Transcription
I'm going to do something I don't normally do. I'm going to show you every [music] folder on my computer. My real setup across my laptop plus three separate drives. It's actually simpler [music] than you'd think and that's the whole point. I wrote a whole book about it, two books actually, but don't worry about the name. Just watch what it lets me do. I can point AI at any [music] part of my work or my life in just a click or two. By the way, that's PARA. Four folders [music] that I've taught for over a decade now. I want to show you how I've set up the [music] shortcuts to my PARA folders in the sidebar of my finder. [music]
And you can see there's kind of a lot of things over here on the left, but they come in a very specific order in four separate parts. These first three are local folders on my computer. This is my home folder which contains everything for my user on this computer, my desktop and my downloads. Some things exist only on my computer and don't really need to go anywhere else and that's those three.
Next, I have my personal Google Drive. So this is nothing related to work, just my personal Google Drive attached to my personal Gmail account which I've had for 20 years. So you can see here what's called My Drive contains an inbox plus the four PARA folders. And this is all personal stuff, so my personal projects that you can see there, my personal areas, my personal resources, and my personal archives. I really like to keep my personal life completely separate from my work life. I also have each of those five top-level folders listed right down here as shortcuts. So with a single click, I can jump into any of the four categories of PARA.
Then, just below I have the same thing but for my individual work Google Drive. So this is everything related to work but just for my individual account that no one else at the company has access to. So, you can see here it's the same five top-level folders, which I also have here as shortcuts. My work projects, my work areas, my work resources, and my work archives.
Finally, we have the Forté [snorts] Labs share drive. So, this is a share drive in that everyone across the entire company has access to it. Which, of course, we need for all of our shared company projects, all of our shared areas, all of our shared resources, and all of our shared archives. Now, you'll notice for the Forté Labs share drive, I don't have the full contents mirrored onto my local machine as I do with my individual work drive and my personal drive. And the reason for that is the Forté Labs share drive is something like 17 TB. It's far too much data for me to store on my computer. What I do in this case is not mirroring, it's the other mode that Google Drive offers, which is streaming. With streaming, all of the different folders that are on our share drive appear here as if they are local folders. But, you'll see here on the right there's a little cloud symbol, which is telling me that this folder only lives in the cloud. It's not actually on my computer, just a pointer to a folder on Google servers. So, if I have a folder that I want to work with within Co-work, I'll have to right click it and then click make available offline. It will download this folder onto my computer. The only folders from the share drive that I have currently downloaded are the two projects that I'm most actively working on, which are my book. You can see the the little green check mark indicating that these are all downloaded. And then, our program the AI Second Brain, which is also downloaded here.
What you'll notice is that every single project is actually part of a broader area. So, if I'm working on my life in perspective book, that is just one single project within a much broader area called books. Another project we're doing is we're building a studio, a recording studio in the town in Mexico where I live. Well, that is not just one little island in isolation. That is part of an area at our company, which of course is YouTube. So, what these shortcuts give me is instant one or two click access to practically any file or folder that I might want to point Co-worker at. And the most powerful part is when you point it at a whole project plus the bigger area that it lives in. That's where it really starts saving you a ton of time.
So, I'll go ahead and start a new task. I'll say work in a project, choose a different folder, and I will first give it the AI course folder, so it has all the contents of this specific project. But then I also I can click again, I also want to choose a different folder and select within areas my marketing folder as well as my content. So, our content is the main way that we do marketing, so I want it to work across both content and marketing and hit open. And always allow. So, you can see here it now says AI course plus two. So, now I can say analyze the contents of the AI course folder. Then create a launch and marketing plan and draw on the contents of two area folders that I'm also giving you. Suggest any ideas, possibilities, new strategies or tactics that we could use to reach our audience and new audiences based on the long-term learnings from those two area folders. It's always going to start by scanning the folders that you've given it to understand what it's working with. So, notice that it's reading the the testimonials of our first cohort that we just finished as well as the feedback survey data. This is why it's so important to have the current very specific concrete project, which tends to have very detailed data, as well as the long-term broad themes that are are kind of like the big picture view. Both of those levels of detail, those levels of abstraction, are very important.
So, this is super interesting. I can already tell, even by this very high-level summary, that it is drawing on just a a bigger picture, a wider view of what we're trying to accomplish through this program beyond just this one single launch that is happening over the course of a few weeks. So, zooming out for a second, do you guys understand the implications of what we're seeing here? There's a lot of other combinations that you can use, especially if you use my PARA method. For example, you could give it two separate projects [music] and say, "Compare and contrast these projects. What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? How could they support each other? How could the learnings from one inform the other?" You could give it two separate areas. "Can lessons from my health inform my work? How can ideas from [music] my gardening inform my marketing?" You could give it two separate resources, even. [music] "How can I use my knowledge of UX design [music] to, I don't know, design more engaging slide presentations that people pay more attention to?" The possibilities are really endless. [music]
You could give it, you know, all of your project folders and ask it for an analysis of your whole project portfolio. Which ones are likely to succeed? [music] Which ones are likely to fail? Which ones you should consider >> [music] >> scoping downward or potentially even canceling? You could give it your full archive and ask it, "What are some past things that I have undertaken that could be revived or could be revisited or could flow into current efforts?" [music]
Really, as long as you have these pre-formed chunks of collections of files, which is [music] really just a folder hierarchy, which you can organize using PARA or any other method, >> [music] >> then the world is your oyster. You can mix and match and compare and combine and merge and synthesize [music] and split apart. It becomes this playground of just melding and [music] and sort of recombining different groupings of content that probably already exist on your computer in your file system >> [music] >> as we speak.
And here's the part that I am most excited to share with you. The way that you build this for yourself [music] is a completely free Claude skill that you can just load up right into your LLM. You point it at your files, it looks at everything you've got, and then it will propose [music] a step-by-step plan to reorganize all of it into this exact system. We originally built this skill [music] just for the first cohort of our live training program, the AI Second Brain. It was only [music] for our students. Starting today, it's free for anyone. Join my newsletter and it's yours. The link is in the description.