5 Tools I Use to Remember Everything 5 Tools, mit denen ich mir alles merken kann 5 herramientas que utilizo para recordarlo todo 5 outils que j'utilise pour me souvenir de tout 5 narzędzi, których używam do zapamiętywania wszystkiego 5 ferramentas que utilizo para me lembrar de tudo 5 інструментів, які я використовую, щоб пам'ятати все 我用来记住一切的 5 个工具

- So, you've probably heard about mnemonics at some point in your life. memory aids|||||| การจำช่วย||||||

If you haven't, they're basically mental devices that allow you to access

hard to remember information in a sort of roundabout way. ||||||||indirect|

Take the acronym ROYGBIV for example. ||ตัวย่อ|||

This silly sounding name allows us

to easily remember the order of the colors

in the visible light spectrum.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Our brains aren't really wired in a way that makes remembering the order

or arbitrary words easy, |ตามอำเภอใจ||

but they easily latch onto silly sounding names.

Essentially this acronym provides

a pathway to a specific piece of information.

Information that does exist in your brain,

even if it's hard to access directly. But building these sort of mental pathways

isn't just useful for accessing information that's already up in your head. You can also build them to easily access

information that you don't know, and in doing so, you can greatly

expand your brain's capabilities. Someone who understood this concept

exceptionally well was Henry Ford.

"I have a row of electric push buttons on my desk," he once said, "and by pushing the right button, "I can summon to my aid men "who can answer any question I desire "concerning the business to which "I am devoting most of my efforts." ||ทุ่มเท|||| In other words, Ford didn't know all of the information that he needed to run his business himself,

but he did know how to quickly get any

answer to any question that he needed.

Now today, there are entire businesses

that provide the access to experts

like the ones that Ford relied upon

back in his day.

They're called Expert Networks, and actually learned all about them

back in my MIS program in college.

Other businesses, like hedge funds especially, |||hedge funds||

often pay huge sums of money for yearly

subscriptions to these types of networks.

But of course, we have another tool at our fingertips,

which is called Google.

And what's more, it's free. So with such a useful tool at our fingertips,

why even make a video about this?

Well, here's the thing. Google is incredibly useful, yes,

but it does have some limitations.

The main one being that it's a search engine, which means that it can only return results

based on the terms that you feed it.

And sometimes, you don't really know what you're looking for well enough to give it the accurate terms.

But there's another problem as well, and it's the one that I wanna focus on in this video. It's the problem of re-access. How many times have you stumble across

a really useful article or video

only to be unable to find it again later?

It's just like putting new information up in your brain, if you can't access it again when you need it, then what good is it?

Fortunately, Google is not the only tool out there.

So today, what I wanna do is share some

of the other tools and methods that

I use to easily re-access information.

Think of them as modern day breadcrumbs to follow, ||||||ร่องรอย||

except that these breadcrumbs don't get eaten by birds so you don't get eaten alive by a witch. And really, at the end of the day,

isn't that what my entire channel is all about? So since we are on YouTube,

the first one that I'm gonna mention is YouTube playlists. If you go over to my channel, and you go the Playlist tab,

you're gonna see many publicly available playlists that I've made of my own videos, but hidden underneath the surface,

there are also dozens of unlisted playlists that

I make for basically any topic that I'm interested in. And with these playlists I'm easily able to save anything that I wanna access later on.

So whatever I'm interested in, be it rock climbing, or guitar pedals and signal chains,

or making better videos,

I will make a playlist for that topic

and then I'll save stuff to it as I come across it. Now, that feature's useful for anything on YouTube, but what about the rest of the internet?

Well, for that there is Pocket.

And Pocket is basically a browser extension

and also a set of mobile apps

that allows you to save any webpage

you want for later reading.

And one of the nice things about pocket is that

it's very similar to the reader mode on the iPhone. It actually strips out a lot of the extraneous Valójában sok mindent eltávolít az idegenből

elements of the website that you're on and just gives you a nice article view

which is very distraction free.

Additionally on their mobile apps,

Pocket gives you the option of saving

articles for offline access.

So anytime I have a flight,

I often go and download one of the articles

that I've saved for later reading so I can access them while I'm on the plane. Now, I know several people who actually delete articles

out of their Pocket once they're done reading them, but that isn't the way that I use it. Essentially, for me, Pocket is a way of saving anything

I come across on the internet whether I've read it already or whether I want to access it in the future.

It's basically my main way of laying out these breadcrumbs, and I don't worry about keeping things organized, I don't use the tagging feature very often, I don't delete things, I just make very liberal use of that save to pocket button in my Chrome browser,

and that way I know if I find something useful,

I'm gonna be able to find it again even if I forget the search terms

that might bring it to me in a Google search.

Now, there is one place in particular on the internet

besides YouTube where I don't tend to use Pocket to save things, and that is Reddit.

I'll often save Reddit comments directly to my Reddit account.

Over the past couple years, I have found that Reddit

is often a better source of information

for certain purposes than blogs or videos.

And this is true for a couple of different reasons.

First and foremost, Reddit like many other social

media sites has a very low barrier of entry to post.

People don't need to buy a camera like they do on YouTube, people don't need to learn how to set up a blog, they just need to make an account

and they can write to their heart's content. And because of this,

you often meet a larger and much more diverse

group of people sharing their knowledge.

Plus, you usually also get multiple answers in each thread.

These are coming from multiple different voices.

