Divide your hardbacks and paperbacks for a cleaner and more streamlined look on your bookshelves. It is also helpful if you're a visual person.

Separate your hard covers and paperbacks

If you're a reader who tends to associate certain stories with their covers, stack your books by colours, try an ombré pattern, or opt for a rainbow look.

Arrange your books by colour

Organising by genre and subject makes it easy to find the right book you find interesting. Group together your mysteries, travel memoirs, 18-century English literature novels, cookbooks, etc.

Organize books by genre or subject

The alphabetical organisation is ideal if your collection of books is so huge it’s essentially a mini library. It works well if you remember book titles and author names more than genres and plot points.

Organize your books alphabetically

Gather all the books you haven’t read yet and place them in their own particular To Be Read section, so they don’t get lost among the other titles.

Group together the books you haven’t read yet

Organising your books by contemporary or classic is useful if you have a diverse collection of old and new books. You can define contemporary and classic as you desire, for example, living and deceased authors, books written before and after a certain date, or books published in specific periods.

Separate your books by author: contemporary or classic

Bookstores around the world use this method because it is simple, effective and classic. Group non-fiction books together and keep the other books in another spot.

Separate fiction and nonfiction

Reorganising books in different ways can help you rediscover old favourites or find the ones you've always wanted to read.

You don't need to be a professional librarian to expertly organize your novels, biographies, encyclopedias, and still-need-to-reads

Stashed ideas

How to Organize Books: Cool and Clever Tips

Your desk can quickly turn into a disaster because most people juggle more tasks than achievable in a standard workday. However, you have to get your work done, so don’t let a messy desk cause you to lose focus or feel anxious.An easy place to start is to take stock of your desk equipment, tools, and decor. Even if you claim that aesthetics aren’t important to you, keep an open mind. Your workspace is a tool that helps you get your job done.

What to Keep on Your Desk to Help Improve Your Focus

Time blindness is real. It can be hard to hang in there if you struggle with staying on task, especially in unpleasant jobs. Consider adding a sand timer to your desk decor to encourage you to work in sprints or practices like the Pomodoro Technique.Timers are available in multiple sizes and speeds. Consider your current work style and attention span to choose those that suit you. For example, if you use the Pomodoro Technique, you’ll need a 25-minute timer to execute the strategy.

A Sand Timer

Analog notes are often the easiest to execute, especially when inspiration hits. Keep a notebook or notepad dedicated for work at your workstation. Have a pen you love on standby, so you’re ready to jot down a takeaway, assignment, or idea. Label your notes so you can keep track of what you’ve written down.One drawback of note-taking supplies is that you won’t find another person in your office with them, and everyone will borrow yours. So get those coloured variety stacks and several pens and locate them on the edge of your desk.

Note-Taking Supplies

Keep an annual calendar in your view, and you just may see your work get smoother.Having a visual of the year ahead can help you plan your workload, consider contingencies, and resist touching distracting tech. Use your annual calendar to layer tasks and responsibilities, so you can tell when workloads can get tight. Then, finalize your workload to your tech-based calendar later and stay in the flow by using a visual calendar first.A paper Calendar can also keep you off of social and seeing your messages when you just have to have a quick date.

An Annual Calendar

Papers may be a necessary evil, especially if your business hasn’t adopted the latest digital tools. Create a system to ingest papers to keep your space clear with no distractions. Instead, use an in/outbox, standing folder holder, or other receptacles to create order where chaos often persists.If you’re often receiving documents for review or sign-off, communicate your process to your team. With a standard protocol, you can ensure that documents are organized and ready for your review.

A Landing Spot for Papers

A powerful quote, poster of your vacation spot, or your kids’ school picture are all fair game for desk decor. Seeing the things and people that matter most can help you push through even the toughest of tasks. Using motivating visuals can remind you of your “why,” especially during challenging seasons of work.Give your motivating visual a place of honor on your workspace. If it’s a photo, invest in a sturdy frame and keep it updated with the latest image of what drives you. Quotes that mean something to you can be tacked on to your monitor or even added to your coffee mug.

