How I Journal and Take Notes: Tim Ferriss (Transcript)

Tim Ferriss’s journaling and note-taking strategies for brainstorming, gratitude, reducing anxiety, and more.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey guys, Tim Ferriss here. Wanted to talk about note-taking. I have what you might call hypergraphia – which means I write all the time. So I have hundreds of notebooks.

So I feel like I’m in a pretty good position to talk about what the hell to do with lots of notes. You need a systematic way of filtering the best stuff to the top of your attention, at least in some fashion.

So I’ll show you a few ways that I do that. It’s pretty straightforward but the key to all of it is multiple passes. For almost all types of note-taking and I’ll describe a few different types of note-taking that I do regularly.

The key is multiple passes and constantly asking, in effect, ‘What did I think was important and cool that isn’t that important or cool?’ And then only selecting the absolute and distilling the absolute best.

So let’s take a look at something really small. This is the type of notebook that I would put in a pocket, a back pocket and this is from an event. It was actually a very good event which was a Vanity Fair event in San Francisco, many years ago, I want to say around 2013.

And I’ll show you one of the exercises that I like to do when I’m feeling overwhelmed or feeling like I need a reset – which I do certainly around New Years, and there are certain seasonal times and I like to reflect!