Hey y'all!

On the last email I promised to show you how documenting your knowledge helps you make the most of your time, business, and life. Today’s that day.

The responses on the last email were really powerful. I appreciate each of you for sharing how that newsletter made you think about how you’re spending your time and I’m really glad it resonated as much as it did.

I got a reply from a reader that fits perfectly into this letter that made me realize something I didn’t catch before so that’s where I’ll start.

Most of us aren’t just talking instead of doing. We’re hoarding instead of creating.

Today I want to show you the truth behind your digital hoarding and consumption habits, and why it’s secretly bankrupting you.

But before we dive into that, here's a quick mention from today's newsletter sponsor Superhuman AI:

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Now back to our regularly scheduled newsletter:

Your Phone Is a Digital Graveyard

Quick question: How many screenshots do you have right now? Tabs open? Videos saved for later?

If you’re like most people, it’s 200-2,000. Screenshots of quotes, business ideas, course outlines you “saved for later.”

Now Here’s the thing about “later”, it’s a place that doesn’t exist.

And I don't mean "doesn't exist" like Happy Gilmore's "Happy Place" where it fuels you and brings peace to your life in moments of chaos:

I mean "doesn't exist" in more of the exact OPPOSITE way: it never actually comes to fruition, creating hell and chaos in your mind and on your devices.

Happy Gilmore actually married his dream gal. You? Your camera roll has become where good ideas go to die.

That productivity thread from 6 months ago? You’ll never look at it again.

That business idea from 2am? Lost between grocery photos and memes.

Let’s do some brutal math:

• 500 screenshots or quick notes × 30 seconds each = 4+ hours collecting
• Time spent organizing: 0 minutes
• Time spent reviewing: 0 minutes
• Time spent acting: 0 minutes
• Value created: $0

This doesn’t even include time spent LOOKING for those things in the mess.

You’re not building a second brain. You’re building a digital landfill.

The Productivity Theater Trap

Another example of this that I think of a lot is my brother who told me once: “I have 57 browser tabs open across 3 devices. I’m afraid to close them because I might lose something important.”

57 tabs??!!! I wish I could have stayed shocked but when I went and checked my own device… I realized that was me too.

That’s not organization, that’s overwhelm, it’s paralysis.

Here’s what those tabs really represent:

Each open tab is an unfinished thought. A decision deferred. A commitment made to your future self that you’ll never keep.

Your brain knows this. That’s why you feel anxious every time you see that digital crowd of tabs or the graveyard of screenshots staring at you. Your subconscious is trying to track 127 different threads of partial attention or why they were saved in the first place.

No wonder you can’t focus.

Each of these things is like having someone tap you on the shoulder every few seconds saying “Hey, don’t forget about me!” Except it’s not every few seconds. It’s constant.

Take that and combine it with the reality that our phones have been turned into a casino where every click and scroll promises the jackpot of perfect information and we have a real issue.

The issue of course being that the house always wins. (The house of course being that dirty little D word… distraction.)

Meanwhile, someone else with 3 focused tabs is building the business you’re researching.

The Hidden Cost of Digital Hoarding

Every piece of unused information represents an abandoned version of your future self.

That newsletter screenshot? That was Future You with a successful email list.
That freelance article? That was Future You who quit their day job.

Your digital collection isn’t just clutter. It’s a museum of all the people you never became.

The cycle usually looks something like this:

1. Find interesting information
2. Save it “for later”
3. Feel productive (dopamine hit)
4. Never review or act on it
5. Feel overwhelmed by the pile
6. Start new “system” to organize chaos
7. Repeat until you hate yourself

This is what I call “productivity theater”, the performance of being organized without actually organizing anything meaningful and it was one of the first traps I got caught into whenever I started trying to manage and organize my ideas, stories, work, etc. in one place.

The cruel irony? You’re procrastinating on your life by organizing your procrastination.

You’ve convinced yourself that building the perfect system IS the work. But building systems isn’t progress, it’s preparation for progress.

The person you want to be isn’t hiding in your next productivity setup. They’re hiding behind your fear of finishing things imperfectly.

