Episode 94 Organizing Your System and Executive Functions

Below you can view or listen to Episode 94 of The Personal Brain Trainer Podcast.

In this episode of the Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast, hosts Darius Namdaran and Dr. Erica Warren explore the impact of organizing systems on executive functions. They discuss various strategies and tools, including Google Docs, Google Keep, and ivvi, to help with managing ideas, materials, technology, and assignments. The episode highlights the importance of hyperlinks, cognitive flexibility, and personalized systems in enhancing productivity and efficiency. Darius and Erica also share their insights into color-coding, folder structures, and the evolving role of AI in creating adaptable, user-friendly interfaces. Listener engagement and feedback are encouraged to further the discussion.

Listen:

Watch/Listen on YouTube:

Brought to you by:

Transcript

#94: Organizing Your System and Executive Functions

Erica: Welcome to the Executive Function Brain Trainer podcast. I'm Dr. Erica Warren.

Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran. And we're your hosts. Sponsored by iVVi. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. Well, try Ivy for free now at ivvi.app. That's iVVi.

Erica: Sponsored by the Executive Functions Coaching and Study Strategies certification course, A comprehensive training for educators, coaches and parents.

Darius: So Erica, what did we talk about today?

Erica: So today we're going to be talking about organizing your systems and how that can really support your executive functions. And when I say organizing your system, that might be your ideas, your materials, your technology, your assignments, your classes. It's really how are we using technology to help us to organize everything, whether it's our desktops. And you and I are going to have a lot of fun really diving deep into all of the tips and tools and strategies that we use.

Darius: And I also want to talk about what sort of executive function insights we are gaining from our workspaces because I think there's a lot that you take for granted in your work and a lot that I take for granted in my work, like stories, experiences, things like that. I think it's really great to sort of share what's live with us and what insights we've been having over the last month.

Erica: Absolutely.

Darius: So are you still doing your executive function coaching with work?

Erica: Absolutely, yeah. I have a very full practice, and I would say that I do executive functioning with all my students and adults, but some of them I also do educational therapy, but to me, executive functioning just works across every single different goal of individual that I work with. Whether it's someone in the workplace, whether it's a first-grade student, whether it's a college student, Executive functioning and having that expertise is just so incredibly valuable.

Darius: Yeah. And for any age and stage.

Erica: For any age and stage. And it works so well with coaching. I've got those two hats, I've got my coaching hat, but I also have my ed therapy hat. Ed therapy hat is more of a pedagogy, you know, in the sense of that I'm teaching strategies, whereas the executive functioning coaching is really helping people find the answers from within while weaving in a few things that they may not have thought of. Or tips, tools or tricks.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: So yeah, this is a big time of year, big transition for me. Cause I get a lot of new people in and so it's getting, getting used to all the new different ways of processing. Right. And I'm always fascinated at how much I learn from each individual because each individual processes so differently that it's always like almost like a new. You're discovering a new little flower that's blossoming and you're like, wow, I never thought of processing that way. For example, I've got this. This new little girl that is just delightful. And when I saw her spy report, which looks at her 12 ways of processing, I fell in love with her before I even met her. So when I met her, I was like, I have been so excited to meet you because you. The way you make sense of the world is fascinating, and I think it's so cool. This is a little kid that loves.

Darius: How old is she?

Erica: I would guess she's about 10. But she loves to dance, she loves to act, she loves to sing. But, yeah, really struggles in school. And it just. I've got a couple of these new students that are just not traditional learners at all. At all. Like, their auditory and visual is, like, low, and the things that are kind of atypical are really high, like the movement and the, you know, all the things that don't necessarily get accommodated in the higher grades.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: You know, so it's. And in this particular student was. Is really struggling with math. And of course, whenever a student struggles with math, the first thing people do is break things down into a sequence. That's just like a natural thing that most math teachers will do. And that's her least favorite way of processing. Doesn't like sequential processing at all. And the parents are like, how can we possibly. What are you talking about? How can we do this?

00:05:00

Erica: What you've got to do is you've got to wrap the sequence in a dance routine or in a rap or in a song. We're getting to the sequence, but we're doing it in a creative way that's going to be fun and exciting and memorable for her.

Darius: So how many adults versus children, what's your split proportionally, would you guess at roughly? Is it 50? 50?

Erica: It's. I would just say I'm really spread across the ages anywhere right now. I mean, I've worked with.

Darius: No, right now.

Erica: Right now, I would say my. My split is 10 years old to 45.

Darius: Right.

Erica: And. And it's just a little bit all across those ages.

Darius: Oh, really? Okay.

Erica: Yeah. I've got kids 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20s.

Darius: Okay.

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: So you got any going through university right now?

Erica: Yeah, yeah.

Darius: Right. And where are you in America in the university cycle?

Erica: When you say, where am I in the University cycle.

Darius: Are they going back in. In the UK, for example? They're just going back to university right now. Is that same?

Erica: Oh, I see. Yeah, it is same. Same here. Yeah.

Darius: You know, isn't it interesting? I've always found September to be the start of a year for me in all sorts of interesting ways. I often find I end up setting major goals for life in September rather than January. It's like September seems to be. If I look back through all my journals that I've written, I've written journals here on my shelves for the last 30 years often. And the way I do journaling, by the way, anyone who's always thought I should journal, I got unlocked journaling unlocked for me. When someone says, you don't need to journal every day, you just journal whenever you think, oh, that's an interesting idea, I should write down. And then it's like, oh, it might even be, oh, I've got a meeting or a wee note about something. And it could just be your life in a. In a notebook and messages to yourself and things like that. Rather than Dear Diary yesterday, I did such and such or whatever. Anyway, that was a big unlock for me. And the point is, I realized looking back through the journals in September, often I'm just right, I'm going to think through, where am I going in my life next? I don't know what it is, but often that's. That's the case.

