Eventually every life hacker realizes that productivity is about systems.

The real “hack” is not a single app or a cool shortcut.

It’s an elegant system that allows you to get more done in less time because it reduces the amount of time it takes to stay organized and get things done.

What isn’t often talked about in productivity circles is the cost of making decisions.

It’s easy to talk about saving time with this app or that plugin.

But what about all those friction points between apps, between tasks, that rob you of hours every day, a minute here, a minute there?

Those are what a system is designed to solve.

The key to managing your information for productivity is reducing the decisions you have to make, and how long it takes to make them.

The way this course solves the problem is that you no longer have to make hard decisions about where to put new pieces of information.

Information.

What am I talking about?

Physical information is mail. It’s stuff you print out. It’s receipts. Packing slips. Magazines and books. Even golf score cards. A moleskine notebook or a loose leaf journal. Sticky notes and scraps of paper. Business cards.

Then there is Digital Information.

This is the real killer for a lot of people.

There is information that other people create: Emails. Web sites, articles, blog posts, forum threads (and QA sites/threads). There’s videos and audios and PDFs that you download or stream. There’s bookmarks and random open tabs. There’s Word docs and Spreadsheets and PowerPoint files.

Then there’s information you create. Photos and screenshots from your phone. And videos. And voice memos. And maybe photos and videos from your DSLR. Notes-to-self in your phone. Papers that you scan into the computer.

You have a perfect storm of information overload coming at you everyday.

And it probably feels like there is no way to stop it.

This system is the way.

For each type of information, whether physical or digital, has an inbox. Each room where you do office work or learning has an inbox, a storage area and an outbox. You will learn how to create “Pipelines” for certain types of information.

You’ll learn how to manage the backup of all your information in all your digital inboxes. Automatically.

The title of this  course says Volume 1. Why?

Because there is a course directly related to this course that comes next, in Volume 2.

Volume two shows you how to batch process each of these inboxes. It shows you how on a daily (email), weekly (web pages) or monthly (files, photos, videos) basis you can batch process the contents of each of your digital and physical inboxes.

Batch processing vastly improves your productivity because you reduce the amount of task switching you do.

Volume two shows you how to do batch processing and gives you a full “Life System” that will teach you where to store all your information for long term storage, once you move it out of the inbox.

The Life System categories are 1. Professional, 2. Personal, 3. Relationships, and 4. Health. The full system contains hundreds of sub folders and is 3-4 folders deep in most cases. You will get the full folder structure as a zip file in Volume 2 as well as a walkthrough of how to use the system.

However, remember this ISN’T part of this course. This course is just about setting up all your inboxes, which is a prerequisite for Volume 2.

Just this first step of setting up the inboxes will take you several hours to complete once you have watched all the videos, and to implement Volume 2 will take even longer. Because of the amount of information and time required to implement these have been split up into two volumes.