It’s like I said in a call the other day with one of the members of our community when she asked about choosing between two product ideas: “You CAN make money doing ANYTHING. But you CAN’T make money doing EVERYTHING”.

You have to choose one thing and do that thing, whatever it takes.

The gap between who you are and who you want to be isn’t closed by information. It’s closed by commitment.

Nike doesn’t sell billions of dollars worth of running shoes because the shoes make you faster. They sell them because when you lace up $120 sneakers, you’re more likely to actually go for that run. The investment creates the commitment. The commitment creates the identity shift and identity shift creates the customer loyalty and product effectiveness.

The real problem isn’t finding the right system. It’s sticking with any system long enough to see results.

This is why most creators stay stuck in the collection phase. They’re waiting for the perfect method instead of committing to an imperfect one. They’re looking for the system that won’t require discipline, when what they actually need is a system that builds discipline through use.

Your ideas don’t need a better container. They need a committed creator.

What Great Creators Actually Do

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advising AGAINST systems. I LOVE that we’re lucky enough to live in an age with tools that help make life and work easier, but before we can use them well we need to recognize that the tool can only create leverage from the work we’re already doing, it can’t do the work for us.

Successful creators capture their thinking, connect their ideas, and create from accumulated insights.

Marcus Aurelius filled journals with personal reflections that became “Meditations”, one of the most influential books ever written. Imagine if he could have searched those thoughts instantly, linked related ideas across years, and never lost a single insight.

Charles Darwin documented every observation during his voyage, then spent decades connecting those scattered notes into evolutionary theory. His breakthrough came from seeing patterns across thousands of entries. Imagine if he could have tagged, filtered, and cross-referenced those observations in seconds instead of years.

Virginia Woolf turned her diary entries into profound insights about the human experience. But think about how many brilliant thoughts she lost to faded ink, torn pages, and the physical limits of paper.

These creators succeeded DESPITE their tools, not because of them.

They had to manually do many things we can now do easier then ever: capturing thoughts, organizing insights, connecting ideas across time, and retrieving exactly what we need when we need it.

Tools should enhance our work, not be confused for the work itself.

The question isn’t whether to use modern tools. It’s whether you’ll use them to multiply your creative output or just create prettier digital graveyards.

The Real Cost of not actually doing the thing

Every unfinished digital project is a promise you broke to yourself.

That overwhelm when you sit down to work? That’s not messiness. That’s shame. Your brain knows you’re running in place.

But their is hope: You’re collecting all this because you care about growth. You’re not lazy, you’re just trapped in a consumption pattern designed to keep you consuming instead of creating.

And patterns can be broken.

I know because I broke mine and am constantly developing my own bias towards output.

That’s the main lesson here, digital creators have a bias toward output. Instead of saving 47 articles about writing, they write one article.

Even if it’s just writing and creating more for just yourself. Private expression is STILL creativity and it’s still valuable.

So for the time being this is the rule:

“Can I act on this in 48 hours?” If no, let it go.

Most “important” information can be Googled later. But insights from YOUR experience? Those can’t be Googled. Those have to be documented.

From Digital Hoarding to Digital Wealth

Successful one-person businesses are built on specific knowledge that can’t be taught in school.

Naval Ravikant’s wealth formula is one of my favorite and what I see as the most accurate to the process:

Specific Knowledge + Leverage + Accountability = Money

Naval Ravikant calls this the secret to wealth creation. You can’t get rich doing things that can be easily replicated or taught to anyone. But you CAN get rich by documenting and systematizing your unique insights, experiences, and perspectives.

Examples:

• Joe Rogan: Documented conversations → $100M podcast empire
• Taylor Swift: Personal experiences → A Billion dollars worth of records
• James Clear: Habit experiments → Atomic Habits

They captured their specific knowledge and turned it into scalable products.

Your Experience IS Your Product

Every conversation you have contains potential content. Every book you read has insights that could become a thread, newsletter, or course module. You were right to save these things because every problem you solve could help someone else, and they’ll pay for that help.

