Welcome to Doug’s Newsletter. Every Thursday, I share one tip for reclaiming the freedom of your time.

Today’s Setlist

🎩 One Tip → One Inbox is All You Need

😄 Funny Business → A book with all the secrets

📊 Community Poll → Standing or sitting?

🎩 One Tip: One Inbox is All You Need

You have thousands of thoughts every day.

Most of them get forgotten immediately, which is for the best. You don’t need a third custom banana peeler, even if it is 80% off.

Some thoughts you do want to remember. To text that person a thank you. To try a new exercise next time you’re at the gym.

You try to capture it in some version of a To-Do List…and if you’re like I was for the past ten years, it’s split across post-its, phone notes, emails, and unearned confidence that “I’ll definitely remember this later.”

One year ago, I discovered exactly what I needed: A second brain.

Some brief backstory: Tiago Forte developed the concept of a second brain. Through many years of studying Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) — how you use your knowledge in your day-to-day — Tiago developed this framework.

At its core, a second brain is a digital "brain" designed to take the load off your human brain.

There are many levels within Tiago’s second brain framework that I will get into in future posts. This post’s focus is only on one level: The inbox.

I break it down in two parts below.

Inbox Part One: Triage Station

This is the triage station. Think of it like the triage station of an emergency room…when a new piece of information is looking for a place to go, it starts here.

That piece of information could be:

1. Resource (e.g. Banana Peeler Podcast Episode #8)

2. Note (e.g. an in-progress ideation list for making my own banana peelers)

3. Task (e.g. Reserve the domain name banana.edu)

Once my piece of information is in the inbox, my second brain — of which the inbox is a part — will remember it forever.

I've made my triage station easily accessible on my phone home screen. Since I’ve started this practice, I’ve never had to worry about losing track of an idea or trying to remember where I wrote a note to self.

Inbox Part Two: The Review

The review's goal is to put things where and when your future self needs them. I do this weekly, but it can be done as often as you’d like.

The important thing is to spend review time solely putting things in their right place. It’s easy to get distracted and start reading an article from your resources or trying to complete a quick task, which is not why you’re doing this. Review time is for getting organized to set up future you for success!

Above, you can see four resources I found last week that I decided to save. During my review I go through each, one by one, moving it out of my inbox and into where it will be most useful for me.

For example: “IDM Implementation Roadmap” is an artifact from a recently finished consulting project. I am saving it to put in a future project — a case study on the project for my website — and want it to be easily accessible in a few weeks when I start the case study project. I’ll tag this resource as “Case Studies” and place it in the Area for “Too Many Hats” (the name of my consulting business).

From there I change the status from “Inbox” to “Read” and it’s both out of my inbox and out of my human brain’s airspace.

Do this for every resource, note, and task, and each week you’ll hit Inbox Zero with everything stored in the right place and time to make things super easy for future you!

♟️How To Apply This: Start Fresh

When I first started my inbox & second brain, it felt daunting to try to migrate all my knowledge into it.

That’s why I recommend 2 quick steps to skip this pain:

1) Start your inbox today— I strongly recommend Notion. It’s free for personal use and intuitive to use. I made an inbox template I’m happy to share to make it even easier to get started. Email me if you’re interested.

2) Archive everything before today— Wherever you currently store your knowledge, make a folder and call it “Archive (today’s date)”. Boom! You’re all caught up. If you do need to access any of that info — it’s been 1 year and I haven’t had to myself yet — you’ll know where to find it.

I’m excited to learn from more people developing their second brains. Each person’s second brain is unique, and I know you’ll find ways to use yours that will benefit me and others. Shoot me an email and share your progress!

😄 Funny Business

📊 Community Poll

I’m confident this is close to 50-50…and at the same time terrified I’ll be the only one who answers how I do. We’ll find out next week!

How I Can Help

Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways for us to work together:

1. Grab time with me for a 1:1 session on community, consumer-driven research, or anything else.

2. Join me at a 4-hour retreat, my small group gathering built on the cycle of the Moon.

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love…