Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Invera. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. Today's episode is a mini episode, and specifically it is
answering another listener question. So if you're a regular listener, you'll know I've been putting out a call for listeners such as yourself, to send in any questions you would like me to answer or tackle on the show. So if you have a question, please send it through to Amantha at Inventium dot com dot au and my email is always in the show notes as well. So this listener question is what is the most productive way to store articles, reference materials, videos, images, and all sorts of
things relating to particular topics. So I've brought at this question a little bit because I want to talk through my filing system and how I think about things in terms of all the different I guess documents and inputs that I have. So to start with email, So how I organize my inbox, and I use Superhuman that is my email client for all things. Inbox is that I
have my inbox where everything comes into. I then have a to do folder where everything that requires an action from me, so me plus time, goes into the to do folder. I have a read later folder, so anything that I can read but is non urgent, I put in the read later folder. And then there's also a folder that's just various non urgent things that actually Superhuman files things into. So I adapted this system from my interview with Google's executive productivity advisor Laura may Martin, who
was on the show previously. In terms of having a better workflow for my email, then when I've dealt with things, I pretty much just archive everything. I don't have too many folders. I find that I don't find folders particularly useful because I think that the search function in either Gmail or Superhuman is incredibly good and allows me to find anything that I'm looking for, So that is email. In terms of articles and reference materials, I use Pocket is an app. I think if you google Pocket app,
you will find that. And it means that when I'm trying to focus on a task, but I risk going down a rabbit hole of interesting articles. I can simply on my Chrome browser there's a pocket has a plug in, and I can save articles to Pocket. I can also create tags for those articles as well, and I find that a really useful way of storing any reference materials
or articles that I want to read later. I all also for longer documents like PDFs of journal papers, I would file them in the Inventium drop box, where we do have a filing system for research, and that's simply filed under the topic that it is most relevant too. Then when it comes to notes, I use Evernote for note taking. Again, I don't actually use tags or the
notebook function in ever Note. Everything pretty much just sits in my inbox, so I have I've tried experimenting with different filing systems, but to be honest, I find them a bit of a waste of time. Again, because the search function is super powerful in ever Note, I find that that is absolutely satisfactory, and I can ninety nine percent of the time find anything I'm looking for within about five or ten seconds. Something else I do is I use things so Things is to do list software.
I used to use wonder List until I think Microsoft bought it and did some stuff with it. So I use Things, and I tried out a lot of to do list software, but I like Things because you can have projects and then categories and then subcategories, and for anything that is a list. So I use things for my deep work and shallow work to do list, but I also use things to store things that are lists. So for example, books that I want to read, I have a book list, Podcasts that people recommend to me.
I have a podcast list. TV shows that people think I should be binging on. I have a TV show list, listener questions for the podcast. I have a listener question list. So I find that it's really useful to organize anything that is a list into things. Now. In terms of photos, I have not invested any time in having a filing system for photos, which is slightly annoyed, but at least if I have a rough idea when I took a photo of something, I can generally find it in my
phone or in the cloud. And finally, for images, like images that I might need for a presentation invent teams, Dropbox has an image folder, and generally I find where I source images from is generally Adobe Images, and I think they have inbuilt tags, so I find that that makes images easily searchable when I'm trying to find something appropriate for let's say, a slide on a presentation. The other thing that I do that I find quite helpful is I use Finder because I'm a Mac user, so
I think is Internet Explorer the PC equivalent? I should know this, but anyway, I use a shortcut menu on the sidebar because there are folders that I need to access when I'm finding files very frequently, so there are about ten folders that I have shortcuts to, which is just another thing that I find saves me time. That is, in a nutshell, how I think about storing and filing and saving things. I hope that has answered this listener question and that you found it useful. So that is
it for today's show. If you are enjoying how I work, why not leave a review in Apple Podcasts or share the episode with someone else that maybe needs some tips around filing and organizing things. So that's it for today and I will see you next time.