Erica: Yeah. Well, and it was for my whole schooling as a child. And then, of course, going into this career of education, September's always the big month. And. And you know, it's funny because there's a part of me that looks forward to a time in my life which may never happen, where September doesn't have to be so busy. And I can really enjoy the fall because I really love the fall weather, but I never really get to experience the fall because I'm always so busy. It just seems that it just flies by. And yeah, I'd love to go slowly through the month of September. That would be lovely. Someday, hopefully for a good reason and not a bad reason.

Darius: Yes, yes. So what have been your sort of executive function insights over the last month? I'd really love to hear what kind of things have really popped for you and are alive for you right now.

Erica: A lot of it is helping each student find a system that works for them for recording their assignments. Because we're just in this awkward stage right now where some people are using paper planners, some people are going online, some people are using apps, some are just not using anything because their teachers put it all online. And then same with the teachers, they're kind of navigating all of these various systems and it's just a really awkward time. And unfortunately a lot of students are struggling, particularly if the teachers are using multi multiple platforms and they're not all using the cons, a consistent one. It really puts an enormous strain on the students. So trying to help them to navigate that and finding what is the right tool for them for their particular situation because it's not always the same. You know that I love Shovel, which is in a way an app that organizes all of your classes and, and syllabi and can really serve as an outstanding planner. Ideally, if it works with one of the platforms that your school is using, if they're using one consistent platform, because you can link it up with the platform and then it kind of downloads everything into Shovel and

00:10:00

Erica: then, yeah, it works really well.

Darius: You know what you've made me think about is, yeah, this whole thing about having a system that you own is so important that you just say, this is my system, I'm going to take ownership of it rather than, oh, this is the system, I'm being compelled to do. So really, you're being proactive about stitching a system together or bolting a system together. It's like plumbing, isn't it? So I've just been going through the executorship of my father, and it's been quite hard and what I've ended up doing is going to Google. I suppose the biggest thing for me over the last month with executive function has been really using the Google Docs. It's really weird, you know how I'm a big fan of Apple Notes and so on, you know, but once you start working with a team, Apple Notes becomes really quite limiting.

Erica: It's very personal, right?

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And you want it to maintain that sense of safety and personal and so it's really good for you personally. But you're right, if you need to have a team, then it gets a little, little.

Darius: The Apple ecosystem is not designed for teams and groups of people for sharing. It's just not designed.

Erica: Trello is better at that even. WhatsApp. Yes, useful.

Darius: So what I've realized is how important hyperlinks are, how important hyperlinks are like.

Erica: And where are you saving all those links? Are you saving those in Google Drive?

Darius: Yes. So what's happening is we just decided. We were getting so stressed, me and my sister, where all this information, all these emails all these documents, everything. We're like, gosh, we've got to be able to make sense of it. And I've been doing this with some clients where he was like saying, we didn't have a project manager for a photo shoot of my clients. And, and, and I was saying, well, what. What would you have really wanted I could really have done with one place where everything went. And we talked about Apple Notes and we, if we. You could create like a wiki, we called it a wiki, or a timeline of the project. So if you could have a document, timeline, document, and all it does is messages to yourself about what you just did with a link to that document or a link to ChatGPT chat or a copy and paste of some text. And you go through it and what ends up happening, it becomes this repository of everything. And instead of telling people to go to this doc, they all realize we just go to this one doc where the new timeline is going. And you end up realizing having one doc with one timeline and every link connected to every folder that you've done and multiple connections. Sometimes you go, I know I can. Could find it there. Because instead of looking at a sort of a list of confusing, rearranging timelines, documents and folders that you can't remember the order you decided on, that was a bit random and so forth, you can just look at this through the timeline. You go, I remember it was above that picture, and it was two, two meetings ago.

Erica: So where are you creating this timeline?

Darius: In a Google Doc.

Erica: In a Google Doc.

Darius: So we just create a dad's estate timeline in a Google Doc and that's it. One Google Doc with one Google Drive folder. And we just link to all the notes, and it's been so great, interesting.

Erica: And I also. One thing I've been doing with combining Google Docs with Google Drive, so for a lot of my students, again, not all of them, because I really want them, I give them the menu and then they get to pick what resonates with them the most. But what's lovely about Google, the Google Suite, is that you can access a lot of things. So even if you're in Google Docs, you can, in the margin, you can access so many different things. You can access your Google keep, you can access your Google Calendar, you can access your checklists, you know, and so it's nice that you have that kind of way of not having to open another tab to be able to navigate across them. But what I've noticed is that in Kim CERISE who we sometimes podcast when you're not available on this very podcast, really. She pointed out something really interesting. I love what she said. And it really stuck with me. She said what I get a lot of my students to do is I tell them how important it is that they have to label all of their Google Docs and that. And she says they. They don't really buy it. And then she says, what I do is I tell them to go into their Google Docs and search for un. What is it called when you do not label something? You don't give a Google Doc a name. It just calls it unlabeled. Maybe it's unlabeled.

00:15:00

Erica: It's un something.

Darius: Oh, yeah, yeah. Untitled.

Erica: Untitled. That's it. That's it. Untitled. She says, I want you to do a search for untitled. And then they get hundreds of documents, and then they're like, oh, I get it. So that really triggered me. And I thought, that's really important, and that's a problem that needs to be solved. So actually, what I'm doing with a lot of my students this year when I sense that this is something that they need, is I'm teaching them to go into Google Drive, create folders for each of their classes. So I did this yesterday with one of my students. We start with the number eight, because numbers come before letters, so it will come right at the top. And she's going into eighth grade, so we put eight English, and then her courses are already color coded by her folder. So we use the same colors. And she creates a folder that says eight English and then eight social studies and then eight science and so forth. And they're all color coded because again, it starts with a number, it'll show up at the very, very top. So all of these folders are beautifully color coded. And then I teach them to go over to Google Docs and like, this is how simple it is.

Darius: Can I stop you for a moment? You can change the color of the file the folder to blue, yellow, green. Is that you just right click and change it? Yeah.

