Mastering GAPRA: A Simple Structure for Your Digital Life

Hello, and welcome to episode 400 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years.

This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points.

Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure.

It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary

And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important?

Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question.

When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation.

Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them.

Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes.

Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists.

And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world.

It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough.

Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today.

Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected

Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents.

These were all original thoughts and observations.

Today, all that information is freely available on the internet and, of course, in books.

What’s more, with AI tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, finding this information today is easy. I, like many people today, rarely use internet searches for information. I simply ask Gemini.

This means there’s no point in saving this information in my digital notes. All my searches are saved within the Gemini app, as they are in ChatGPT and Claude.

But your original thoughts, ideas and project notes are unique. It’s these you want to keep in your digital notes.

Much like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton wrote down their thoughts and observations, your thoughts, observations and ideas should be collected and stored.

When Darwin travelled on the Beagle, he was 22 years old. When he published The Origin of Species, he was 45.

And perhaps, like Darwin, not all your ideas today will have an immediate practical purpose. But if you don’t keep them, they never will. This is why it’s important to keep them where you can find them later.

And that’s where our digital tools today are so much better than the paper notebooks we kept. We can find anything, any time, from any digital device we have on hand.

I remember reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography, and he often travelled to other parts of Italy. If he needed to reference a note he had made—and he made copious notes—and he did not have the right notebook with him on his travels, it would have taken him days to retrieve the information.

We don’t have that problem today.

So, when it comes to collecting, be ruthless in what you keep.

I have a notebook in my notes app called “Suppliers”. This is where I store the names of the companies I regularly buy things from.

For example, I get my clothing from several preferred retailers. I buy my woollen jumpers (sweaters) from Cordings of Piccadilly. In the note I have for Cordings, are my sizes and the website address.

This makes it easy for me to find what I am looking for and order. I use Apple’s Password app to store my login details, so once I have found what I want, I can order it very quickly.

Amazon makes this even easier with a “Buy It Again” section, so if I am running low on Yorkshire Tea, I go to Amazon, click Buy It Again, and within a few seconds, I see Yorkshire Tea and can order straight away.

Ten years ago, I kept all that information in my notes. Today, I don’t bother as it’s faster to go directly to Amazon.

Another use I have for my digital notes is to keep all my client meeting notes. Each week, I will have around fifteen to twenty calls with clients, and I keep notes for each call as I write feedback, which I send to the client after the call.

These are unique notes, and each one will be different, so using the Darwin/Newton principle—keeping thoughts, ideas and observations in your notes—they will be kept in my notes in a notebook called “clients”.

What’s great about this is I have over eight years’ worth of client notes in Evernote, which feed ideas for future content as they’re directly relatable to real experiences and difficulties.

Another useful note to have in your notes is something called an “Anchor Note”. This is a note where you keep critical information you may need at any particular time.

For example, I keep all the subscriber links to my various websites there, which can be quickly copied and pasted whenever needed.

I also have the Korean Immigration office website there, since it’s not easy to find, and I only need it every 3 or 4 years.

Depending on how security-conscious you are, you can also keep your Social Security and driving license numbers there, too.

How you organise your notes depends on you and how your brain works. However, the more complex your organisational system, the slower you will be at finding what you need.

Now this is where computers come into their own. Whether you use Apple, Google or Microsoft, all these companies have built incredible search functionality into the core of their systems.

This means as long as you give your note a title that means something to you, you will be able to find it in five or ten years’ time.

I remember once my wife asked me for a password to a Korean website I had not used in ten years or more. I couldn’t remember it, and I didn’t have the password stored in my old password manager, 1Password.

As a long shot, I typed the name of the website into Evernote—the note-taking app I’ve been using for almost fifteen years—and within a second, the website with my login details was on my screen.

If I’d tried to find that information by going through my notebooks and tags, I would never have found it. I let Evernote handle the hard work, and it did so superbly.

However, that said, there is something about having some basic structure to your notes. I use a structure I call GAPRA. GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive. It’s loosely based on Tiago Forte’s PARA method.

I find having separate places for my goals, areas of focus and projects makes it easier for me to navigate things when I am creating a note.

My goals section is for tracking data. For instance, if I were losing weight, I would record my weight each week there.

My areas of focus notebook is where I keep my definitions of my areas and what they mean to me, and it gives me a single place to review these every six months.

My project notebook is where I keep all my notes for my current projects.

The biggest notebook I have, though, is my resources notebook. This is a catch-all for everything else. My supplier’s notebook is there, as is information about different cities I travel to or may travel to in the future. As I look at that notebook now, Paris is the note that has the most information. (Although Osaka in Japan is getting close to it)

I also have places to visit in Korea that I keep for when my mother visits—which she does every year—so I can build a different itinerary for her each year.

The archive is for old notes. I’m not by nature a hoarder, but I do find it reassuring that anything I have created is still there and still searchable.

And that’s it, Ricardo.

You don’t need to keep anything that is findable on the internet or in AI; that’s duplication. But what I would highly recommend you keep are your original ideas, thoughts, and meeting notes (even if they are being summarised by AI. How AI interprets what’s been said is not always what was meant)

And if, like me, you prefer to take handwritten notes, you can scan them into your digital notes app so you have a quick reference even if you don’t have your paper notebook with you.

I hope that helps, and thank you for your question, Ricardo. And thank you to you, too, for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

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