And because it has a conversation style setup,

Reddit encourages discussion, it encourages debate,

and I often find the best answers

several levels deep nested beneath the original comment.

So sometimes this debate is really, really useful.

Now, I know that I could easily save Reddit pages

to Pocket just like any other article,

but usually I'm interested in saving a specific comment rather than

the entire thread that it's from. And yes, I could click the permalink

button and save that in Pocket,

but usually saving things to my Reddit

account makes things easier because

if I'm looking for something in the future, I usually at least know whether it was

from Reddit comment or from a blog post,

and if it was from a Reddit comment,

I know that I can start from my profile

instead of digging through Pocket.

All right, so we talked about YouTube playlists,

Pocket and Reddit.

The next one I wanna talk about is screenshots.

I take a lot of screenshots,

especially when I'm watching YouTube videos. Saving an entire video to one of

my playlists can be very useful,

but sometimes I just want one frame for later reference.

For example, I was recently watching a video

about how to set up a specific order of guitar pedals,

and they had this diagram of the signal chain in the video,

so I screenshot that in case I need

to reference it later on.

Now, basically every computer operating system out there

has a built in screenshot program.

And I am here to tell you that it is not

good enough and that you can do better.

So the program that I personally use is called Greenshot.

It's open sourced and free on Windows, and incredibly full featured.

And then, it also exists on the Mac,

but it costs about two bucks

and doesn't have quite as many features, though that being said, I still use it just because

I like to use the same programs on

each operating system if I can.

The main thing that I like about Greenshot

is it allows me to setup multiple

destinations for my screenshots.

For example, I have mine setup to not

only save each screenshot to a specific

folder that's in my Google Drive so I can access it from anywhere,

but also save screenshots to my clipboard

so I can easily paste them into Photoshop

if I need them for a video,

or I can past them into Notion or Evernote

for note taking purposes.

And in addition to that feature,

I also like that it allows me to set up

different shortcuts for taking a screenshot

of the entire screen as well as also drawing

a box around a specific region that I want to capture.

Now, Greenshot is by no means the only

screenshot program out there,

so if you're looking for an alternative, there is ShareX on Windows, Skitch for Mac,

and then Monosnap for both platforms.

And that just leaves us with one more

method that I wanna talk about which

is trusty old notebooks and note taking.

So in addition to taking notes on individual books,

I'll often create specific notes in Evernote on things I'm trying to learn, as well. And if it's a current interest, I usually bookmark those notes

and add them to my shortcuts bar.

A few examples include my Japanese notes,

my After Effects notes, which have different

scripts that I use occasionally and different

shortcuts that I like to reference

and can't always remember off the top of my head, and my notes for my live set up

which I'm trying to build right now which has a lot of very different complicated gear

that has to go in a specific order.

And aside from just typing notes,

I also make extensive use of the camera

feature in Evernote as well.

If I've got like a specific configuration of things or anything where just a visual reference would make

much more sense than typing things

out for a long period of time. I'll take a picture of it, I'll shove it in Evernote, and that way I can easily access it just as I can with text.

Now, the one odd thing about my Evernote setup

is that I don't tend to use the Web Clipper function, which is essentially this browser

extension that you can use to save articles

and basically anything you want

to your Evernote just like you can with Pocket.

And I know my friend Martin uses that all the time,

especially for things like recipes,

but I tend to keep articles and things like that in Pocket,

and things that I kind of create myself in Evernote,

but you kinda have to use what works for you.

Now, one last way that I make sure

that I can easily re-access information

is by building a library,

or rather, several libraries.

I have a physical one sitting on the bookshelf behind me,

a digital one in my Kindle app,

and another one made up of audiobooks.

Now, you might think that it'd be hard to re-access specific information in an audiobook that's hours long, but that's not a problem if you're listening through Audible since their app

actually lets you set specific bookmarks

at time stamps and even add notes to them.

Audible is also simply the best place to get audiobooks

ranging from the best-sellers to more

obscure titles on botany and music theory.

I use audible almost every single day,

specially now that it's warm and I can bike more often.

And if you'd like to give it a try, as well, you can go over to Audbile.com/Thomas

or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone

to get a 30 day free trial.

That trial also comes with a free audiobook

download of your choice.

And this month I'm gonna recommend Bill Bryson's excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything.

This is one of my favorite non-fiction books

of all time, and even though it's not on my list of essential books on my website,

since it doesn't deal with productivity or academics, I do think that everyone should read it.

It is a fantastic introduction

to basically all fields of science.

Now of course, you could go and get any other audiobook

that you want and once you're a member, you're gonna get one new credit every single month for another audiobook,

plus access to two Audible originals every single month

that you cannot get anywhere else.

And a library of audio workout

and meditation programs to boot. és meditációs programok indításához.

So once again, to get a free 30 day trial of Audible service

along with free audiobook download of your choice

and two free Audible originals,

go over to Audible.com/Thomas

or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone.

Big thanks as always to Audible for sponsoring

this video and being a supporter of my channel,

and thank you as always for watching, as well.

If you enjoyed this video, hit that Like button

and also get subscribed right there

so you don't miss new videos when they come out,

and also click right there to get a free copy

of my book on how to earn better grades

if you haven't done so already. Last, but not least, you can check out one more video

on this channel by clicking right over here,

or check out our latest podcast episode

right over here and if you haven't subscribed to that podcast channel,

you should probably do that as well.

Thanks again for watching,

and I will see you in the next video.