Erica: So if you have a create a folder, you go to drive, you hit new, and then you do new folder. And then there are three dots at the end of the line. If you click the three dots, you can go to one that says organize. So you wouldn't necessarily think that why would organize. Give me the colors. But that's the word they use. So when you hit organize, it then gives you a choice of, let me see, I would have to actually pull a folder Up, I would guess probably 10 different colors.

Darius: Wow.

Erica: And so then you can, you can. You can color code them.

Darius: Oh, that's so useful.

Erica: Oh, it's fantastic. So then what you do is you go into Google Docs. As soon as you create a new document, you label it. So it doesn't say that's what it was. It is Untitled Document. So you go into Untitled Document, you label it first. And if you want to, I say to them, if you want to, you can just simply put the date there. Because if you're going to be putting it into a folder anyway, then what you're doing is you're creating the sequence.

Darius: Yeah. Have you noticed that if you just click into the Untitled at the top of the doc, it will do it for you, your title, and pastes it.

Erica: In there for you if you titled your document.

Darius: But if you titled your document, it takes the first sentence and puts it in whatever that first sentence is. So I find that really valuable how you title the document and then copying that in automatically into the title.

Erica: So you can. So let's say yes as soon as it's titled. Now, if I want to put it into one of those folders, you hit file, and about halfway down, let's see, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 down, there's one that says Move.

Darius: Oh, yeah, I hit Move. Yeah.

Erica: And all of the folders come up and you can just click on what folder? Now, because we put a number first, it's going to be ahead of all the letters. And so it'll be. It'll come right up as the first ones. And they're all color coded.

Darius: So I'll tell you. I'll tell you what I would do in that scenario. Just for myself and a client, I would say, okay, we've created this new system. Let's imagine you've got amnesia, okay. And you cannot remember the system. Let's just pretend you have to come back. And every single time you come back, you're going to have amnesia. But you know that there's one document at the top, this blue title, which is Master Document or whatever. Timeline, Filing Timeline. You click on it, it opens up, and that's your document. That explains Darius. You've decided to do your folders with an eight, and you did it here. And here's one of them. And you decided that you would color code it. And here's a screenshot.

Erica: Oh, I see. So you're creating like a master logic of your system.

Darius: That's right.

Erica: It's like a manual yeah, and you're.

Darius: Basically, you're creating an on the hoof manual for yourself and that's incredibly valuable in the long term. On. So basically my philosophy now has emerged in that every project that you start has to have one document that becomes the project manual.

Erica: Okay, well, and we did that for our podcast now, didn't we? We did this one document. What made that work so well and I didn't know about this. And when I think you even, you might have been the one that taught me about this.

Darius: Yeah. Are you going to say the content thing at the side and the headings and so on?

Erica: Yeah, that's right. So what you can do is on the left hand

00:20:00

Erica: side of a document you can open up. It's almost like a table of contents. Now it won't exist unless you create headings.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: So you can turn right now everything is set to normal text and there's a little dropdown next to it, but if you hit the drop down, you'll see that you have title, subtitle, heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, heading 4, heading 5. And then it gives you other options. So you can actually start to organize your information by using titles, subtitles, the headings. And then it creates that infrastructure on the left-hand side, which is almost like an outline.

Darius: Clickable outline, which is the most important thing.

Erica: Yes, a clickable outline. So you can click on any of those titles or heading one or heading two, for example, and it takes you to that part of the document.

Darius: Yes, yes. It's brilliant.

Erica: So, so that's essentially what you're doing with your sister, is that correct?

Darius: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I had to teach her this, and she was like, oh my goodness, this is great. And so we intentionally use heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, for different kind of priorities of things. And the other thing that's emerged is how important shortcuts have become to me. Like command option 2 is a heading 2, command option 3 is a heading 3. And those shortcuts have become very valuable for me in using Google Docs. The other shortcut that's become really useful is command K. Okay. Now command K basically is a shortcut to attach a link. So if you do command K, it opens up the link. And the interesting thing is you can link to your recent.

Erica: That's where you insert a link.

Darius: That's right, yes. So let's say you selected a word, of course.

Erica: And you know, that's the crazy thing about it is you can go to insert link, and right next to it, it says command K. Yes, that's right. It's right there. So if you, if you want to find shortcuts, they're just listed there. Just look at them.

Darius: Just look at them. And if you're like me and you've got really bad automaticity and it takes you forever to pick up good habits, then you forget it's Command K but so you realize there's a drop down, but then they've left that little breadcrumb for me for you in gray beside it. And you, oh yeah, Command K, I'll try it again and try it again. And then you start using it. You go, oh, this is really valuable. I'll keep learning it. And so I highly recommend Command K to insert link. But the beauty of what Google has done is you can insert a link to another section in the document.

Erica: I did not know that.

Darius: Isn't that amazing? You can type in it. So it gives you a little search bar. So you can paste the link, or you can search, and it gives you your most recent drop down of your most recent folders or topics titles. And you type in maybe you said, what was it? 8 Biology. And you type in 8 Biology. And it was maybe show you 8 Biology folder, but it might show you 8.2 Biology lecture. Do you know what I mean?

Erica: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Darius: And you would click on that. Or it might show you 8 Biology as a title within your document up above where you said, oh, always title your titles like 8 Biology. And you link back to that so you can go up and down instantly within the documents. Crazy. So, okay, that was a bit of a rabbit run.

Erica: That's really fun.

Darius: But from an example, I hope we.

Erica: Didn’t lose people on this because.

Darius: I know, I know, but I think what, what? I, I don't think we will lose people on that because if they're anything like us, they will start realizing, gosh, actually I am trying to get a hold of my executive functions and one way of doing that is by developing useful systems that really work. And often systems are about deleting complexity. And this kind of I'm going to have folders and files and documents everywhere is absolutely horrible for me. And this simplicity of always having one singular document until it becomes untenable. And that's the decision we made with the podcast, what was it, three, four years ago? You started to create multiple docs. And I was like, look, Erica, let's just do one doc until it becomes impossible. And then we think about another doc and we're still four years on thinking this one doc is doing Fine.

