a digital circle with all these different blobs tied together. The notes that point to these big topic blobs also tie to other notes because you know all your learning is linked to each other, it's not just a simple path to one thing and now you're going to be able to reference all these different notes at one point, they're not stored in these separate file structures and differentiated, they're all stored together in this one big brain, like I don't know how to describe it. So I want to talk about Russian architecture, I might type in Dostoyevsky, I can see my notes about Dostoyevsky, I might type in another key word like timber frames, anything like that. Everything in other architecture terms comes up in relation to that and so I can see all my learning in one place and it's very very simple to reference and use. So I might be writing an article about it, I might be writing an essay, now I can actually make all that learning useful and it's not just something that's flowing out my mind and I'm going to have to look for it again. This is key and it all starts with this book, it's very easy to do, very simple to use and is incredibly satisfying and make you feel so much more productive. Simple journal, I'm selling them tomorrow so you can buy one if you'd like to. I've spent a while developing this and I'm really proud of it so I think you might like it, I think it'll help you. You customise this to suit your system and I'm going to make a guide on how to do that but this is mine, I hope it gave you a little picture of how I use mine and it does really work so thank you very much.