In the section on daily review of goals I mentioned the importance of syncing this list between computer and mobile devices, if you use different platforms. This chapter develops that idea and goes further. In principle it could be moved to the second book, since here besides the theoretical text there will be advice and examples, but I'll leave it here anyway.
Reading productivity books you're unlikely to find such a point, but for myself I discovered that it's extremely important and convenient.
We live in two worlds at once — physical and virtual. That means you have documents both in physical and electronic form. That's perfectly normal and there's no getting away from it. Next I'll write a few sentences, and if you recognise yourself in them, you probably have serious problems with order.
Take the average person. They have photo albums lying in a chest of drawers in the living room (or bedroom). In the kitchen there are sure to be scraps of paper with recipe notes (especially for older people) and recipe magazines. On the coffee table there might be a notebook. Flat documents, say, are stored in a cupboard in the bedroom on the wife's shelves (after all, as a rule, women more often deal with such things). Car documents, on the other hand, lie somewhere in the living room on the husband's shelves. In the wife's handbag might be the results of her latest medical check-up. And somewhere next to the 200-dollar emergency stash are credit payment receipts, which it's important to keep just in case until full repayment. Now let's move to one of the spouses' devices. The shopping list they keep as notes in an app. In the browser there are many tabs open with various recipes or they're simply in bookmarks. There are saved images and notes in messengers like Telegram, Viber or WhatsApp. Screenshots are mixed with photos. And there's a home computer where you can't find anything at all, everything's mixed up and nothing's grouped.
Did you recognise yourself in at least 50–60%? Most likely yes. I described an abstract fictional family without any reference to real people, but it's a quite realistic situation. As you read the previous paragraph, weren't you alarmed by what an information–document chaos you live in? If not, that's very bad. Though I wasn't expecting a "yes" answer, since many people live exactly like that.
Why does this happen? I think it's linked to at least several reasons. First, the mixing of the digital and real world happened relatively recently — computers and phones massively entered our lives only 20–30 years ago. Second, even when stuck in the physical world, people didn't strive to bring order to it, because nobody taught them that, and they themselves didn't have the thinking that would let them ask such questions. The vast majority of people have serious problems with storing and organising both physical and digital information. You can't even imagine how much this problem gets in people's way in everyday life.
First, searching in an unordered and unsorted source always takes more time than in a neatly organised one. And don't think that sorting and organising will take a lot of time. Second, searching across several sources complicates the task and takes even more time. Third, unsafe storage of documents and data makes it harder to create backups and wastes extra time. What backups are and why they're needed we'll discuss in one of the following chapters. And finally, fourth, when you have chaos with documents, you have chaos in your thoughts too. Ordered documents quickly show the general picture of your life, which lets you adjust your goals more precisely. This is an important point, because for a long time I myself had problems with this, and this virtual–physical chaos slowed down my goal achievement and negatively affected my self-education. I'm convinced that practically all physical and virtual documents can be structured.
Now I'll show how I store virtual and physical documents, and on that basis you can try to do something similar with your data. So, as I said, we live simultaneously in physical and virtual worlds, which means there are two groups of documents that are practically impossible to unify. There's nothing strange about that — having 2–3 storage places is better than 10–15.
Let's start with physical documents:
1) Notebook for recording expenses.
2) Medical results of routine check-ups.
3) Flat documents (each in a separate folder).
4) Work documents.
5) Tax documents (for/from).
6) Bank agreements.
7) Car documents.
Let me go briefly through this list with explanations. I have a notebook where I record my daily expenses from 1 October 2020. I also have medical check-up results, flat documents, work documents, bank and tax documents, and car documents. All of this, except the expenses notebook, is stored on a single shelf. It's very convenient. You couldn't think of anything more convenient. The documents are neatly arranged so you can quickly grab any folder. Why don't you do the same? Your life will probably consist of different document categories, though they'll overlap with mine in some ways. Organise storage in one place. Imagine that one day there's a fire in your flat and you have to urgently take everything essential. When all documents are stored in one place, you can quickly gather them and leave the building, instead of getting photos from the living-room cupboard and flat documents from the bedroom chest of drawers. Of course I don't keep them in one place only for fire or emergency evacuation, but also for quick access and understanding what types of documents I have.
Now let's move to virtual documents. So I have:
1) Work projects.
2) Home projects, sites and drafts.
3) Photos and video.
4) Other.
Don't doubt that all of this is stored very close together so backups can be created conveniently. Virtual documents don't need special explanation, as it's all clear anyway. The only point that might cause difficulty is "Other". In fact this point hides many sub-points, including personal-life documents in the form of notes and passwords, materials for learning English, materials on astrophysics, virtual books and everything else that makes up my virtual life, and with it my real life. Create yourself a folder "Data" or "My life" — or any other suitable name. Then inside this folder create the folders you need based on your needs, interests and hobbies: English, recipes and any other names. Inside each such folder you can create additional folders as needed, but it's very important that all your virtual documents and materials are initially in the "Data" or "My life" folder. In fact you don't even have to store this as directories on your computer. You can use any of the programmes designed for storing data in hierarchical form, such as Notion, FSNotes, Bear Notes, Obsidian and many others. One of these programmes, by the way, I use to this day.