Erica: It's fantastic. It's just fantastic. I love it. And it's funny because I do the same thing with Canva. Canva is another one of those where you could just create a new Canva for each thing, but they now have ways of creating folders or you can actually

00:25:00

Erica: just create another page in a Canva. So for example, for doing social media, if we're doing maybe a thumbnail for all the long videos I've been, they were all my team was doing them all in separate canvas. I'm like, nope, nope, nope. One document, one. I want all of the thumbnails in one document because now you can do hundreds of pages. And let's, let's set it up so that the newest ones are first and you can even label them with the date.

Darius: Oh, that's nice. I like that. So you put the newest ones at the top, scrolling all the way to the bottom.

Erica: Yes, yes, yes. So Canva is another thing that's just really important to organize. You know, I think when we came into all of these technology tools, we were just creating for example, a document each time, but now we're discovering that actually using one document to house a whole project is the way to go. And then of course, creating these color-coded folders, amazing. In Google Drive is really key. And then there's Google Keep. So I've got some people that they're not sequential processors and a lot of this makes them uncomfortable or they get overwhelmed by the amount of content in what we were just talking about. So Google Keep is very interesting. And what I like about Google Keep for individuals that get overwhelmed is that it's a very clean and simple interface where basically you can create these little sticky notes, but again you can put them into folders. They don't call them folders.

Darius: I think they call them tags.

Erica: They don't.

Darius: Do they not call them tags? Labels.

Erica: Label. That's it. That's it. I was looking it up because I was like. Because it's just not intuitive. I would never call it a label. Why don't they just call all folders, folders?

Darius: Because they're not folders, Erica.

Erica: Because they're not folders.

Darius: Because why they called them labels is that you can have the same document in multiple labels. So it's a.

Erica: Yes, you can. Yes, you can.

Darius: So basically if you, if you created a biology document or note would be biology, but it might also be flashcard or it might also be mind map. And then sometimes you might say, I want to see all my mind maps, and you Click the Mind Map label and it shows you all the mind maps. Sometimes you just want to see biology and sometimes just want to see all your flashcards. So it allows you to file them in multiple folders, but it's not folders.

Erica: So that's why they feel like. They feel like file folders to me.

Darius: I remember reading this book where it talked about. It's a futurist book. And one of the key things he said is the difference between organizing in folders and organizing in tags is one of the most fundamental transformations of our way of processing information in the last 20 years and the reason why it affects everything. So there's different ways of organizing information. The old way is folders. The new way is tags. And the world is gradually shifting to tags.

Erica: I guess that makes sense because you can find. Because sometimes you don't know what folder you put it in where the tag. You don't really have to worry about that because it's not really in a folder, it's just tagged.

Darius: Yes, it's fascinating, this sort of tagging, this hashtag movement we had for a while and now. But this concept of keywords and tags, you're actually starting to look for keywords rather than key folders.

Erica: Right, right, right. And of course, here they call them labels. And you know what I like to do is I like to show my students and say, well, this is another option. And you have two choices. You can view everything as colorful sticky notes, and I get them to color code. Now, if it's their classes, we stick to the same color code that they had for their Google Drive folders and for their actual folders so that we've got this kind of consistency of color that history is always purple or whatever color you choose it to be. So one thing that we can do on Google keep is we can put. Use that a place to put all of your homework. So we color code all the little boxes. Then this is where they can enter in their homework that they need to do. What's nice is it has the check boxes. So as soon as it's done, you can check it off and it puts it with the line through it on. And I try to get my students to make the commitment to don't check it off when it's done, check it off when it's done and turned in. Or create

00:30:00

Erica: a separate checkbox for when it's turned in.

Darius: Yeah, yeah, I would do too do that and check it in. So both are doable.

Erica: So because I have a lot of students that get their homework Done. But they forget to turn it in.

Darius: Yes, absolutely.

Erica: Which is tragic. So if it's one of those kids, then we have to put in two checkboxes. But. So you can do it for your classes. But I also use it for creating templates for essays.

Darius: So you put a template into, onto a post it.

Erica: Onto a post it. What's great about doing something like this is by putting the template onto a post it, then all you've got to do is duplicate the post it and then you write over the template and then you don't have to get overwhelmed by remembering, oh, what are the, what's, what's the formula for a five-paragraph essay? Yeah, so, so getting my students, you know, creating some of those templates and for what I for there we create new labels. Maybe a label for 5 paragraph essay. Maybe a label for a DBQ document-based question.

Darius: Can I.

Erica: So there so many ways that you can use it. And I like it because as soon as they're done making their little checkboxes and creating their templates, if they open a Google Doc, they can just drag it right in to their Google Doc. But note this, I'm giving a special secret away. Google Keep, I think is better for writing an essay than Google Docs. And this is why you; you can move your sentences around very easily. They're right next to the checkbox, there are these six dots and if you click on it and then you drag, you can drag your, the order of sentences very, very quickly.

Darius: For someone like copy, cut and paste.

Erica: And drag, which never works well because sometimes you're on your way to go do something and then you do something else, and you lose that whole sentence and then where was that? And oh my God, it gets really confusing. So for people that tend to write in a way where they're just kind of like throwing all their thoughts down and then they have to reorganize their ideas, Google Keep is the way to write because it's very easy to change the order, order of ideas. And the other is what I, what I do for those people is we create a different one for each section of the essay, a different note, post.

Darius: It note for each section.

Erica: Right. Then let's say you were doing a research paper, and you were doing it on otter, and you wanted to have a section on reproduction, and you wanted to have a section on habitat and so forth. Each one of those would be a separate, a separate sticky note.

Darius: Right?

Erica: Right. And then that way you have somewhere to put all the information in and it's a whole approach that I. A whole color-coded approach to writing that I teach my students. But again, it all depends on the student and plenty of students I don't teach this to. It depends on how they process, if they, if color really speaks to them or they're not a sequential processor.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: Then I like to use this because you can write in a non-sequential way. When you've kind of got these master headings, you can bop between all of them. Even if your thoughts are random and they're not moving in a sequence and you're in the middle of body one and you have a great idea for body three, you can quickly navigate the different.