But only if you capture it in a way that makes it USEFUL. Capturing and connecting ideas into something valuable.

The most successful one-person businesses follow this pattern:

1. Document everything (conversations, insights, experiments, failures)
2. Connect the dots (find patterns across different experiences)
3. Package the insights (turn patterns into content, courses, or services)
4. Scale through systems (automate delivery while maintaining personal touch)

But why does this work so well?

The Compound Interest of Ideas

Albert Einstein supposedly called compound interest “the eighth wonder of the world.” But there’s something even more powerful then just applying this to money: the compound interest of documented thinking.

When you consistently capture and connect your thoughts:

• Ideas build on previous ideas (instead of starting from scratch every time)
• Patterns emerge (that you can teach to others)
• Your unique perspective becomes clear (this is your specific knowledge)
• Content creation becomes effortless (you’re drawing from accumulated insights)

This is how you escape the hamster wheel of trading time for money.

Instead of starting over with each project, each blog post, each course, you’re building on a foundation of documented experience that gets stronger over time.

THIS is how we make the most out of our limited time. We create evergreen value from our efforts and experiences.

As I said before, you get roughly 4,000 weeks of life (if you’re lucky).

How many will you spend organizing information you’ll never use?

Finishers optimize for completion, not collection.

Done beats perfect because done can be improved, and sold.

Consistency with an imperfect system beats perfection with an unused one.

The goal isn’t to have the best notes. The goal is to have notes that make you money.

The $5K Reality Check

Want to know if your digital collection is actually valuable? Try this:

Could you create a $5,000 service from what you’ve already captured?

Think about it. If you had to help 5 people solve a problem for $1,000 each using only the knowledge you’ve already collected, could you do it?

Most people realize they couldn’t. Despite having consumed and saved gigabytes of “valuable” information, they couldn’t confidently solve one specific problem for one specific person.

That’s not a knowledge problem. That’s a system problem.

Here’s how successful one-person businesses actually work:

You already have specific knowledge. You just haven’t organized it in a way that creates value for others.

Examples of specific knowledge hiding in your digital mess:

• Your career transitions → Course on changing industries
• Your learning experiments → Templates for skill acquisition
• Your relationship insights → Coaching on communication
• Your creative process → Content creation system
• Your productivity failures → Guide on what actually works

The person making $10K/month teaching productivity isn’t smarter than you. They just documented their experiments systematically and packaged them into something others could buy.

The One-Person Business Formula

Every successful creator follows the same pattern:

1. Document Your Experiments and Experience

• Track what you try (diet, workout, business strategy, creative process)
• Note what works and what doesn’t
• Capture the insights along the way

2. Find Your Unique Angle

• What problems have you solved that others struggle with?
• What combination of experiences makes you different?

3. Package Your Process

• Turn your documented experiments into content
• Create templates from your successful systems
• Build things from your proven methods

4. Scale Through Systems

• Automate delivery while maintaining personal touch
• Use tools to amplify your reach without losing authenticity
• Build once, sell many times

The difference between digital hoarders and digital entrepreneurs isn’t the amount of information they collect. It’s how systematically they transform that information into value for others.

But for now I leave you with one challenge:

Pick one piece of information you saved recently and do something with it today. Write one paragraph about it. Send one email about it. Record one voice memo about it. Create one thing.

Maybe it’s from the brain dump or things you wrote down after I sent out the last email, maybe it’s from the show you watched today or the memory that crossed your mind at breakfast. Just create something.

Stop collecting. Start creating.

Your future self will thank you.

Quote of the Week

My own twist on a famous Chinese proverb: “The best time to start using your ideas was when you first had them. The second best time is today.”

How can I help?

Here are our best resources to get started:

• Need some accountability to help you finish things? The Finisher's Club is for you.

Cheers,
Noah Riggs

P.S. If this email made you realize something about your own digital hoarding patterns, hit reply and tell me your number. How many screenshots? How many tabs? How many unfinished workspaces? Sometimes the first step to freedom is just admitting where you are.

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