A Visual That Motivates You

Many workplaces insist on a clean desk policy to keep customer and company data secure. However, while you should always protect private and personal information, so should you guard your productivity.Make a practice of tidying your space at the end of your workday. Set a reminder on your calendar for the final 15 minutes of your scheduled hours. File papers, remove remnants from meals, and update your to-do list tomorrow.

Keep a Clean Desk Policy

Your desk can quickly turn into a disaster because most people juggle more tasks than achievable in a standard workday. However, you have to get your work done, so don&#8217;t...

5 Things to Keep on Your Desk to Help Improve Your Focus

The very first email was sent 50 years ago, in the spring of 1971.The incredible spread of email since then unleashed an unimaginable torrent of information into our everyday lives.As knowledge workers, we continue to struggle to process our inboxes, not to mention use that flood of information to move our projects and goals forward.Many have tried to lead us on a path out of information overload, and each “wave” of productivity tactics and apps valiantly attempts to solve the problems the previous one created.

The Humble Email

A simple medium that was originally meant for sending messages – email – has expanded to become a notification system, a to-do list, a notetaking tool, a contact database, and an archival system for our digital lives.All great technologies begin as blessings… but end up expanding so wildly that they become a curse.

Email Is Used For Everything

You’re probably using email for multiple purposes far beyond what it was designed for:<ul><li>You use email to send messages</li><li>You use email as a to-do list</li><li>You use email to keep track of notes and ideas</li><li>You use email to manage complex projects and areas of your life</li></ul>These are extremely different use cases, and using one platform for all of them ensures it fails at all of them. To perform each of them effectively, you have to break apart each of the four essential activities of modern work – Email, Task Management, Notetaking, and Project Management – and use the right tool for each of those jobs.

The Productivity Stack

All the subsequent waves of productivity software that we’re going to look at arose in reaction to the Email Big Bang, like gravitational waves echoing across the universe for eons. Each of them is an attempt to solve the problem of information overload that was unleashed upon humanity half a century ago.Example: Automobiles seemed miraculous until they started crowding the highways and blackening the skies (this is called a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap">Progress Trap</a>).

Email as a Task Manager and Everything Inbox: The Progress Trap

Email created thousands of “open loops” – unfinished or incomplete mental tasks – in our lives. And as GTD sought to create a system for taking in, prioritizing, and closing those loops in a systematic way, digital to-do list apps  gained widespread adoption as people realized just how much easier it was to maintain a to-do list using them.

Task Managers: How to Get Your To-Dos Off Your Mind

Task overwhelm occurs when the actionable items in your list are crowded out by the non-urgent ones: when your ideas, list of someday-maybes, inspirations, and random learnings make it difficult to find the singular, next important action.

Task Overwhelm

Coinciding roughly with the rise of the iPhone in the late 2000s, digital notetaking apps like <a href="https://evernote.com/">Evernote</a>, <a href="https://bear.app/">Bear</a>, and <a href="https://simplenote.com/">Simplenote</a> rose to meet the demand for easily capturing notes from anywhere (and having them available everywhere).Each new generation of tools takes over certain jobs but not others, and notetaking apps unlocked a new form of digital creativity well-matched with our fluid, mobile, always-on, everyday lives.

Notetaking Apps: Your Own, Personally Curated Solution to Information Overwhelm

Notetaking overwhelm happens when you’re collecting everything, processing your notes, and growing a knowledge system – but somehow, you never revisit the notes you’ve captured, and don’t seem to be able to achieve the day-to-day usefulness from your notes you’ve already collected.

Notetaking Overwhelm

Personal Dashboards push mere notetaking to the next level: they provide the big picture, using your curated knowledge and data to guide action and help you make better decisions.Your dashboards proactively inform the actions you take every day. To do that, they have to be dynamic and responsive to your changing needs. They have to change in response to how you want information presented at the moment, which facets you want to explore or understand, or based on changes in your digital environment.

Personal Dashboards: a Just-in-Time Springboard to Knowledgeable Action 

The main purpose of a dashboard – think of the dashboard in your car, or the cockpit of an aeroplane – is to facilitate fast, informed decisions. This new kind of document is perfect for modern knowledge workers – more interactive than simply editing text, more intelligent than a static document, more dynamic than a bullet point list, and more collaborative than a Google Doc. And they address notetaking overwhelm by structuring, organizing, and reframing your existing notes on a just-in-time basis.