Darius: It kind of reminds me of a mind map, like having a canvas and chunks on the mind map and be able to move things around, but it's got a little bit more linear.

Erica: It's a, it's like a blank mind map that you can bop across.

Darius: Yeah. Can we shift the topic a little bit to AI? Because one of the reasons why, and the link with. Is one of the reasons why I'm starting to put things into Google Docs is because of AI. So I, I think that Google is skating to where the puck is going to be in terms of AI and documents and how we manage our information and processing it with AI because they've got the ecosystem, they've now got a really great model with Gemini. And I have found google Gemini 1 million context window so helpful for me to have long conversations with Gemini about key things. And it doesn't forget what it said at the beginning. And I just had this horror. I don't know if anyone else has had this horrible experience. You get to a point in the conversation where the AI starts to just kind of repeat itself and start talking in generalities and so on. You're like, what's just happened to you? You were really intelligent and, on the ball, and now you're talking weird, and you're sort of just BSing your

00:35:00

Darius: way through this. It's like you've shown up and you've not done your homework and what, what's happened is it's got to the end of its context window and people don't know about this context window thing. And it's basically, it's working memory. It's basically got, you know, some of them have got 6,000 words that they can remember and once your conversation goes past 6,000 words, it only remembers the last 6,000 words. And that's the key. Or the last 30,000 words or 64,000 words, or 120,000 words. And it's surprising how quickly you can run out of 120,000 words when you're having a conversation. And Gemini has got a 1-million-word context. And I've never got to the end of the 1-million-word context until just about an hour ago, before we met, and it was starting to. And it was a big, long conversation and it was really valuable, important about my dad's executorship and so on, legal matters and so forth. And then it started acting weird and I'm like, oh, my goodness, it's got to the end of its context window. And at that point you're in trouble because what's happened is you've got this huge body of content that's valuable to you, but it's not properly accessing it anymore.

Erica: Is it possible to ask it to look through the whole context window, condense it into a summary.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Then upload that and start a new one?

Darius: Yes, absolutely. And actually it's quite an advisable thing to do as you're going through the conversation and you kind of create a checkpoint, as it were. And while it's still got context window, because I found it's got to a point where actually, even though it's meant to have a 1 million context window, that is what it's last done sometimes. I uploaded an audio file, for example, and that just destroyed its context window and just messed everything up after it. It transcribed it, it listened to it, it gave me feedback. It was very good. But it must have used up a lot of its tokens and that became like a barrier to everything before it. And it just kind of went on this sort of loop. So I think that's what happened with me.

Erica: What about something like NoteBookLM? Because that's also another Google. It's got a pretty. I mean, it can handle books upon books.

Darius: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's even better because it's not looking back through its own chat history, it's looking back through all the documents you've loaded and relating to them.

Erica: I mean, you could. You could technically, for, say, this situation with your father, you could technically add in data from Google Docs. Right. As chunks of information. And the nice thing about using NoteBookLM is you can check or uncheck any of those chunks of information at any time.

Darius: Yeah, yeah. The fascinating thing. Okay, so we're going diverting, but I think the biggest thing useful for people who are listening in on this conversation is that when you start using Gemini, it's really easy to pull in a doc that you've already got from Google Drive. So you've got it as a doc. So let's say you've got that master doc. You can just pull that master doc in and just say, hey, look at this master doc. Tell me what you think about it, give me a summary, find me this, find me that. And it will look through the doc and pull-out certain things and so forth. So that the advantage of having a system that you own that information, you've deliberately taken it. So, for example, you might be in ChatGPT. Oh, I'm going to copy that, I'm going to put it in Google Doc. You might be in perplexity, you might be in something else, but if you start owning the information and ideas, you put it into that doc. And for example, I might be having a really good chat about my dad's executorship on a particular topic with Gemini. What do I do? I copy the Gemini link to the chat into my timeline, and I go through the timeline. Gosh, where was that Gemini chat?

Erica: Because when you go to Gemini, can you do that with ChatGPT too, or.

Darius: Yes, yes.

Erica: Where do you find those links? I don't even know about that.

Darius: So that's the key. And this whole conversation, the underpinning theme is how valuable hyperlinks are to you.

Erica: Right on.

Darius: You know how I said that at the beginning?

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: It's just a massive revelation to me in terms of executive function; how valuable hyperlinks are. Hyperlinks and labels, just hyperlinks, that one thing. If you get that into your head, how do I find a hyperlink to this chat? Like you just ask. Oh, because I know that's valuable. So the way you do it is, is you just go up into the

00:40:00

Darius: search bar at the URL bar at the top, and each chat's got its unique URL. You just copy it, you paste it into a doc, and it goes straight back to it. That's simple as that.

Erica: That's really nice because you can get to the point where you're just saying, oh, I'll, I'll find it in a search.

Darius: Yes, and you won't.

Erica: Doesn't always.

Darius: It's messy and a lot of these AI applications deliberately make it not very useful because I don't know what their thinking is in it. You look at ChatGPT, for the first year, they didn't even have a search function for their notes titles. You couldn't even search your titles for about six months to a year. So you had to kind of scroll through them because they don't want you creating a note file here, they just want you creating a new question, a new interaction. It's all about this engagement and.

Erica: But each one of those creates a new URL. Now, can I share my chat GPT URL with you?

Darius: No. Now, you can't do that because unless I had your password unique to you and your account, so it's private.

Erica: I see.

Darius: So, but what you can do is you can share the document. It creates a unique URL for in ChatGPT for someone else to look at the chat, and then they can fork it off and make it their own chat. And you can't see where they took that chat. So this whole realm of sharing documents, sharing URLs and so on, I think about it a lot because of Ivy, because we've got two versions of Ivy. One is.

Erica: And explain what Ivy is to those that don't know what it is.

