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A few weeks back my team & I were prepping for an in-person conference for our clients and we had several presentations to collaborate on.
As we were brainstorming the final parts of our presentation each of us bought to the table something we had saved in our notes over the past months:
Each of us had collected these things randomly - not because we needed them for the presentation (or even knew we would use them in the presentation). But just because they sparked something in us.
And eventually they came together perfectly to help us put a nice bow on our presentation.
Lucky you remembered that tidbit of information that will help you complete the never ending stream of presentations, reports, blog posts or emails you have to deal with on a daily basis.
But it's not luck, or some kind of laborious note-taking system.
It's an intentional practice.
I call mine The Spark Practice. Rather than just saving notes & quotes to a database I never looked at again, I use each incoming piece of information as a prompt for my own thinking.
I've been doing this practice for four years now & the difference is night & day. All that information has become useful because I'm bringing my own insight to it.
This is essential. You don't want to be hunting around through notebooks, note-taking app & post its. You want to be able to sit down and have some things to work on. These might end up being book notes, or notes from a podcast or article.
​Readwise​ is a great tool for saving things from the internet into one place - I highly recommend it.
(​Read more about my Readwise reading & writing workflow here​)
Don't think of yourself as a secretary during this time. It's not about processing and filling everything away neatly.
You need to think of yourself as a CEO. You're job is to look at information & make meaning from it. So treat each of the things in your new inbox as a prompt to think → and then write.
The input is just the prompt your brain needs to start thinking.
Information is just information until you collide with it. Ask yourself:
You don't need to write an essay. Writing is simply a conduit for thinking. For surfacing your own thinking, creating your own unique 'takes' on a topics & concepts.
That is how to make all of this information we encounter daily actually useful for us.
Once you have created your knowledge note, you want to make sure you can find it again. This is where you should shift into secretary mode. You might want to file notes around certain topics, areas or by project. But don't let them just sit and languish.
Find a system that helps you find them again easily when you need them. Something like Notion, Obsidian or Tana can help with this.
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Spending time creating a practice where you turn information into knowledge will transform how you work.
You'll start to build the building blocks of projects - even before you know those projects are coming up. You'll have these knowledge assets you can use over and over and over again.
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