Dashboards: A Better Solution

The power of dashboards has now trickled down to everyone, as part of the “no-code” movement: apps that allow for extensive customization, without requiring technical coding skills, such as Webflow (for web design), Zapier (for automation), Airtable (for databases), and Notion, Coda, and Microsoft Loop (for dashboards and collaborative pages).

From Email To Notion

It takes far more time and energy to create a Personal Dashboard in Notion, for example, versus a note in Evernote. A personal dashboard has to be architected – designed, built, iterated on, and maintained over time. Start building with the end in mind. Here are some good questions to ask yourself:<ul><li>What problems do I want to solve – the big questions I’m trying to answer?</li><li>What is the ideal future state for a challenge I’m facing?</li><li>What personal dreams or goals do I have that I might not have shared with anyone else?</li></ul>

Build, Don't Migrate

We all have a holistic productivity stack, which changes slowly. We can call it a “Second Brain,” because it allows you to offload and utilize all the complex information swirling through your mind.Each new generation of productivity software adds a new layer on top, instead of completely displacing the ones that came before. Not only is it unnecessary to immediately ascend to the highest layer, but it’s also probably wise to wait until the dust has settled and it’s clear what the new layer is and what it’s for. We need to have patience.

How to Craft Your Personal Productivity Stack

From the dawn of email to the rise of personal dashboards: Introducing the 4 functions of your productivity stack & how you can use each piece of it better.

How to Build Your Personal Productivity Stack

<a href="https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/">Building A Second Brain</a> is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks.This methodology is not only for preserving those ideas, but turning them into reality. It provides a clear, actionable path to creating a “second brain” – an external, centralized, digital repository for the things you learn and the resources from which they come.

What is it ?

We spend a significant portion of our careers creating snippets of text, outlines, photos, videos, sketches, diagrams, webpages, notes, or documents. Yet without a little extra care to preserve these valuable resources, our precious knowledge remains siloed and scattered across dozens of different locations. We fail to build a collection of knowledge that both appreciates in value and can be reused again and again.By offloading our thinking onto a “second brain,” we free our biological brain to imagine, create, and simply be present.

Why adopt this methodology?

Your second brain will serve as an extension of your mind, not only protecting you from the ravages of forgetfulness but also amplifying your efforts as you take on creative challenges.

<ol><li>Uncover unexpected patterns and connections between ideas.</li><li>Reduce stress and “information overload” by expertly curating and managing your personal information stream.</li><li>Develop valuable expertise, specialized knowledge, and the skills to deploy it in a new job, career, or business</li><li>Cultivate a collection of valuable knowledge and insights over time without having to follow rigid, time-consuming rules</li><li>Unlock the full value of the wealth of learning resources all around you, such as online courses, webinars, books, articles, forums, and podcasts</li></ol>

Benefits of building a 2nd brain

The first step in building a second brain is “capturing” the ideas and insights you think are worth saving. How do you do that?Think like a curator - Make conscious, strategic decisions about what you consume. As you come across social media updates, online articles, and podcasts throughout your day, instead of diving in immediately, save them for future consideration. As you begin to collect content, you’ll be able to choose which sources to consume in a deliberate way.

Capturing - Part 1|Remember

Instead of organizing your files primarily by topic (for example, web design or psychology), which is time-consuming and mentally taxing, organize them according to the projects you are actively working on. This ensures that you are consuming information with a purpose – to advance your projects and goals – and only at a time and place where you’ll be able to put it to use.

Organize by project - Part 2|Remember

Save anything that “resonates” with you on an intuitive levelThis is often because it connects to something you care about, wonder about, or find inherently intriguing. By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us at a deeper level, we improve not only our ability to see opportunities, but also our understanding of ourselves and how we work.