Darius: Yeah, Evvy is the software that I. The company that I, I manage, I run, I founded with my wife. And basically, we're trying to solve note taking for visual thinkers, especially solving note taking for Dyslexia, with this app where basically Evie takes an audio recording of your meeting or lecture, transcribes it and turns it into a mind map in real time. And everything's synchronized and there's a hyperlink for every map. And so you can take that hyperlink and put it into a doc and say, I was thinking about this. And you have an image of the map there and you can link it to the original map, and you can open the map, edit it, and the online version.

Erica: I'm sorry to interrupt. Is it the same that you can't share it with another person because they don't have your account information?

Darius: No, it's even better because the online version of Ivy allows you to share it as a public link if you want, where people can just view it and interact with it and open it, or for comments or for edits or, you know, so you can share a map, they can look at it and they can. And they. You can do a comment map, and they can just copy it into their own and keep working on it. And the map's got hyperlinks in it, embedded in it, and images and everything else is in the map and you can move it around and so forth. Now, the point I'm going to make is we had that functionality within iVVi, we switched it off and, gosh, I found it so painful once we switched it off. And the reason we switched off was we changed some of the database infrastructure in IVI to make it work with the AI and the transcription and everything else. And it was going to be too complex to integrate the sharing function. And we said, look, that isn't essential for students right now. They just need their own notes on their own computer and on their own cloud. They don't need to share it with other people and collaborate on their own notes. They just need to get those notes safe for university. But then we created a desktop version of Ivy because we kind of needed that for offline use, you know, so that you can record in a lecture if you've not connected to the Internet and all that jazz. But they don't have hyperlinks. Do you see what I mean? They have files that are saved on your hard drive and then you're like, oh, that's really useful. But that's so 20th century. Because your kind of like, I want to link to that. I want to put hyperlink in my Google Doc or whatever. I want to share it with a friend or whatever. And that's what was a big eye opener for me. It's like, we cannot live in that world where people just go, especially students, they need to be able to hyperlink. Like older people, like you and me are kind of used to the constraints of folders on your desktop or private folders in Apple Notes and so on. But young people are kind of like, why can't I share that? Why can't I export that? Why can't I import that? I should be able to have what is called interoperability of these docs. Do you know what I mean?

Erica: Yes, I do.

Darius: That's the revelation for me how important. I mean, if he's even got a hyperlink to every branch.

Erica: So

00:45:00

Erica: bottom line is, you turned that feature back on.

Darius: I did. For the online version, yes. I didn't switch on the share version yet, but the online version has got that feature where you've got a link to every map and you've got a link to every branch.

Erica: That's really cool.

Darius: And how about this as an idea? Okay, I'm giving away all our secrets, but we've got this idea where I would like to see all my notes, mind maps. I've got them as a list down the side in our file structure. I'd like to see it as a map instantly.

Erica: You know, like a mind map of your mind maps.

Darius: Yeah, a mind map of all my files, a mind map files down the side. I can choose list view of my documents, or I can click mind Map view. And you know that table of contents you see down the side? You would see it as a map, whether it's like a half-moon map or a full sun map, circular all the way around, you can see them ordered and you click on it, and it just opens up that map. You can click on that and open up that map and you can remember your maps positionally by the color of the branch and images on the branch and things like that. And that becomes like a map of all of your information, literally that you just click into the map. Now what I really want, obviously you can create that in iVVi right now already because of the hyperlink function. You just create a mind map. You hyperlink it to the other maps. So we can do that already. But what I really want is when someone creates a map and they put it into a folder, okay. And they click on that folder, and it shows all of the notes that folder should create a folder map automatically of everything in. You don't need to add all the hyperlinks, you don't need to create a map, it's just auto generated. These are the maps in the order that you wanted in the timeline, et cetera.

Erica: That makes me think of NoteBookLM where you toss in all of your data, so to speak, all of your articles, all of your videos, all of your audios, and then it creates this overall summary. And, and it will actually create mind maps. Nothing like ivy but static mind maps.

Darius: Which is Fantastic to see NoteBookLM bringing introducing that concept to so many people that have never heard of mind maps or seen mind maps.

Erica: And the fun thing about their mind maps too is that when you take it to the end and you click on it because there's nothing else to open, it takes you right into the document where that little nugget was found.

Darius: Oh, really? Yeah. That's good. Okay.

Erica: Yeah. Now, now they're doing split screens too.

Darius: Okay.

Erica: You can go between the mind map and the resource.

Darius: So you're using mind map as a, like a table of contents of the, of the topics and resources.

Erica: It makes me think of like. Yes, exactly. But it's, it's like it's spatial.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: It feels like a little map to a mole residence.

Darius: Yes, yes, absolutely. And that's where I want to be and I want Evvy to create those folder structures visually as well as linearly.

Erica: Love that. Well, yeah, because I love the fact that you honor both the sequential and the simultaneous processor. And that was one of the things that I used to love about. There used to be a mind mapping tool that doesn't really exist anymore. Do you know which one I'm talking about?

Darius: Is it inspiration?

Erica: Inspiration, yeah. That was so sad. It was. They were like the best mind mapping program. And then a company opened it and it just kind of petered out. But.

Darius: Well, actually to be. I know the guy who's bought it, A guy in the UK has bought it and it's not Peter Doubt, you know.

Erica: Oh, good. Is it coming back?

Darius: He's a competitor and it's back. It's there.

Erica: But I love their feature of how you could just press a button and turn an outline into a mind map. Or a mind map.

Darius: That's right. That.

Erica: That was. That was my. My number one favorite feature that they had.

Darius: We're going to do that in Ivy a lot. And so what we want to do is I'd like a mind map to sort of how a mind map can be circular and have lots of images and be very dynamic.

Erica: Yes, it can, it can. You can organize the structure in multiple.

Darius: Ways and then you can take exactly the same mind map and just say, right, let's make this a little bit more organized. Maybe a half-moon mind map. And then it's more. A little bit more linear.

Erica: Or a tree.

Darius: Yeah. And let's tone down the images so they're smaller and prioritize the words and. And then let's make it actually like a table of content list and an actual outline. Do you know what I mean?

Erica: You can, you can embed an outline in a map.

Darius: Absolutely. And so all you do within Ivy.

00:50:00

Darius: This is our plan. This is what's going to happen, is you click the view function, and you just change what view you have and it's the same information and it just shifts the view. And you can create your preferred view of the map and the same information. Because sometimes, even if you are a very creative person, you're kind of like, I don't need lots of creative ideas and stimulation. I need some inhibitory control here. I need some real focus. And so you need to change the view. So it really creates a very tight, focused, linear view. Even if you are a creative person that tends to process information much more visually, like me. So sometimes you need sequential. Do you know what I mean?

Erica: Well, and this is a very fascinating concept, which is there are ways of organizing for my dyslexic brain sequentially that don't work. And there are other sequential strategies that do work. And this is tying off exactly what you're talking about. For example, if words were written or stories were written from top to bottom instead of left to right. You following what I'm saying? So instead of scanning text from the left to the right and then down to the next row, left, right, left, right. If words were written with, say, the dog ran down the road, we're not reading from left to right, we're reading down the dog.

Darius: So it would be the dog ran down the road just as a column.

Erica: As a column, exactly. And there's been research done on this. There would be many fewer dyslexics. So part of what doesn't work for dyslexic is going from left to right. And I can remember as a child, if I had a page to read, I started at the bottom and went from the bottom to the top, from the right to the left. Right. And to this day, if I have a sequence to go through, I'm halfway through and I'm like, I can't go any farther. I have to stop, start at the bottom, and work my way back up. Because I just can't. Too much of a left to right is. Just doesn't work for me. So what you're doing with the mind maps is you can reorganize a mind map from top to bottom instead of left to right. And you can even.

Darius: So hold on a minute, I'm processing that.

Erica: So the main idea is on the top.

Darius: Okay. The main idea starts at the top, and it goes down to the bottom.

Erica: And then it goes down, and it might fan out like a tree as you're going.

Darius: Like roots of a tree going out.

Erica: Right. So it could. But you could take that same thing and you could turn it on its side. And the main idea could be on the left, and it could fan out.

Darius: To the right, which is the way our maps work. By default, they start on the left and they fan out to the right.

Erica: But technically, you could. You could reorganize. Like, that doesn't work for me nearly as better. As nearly as well as top to bottom. And then there are those people that like to go, well, no, no.

Darius: Okay.

Erica: Right to left.

Darius: Yeah, yeah. So at the moment, we've got a node. So traditional mind maps start with the center in the middle, and they go in a clockwise order from the top, you know, in a clockwise order. What we've done is the ivy maps, we've kind of shifted that emphasis and we moved the nodes to the left, and then we've created like a half mind map. So it's still going from top to bottom, but in a half-moon shape, as it were. And so you're not going past the 6 o' clock and going back up to 12. Because we found a lot of people with dyslexia found that transition really quite hard to just go back up the other half. It is very satisfying seeing the whole thing but sometimes going through it. That transition from 6 to 7 to 8 can be really quite problematic in terms of processing it. So we've stuck with the half moon right now, working from the top to the bottom and from the left to the right. Now, in that scenario, what do you think would be better for you?

Erica: And this is something that inspiration used to do. It would let you pick how you wanted to organize your mind. Or you could just change. Just press a button and change the order, which is what you were just kind of talking about. And I like that idea because I think there are some people that want to have a central idea, and they want to spin around the circle. There's some people that just want to keep the central idea to the left or to the top or even at the bottom.

Darius: Yeah, at the bottom.

Erica: The bottom is fascinating because if you're more detail oriented, okay. You want to see the details all fanned out along the top and allow it to be like a funnel that comes down to the main idea.

Darius: Oh, so the bottom becomes the main idea, and all the details are at the top.

Erica: Yeah, it's just another way of processing. And I think that different people really resonate

00:55:00

Erica: with different ways. And this is how I teach my kids to write. I evaluate how do you think. Do you think from main ideas to details or do you think from details to main ideas? It's almost like a distinction between qualitative and quantitative assessment.

Darius: Yes, that's right.

Erica: You know what I mean? Quantitative is where you're moving more from the left to the right. And qualitative is you let the themes emerge from the data. Right. But people think just they think the way they make sense of the world is very different from one another. And if you can honor the way they think. Which is why, again, why I like to teach kids to use Google Keep to write. Because if they don't think linearly, then they can bop around, and they don't lose their valuable ideas. So again, it goes back to paying attention, how people process. But also the second you allow people the option to change the view, you're also teaching them to be more cognitively flexible, and they might actually discover a new view that works better for them. And they could have this whole revelation of like, I never thought of processing that way. And that actually Works better for me. Oh my God. I love the main idea on the bottom, and the details are on the top because that's, that feels more intuitive to me. But I think there's, there's something about that and I, and I love that you are going down this, down this pathway of allowing people to alter the structure of the mind map, because I think it really does, I think it really does help us to be more cognitively flexible, which is such a vital, a vital executive functioning skill that helps us to solve problems.

Darius: So one of the things that, as an AI. Oh, by the way, when is this podcast going to be released? I'm just going to mention something that might be embargoed.

Erica: Well, we just released one yesterday, so it will be the next one. So it's going to be somewhere around there.