Keep what resonates - Part 3|Remember

Every time we create a note or make an edit, we can make it just a little easier to find and make use of next time.This can include:<ul><li>Defining key terms in parentheses in case we forget what they mean</li><li>Inserting placeholders when we leave off summarizing a source so we know where to pick back up</li><li>Adding links to related websites, files, or emails that we’re likely to forget over time</li></ul>saving packets of knowledge in a format that our future self can easily consume, we follow a “pay it forward” strategy that we get to benefit from in the future!

Design notes for your future self - Connect|Part 1

<a href="https://fortelabs.co/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes-3459b257d3eb/">Progressive Summarization</a> is a technique that relies on summarizing a note in multiple stages over time. You save only the best excerpts from whatever you’re reading, and then create a summary of those excerpts, and then a summary of that summary, distilling the essence of the content at each stage. These “layers” are like a digital map that can be zoomed in or out to any level of detail you need.It allows you to read the note in different ways for different purposes: in depth if you want to glean every detail, or at a high level if you just need the main takeaway.

Summarize progressively -Connect|Part 2

Add value to a note every time you touch itThis could include adding an informative title the first time you come across a note, highlighting the most important points the next time you see it, and adding a link to a related note sometime later. By spreading out the heavy work of organizing your notes over time, you not only save time and effort, but ensure that the most frequently used (and thus most valuable) notes surface organically, like a ski slope where the most popular routes naturally end up with deeper grooves.

Organize opportunistically- Connect|Part 3

A common challenge for people who love to learn is that they constantly force feed themselves more and more information, but never actually put it to use. But information only becomes knowledge – something personal, embodied, grounded – when we put it to use. That’s why we should shift as much of our effort as possible from consuming information, to creating new things. The things we create – whether they are writing pieces, websites, photographs, videos, or live performances – embody and express the knowledge we’ve gained from personal experience.

Don’t just consume - Create|Part 1

Begin to think of your projects as made up of discrete parts. I call them “intermediate packets,” which can include any kind of content we’ve already mentioned: a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings,etcInstead of trying to sit down and move the entire project forward all at once, a more effective approach is to end each work session – whether it is 15 minutes or 3 hours – by completing just one intermediate packet. This allows you to work in smaller increments, making use of any available span of time, while getting lots of feedback and taking frequent breaks

Create smaller, reusable units of work - Create|Part 2

By consistently sharing your work with others – whether that is your family, friends, colleagues, or externally on social media – all sorts of benefits will start to materialize. You’ll connect with new collaborators who you never would have imagined would find your work compelling. You’ll find clients or customers, in some cases even when you weren’t seeking them. Others will reflect back to you their reactions and comments and appreciation (and occasionally criticism). You’ll find that you are part of a community that shares your interests and values.

Share your work with the world - Create|Part 3

Each note in your second brain is a record of something you’ve experienced in your life – whether that is from reading a book, having an interesting conversation, or completing a project at work. With all your most valuable ideas at your fingertips at all times, you never need to struggle and strain to remember everything you’ve learned.Because you know how to capture and make use of anything, every experience you have becomes an opportunity to learn and to grow.

Conclusion

Amazing ideas which can not just help you stash mindfully but also how to connect with them again and put those ideas to use.

Building a Second Brain 🧠  - Forte Labs

Research tells the greatest athletes and the greatest businessmen are strikingly similar in their wiring. They think in many of the same ways and have similar levels of competitiveness.What distinguishes these high achievers is their mindset: Successful people have realised that being busy is a waste of time, being productive should be the goal. Dispel the myth that the most successful people in sports or business get the most done. They do not. They only proceed with care and mastery of priorities. They excel at prioritising their day's activities and completing the most important ones.

Ordinary vs Successful Mindsets

﻿It just doesn't matter how organised, efficient, and energised you are. You will never get everything done in a single day. That's just too high a bar to set.

In the spirit of business/self-help hits such as Darren Hardy's The Compound Effect, a simple formula for productivity and success, from a prominent sports psychologist and a star business coach who join forces to offer seven fundamental skills for improving your habits and achieving peak performance in work and life.

How to Organize Books: Cool and Clever Tips

5 Things to Keep on Your Desk to Help Improve Your Focus

How to Build Your Personal Productivity Stack

Building a Second Brain 🧠 - Forte Labs

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