Darius: Breaking news. We just got accepted by Edinburgh University into their AI accelerator. Now, America is number one for AI in the world, China's number two, and the U.K. is actually number three, surprisingly. And Edinburgh University is one of the top AI universities in the country in, in the U.K. and so they've accepted our company Ivy, as one of the 12 selected companies for their accelerator for the next year. Now, why is that relevant? Yes. So I'm really thinking about the whole AI side of things. If he is AI powered, obviously, is it. Maybe it's not obvious, actually, it's obvious to me, but that whole process of listening to an audio recording, transcribing it, turning into a mind map, that's using multiple different models to achieve that. And in the future, AVI will also create an image for you in the center of the map with other images and help you create drawings and infographics and diagrams and help you write, draw, do kind of visual mind mapping, flashcards and all that kind of stuff. So we're thinking about AI a lot. And one of the other secrets I suppose I should share, I'll share is that I think the way AI is going to work within interfaces, like anything, is people will expect that they can speak to the interface of software, and it will change. So they will look at Google keep or whatever and they'll go, oh, I really want that post it to be ready. And it'll turn red.

Erica: Oh, be.

Darius: So rather than click, click, click right and then they'll say, oh, the background of that. If this page is too bright for me, it needs to be off white, please. And it just turns it off white.

Erica: That's going to be so accommodating for people that have, have just these sensitivities.

Darius: What’s going to happen is everything that used to be three clicks away in a drop-down menu where someone says, oh yeah, we've got those accessibility features, you need to click on Settings and then you need to click on sub settings and then you need to click on sub. Sub Settings. And in that long list on the third scroll down, you'll see that little button there. And you click that on and obviously that'll make it work for you. Oh, and, and once I do it once, that'll be it. No, no, no, you need to do that every time. And you're like, what the heck?

Erica: Yeah, yeah.

Darius: And so you never use it, but they're like, oh, we have accessibility features for everyone and all the rest of.

Erica: It now, but they're not accessible accessibilities.

Darius: That's right. So what I think is going to happen is, and we're going to get ready for it within Ivy

01:00:00

Darius: is we will create like little adjustability dials. Okay. That allows you to adjust everything in the user interface. I would like the headline to be much thicker and those icons to be really much bigger than. Because I find it really hard to see them and read them and so on. Or I would like those icons to be closer, or those icons move them along a bit that they just. It doesn't. I like.

Erica: So what you, what you're talking about is, is the, the voice control of just being able to say what you want instead of having to click, click.

Darius: That's right.

Erica: Click, click, click, click. Yeah, it, it will reach full reorganize. That will keep up with your thoughts instead of you having to kind of go down these rabbit holes which, which interrupt the, the, the productivity flow and.

Darius: So people will start expecting, oh, I want my, this map to start from. I want the main idea to be at the bottom and all the little ideas to be at the top. And, and if he goes. And I'm not saying this is what Ivy does right now. Okay. But this is what I'm dreaming of. But as an example, if he would then drop it down to the bottom and put the main ideas at the top and you go, oh, right, yeah, okay, well, but I don't want all the words written up the way. I can't really read them. I have to turn my head sideways. What do I do about that, Evie? And, and if he will go, oh, do you want them angled a bit like this? Oh, that's quite good. Yes. Oh, no, actually I don't want them angled the same way. I want them kind of fanned Out. But all the words on the left-hand side to be the right way around, because they're that way and that way. But the thing is, our software can't do that right now because the developers can. But the developers don't think that anyone's ever going to go into settings and adjust this, tweak and that control and readjust that and so on, because very few people ever do. And they're not really going to use it. It's not worth doing. But you can create this behind the scenes, fourth level down, clicks, which is one control dashboard where you can turn all these knobs and do X, Y and Z. If you're an AI who understands all of that and you can just talk to it. So you talk to ChatGPT or Google Gemini and you go, by the way, I'm in the interface here and I really want you to change it so that it does this, that and the next thing and you, you change the size of this and the shape of that and the way this works and the way that works and you create your own customized dashboard of exactly what you want.

Erica: Yeah, we're definitely moving there.

Darius: So we started all of this from what did we discover about executive functions in the last month? And what do you think's really emerged? Is this hyperlink, how important getting everything is into a document and finding its hyperlink?

Erica: I would say yeah, but it's more than just the hyperlink. It's about finding your system. And within those systems. We are proponents of hyperlinks and categorizing whether it is folders or what was it that they called them on Google?

Darius: Labels.

Erica: Labels. Yeah, our tags. Right, yeah. That there, there really is some value to using the, all of those to help you to be able to quickly access the information that you want.

Darius: So, Erica, it's been fantastic. I'm loving this. We're going to be doing this on a monthly basis, aren't we, where we're going to touch base, review what we've really learned from executive functions in the last month, or maybe more frequently, but we'll definitely try and do this every cup, every month to see how it's going and what's been happening. It's been great. I've learned so much and I think we've learned so much from each other. And I hope you as podcast listeners have learned a lot as well.

Erica: And if you have thoughts, if you, if you, if you have another idea that riffs off of what we were talking about, please reach out to us because we're, we're always open to new and thoughtful.

Darius: How do they do that?

Erica: Looking at things.

Darius: How do they do that? Do. Do you publish your email? I'll tell people my email. My email is darius@ivvi.app. If you're listening to this podcast, I would love to hear from you. How can people contact you?

Erica: I've got lots of different emails and, and it's always hard to know which one to share. But probably the, the simplest one is just my Google one, which is ericamwarren@gmail.com.

01:05:00

Darius: Old school. Both of us. Just email us. Chat to us. The funny thing about doing a podcast is you don't get a lot of audience interaction, but when you do, it's from the most thoughtful people, because they've really listened a lot. They understand where you're coming from. So if you're hearing this, we want to hear from you.

Erica: Yeah. And we appreciate. It's always fun.

Darius: Yeah. So until next time.

Erica: Until next time.

Erica: Bye for now. Sponsored by the Executive Functions Coaching and Study Strategies Certification course, a comprehensive training for educators, coaches and parents.

Darius: Sponsored by iVVi. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. It's ideal for students and managers with dyslexia or adhd. Try iVVi for free now at Ivy App. That's iVVi App. Thank you for joining us at the Executive Function Brain Trainer podcast.

Erica: Check out our show notes for links and resources and follow us on social media.

01:06:25

Episode 94 Organizing Your System and Executive Functions

Listen:

Watch/Listen on YouTube:

Links:

Brought to you by:

Transcript