Building a Second Brain - Vignesh Prasad

- Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 258-261 | Added on Sunday, 29 January 2023 02:23:44: It’s time to acknowledge that we can’t “use our head” to store everything we need to know and to outsource the job of remembering to intelligent machines. We have to recognize that the cognitive demands of modern life increase every year, but we’re still using the same brains as two hundred thousand years ago, when modern humans first emerged on the plains of East Africa. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 325-331 | Added on Sunday, 29 January 2023 02:31:11: When you enter the professional world, the demands on your notetaking change completely. The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need. In the professional world: It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on. No one tells you when or how your notes will be used. The “test” can come at any time and in any form. You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place. You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 333-334 | Added on Sunday, 29 January 2023 02:31:23: modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 339-340 | Added on Sunday, 29 January 2023 02:31:47: A knowledge building block is discrete. It stands on its own and has intrinsic value, but knowledge building blocks can also be combined into something much greater—a report, an argument, a proposal, a story. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 453-454 | Added on Sunday, 29 January 2023 02:37:44: This book isn’t focused on the science, but for an excellent introduction to extended cognition I recommend The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 476-478 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 13:33:16: There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 511-515 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 13:36:16: Too often when we take on a task—planning an event, designing a product, or leading an initiative—we draw only on the ideas we have access to right in that moment. I call this approach a “heavy lift”—demanding instantaneous results from our brains without the benefit of a support system. Even when we do a brainstorm, that still relies only on ideas that we can think up right now. What are the chances that the most creative, most innovative approaches will instantly be top of mind? What are the odds that the best way to move forward is one of the first ways we come up with? - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 524-532 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 13:37:35: A recent study from Princeton University found that there is a certain kind of job that is least likely to be automated by machines in coming years. Surprisingly, it wasn’t jobs that required advanced skills or years of training that were predicted to fare best. It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”5 In other words, the jobs that are most likely to stick around are those that involve promoting or defending a particular perspective. Think of a fundraising organizer sharing stories of the impact their nonprofit has made, a researcher using data to back up their interpretation of an experiment, or a project manager citing a couple of key precedents to support a decision. Our careers and businesses depend more than ever on our ability to advance a particular point of view and persuade others to adopt it as well. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 630-635 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 13:44:45: The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside. When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level. Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful. Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 670-671 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 13:46:47: Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 680-681 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 13:47:24: A common challenge for people who are curious and love to learn is that we can fall into the habit of continuously force-feeding ourselves more and more information, but never actually take the next step and apply it. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 683-687 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 13:48:57: It’s so easy to endlessly delay and postpone the experiences that would so enrich our lives. We think we’re not ready. We fear we’re not prepared. We cannot stand the thought that there is one little piece of information we’re missing that, if we had it, would make all the difference. I’m here to tell you that that is no way to live your life. Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 872-875 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 17:01:22: You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 951-952 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:31:29: The more economical you can be with the material you capture in the first place, the less time and effort your future self will have to spend organizing, distilling, and expressing it. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 955-955 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:31:59: Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me? - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 961-961 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:33:41: Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful? - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 969-969 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:34:12: Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal? - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 976-976 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:35:32: Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising? - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1001-1006 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:50:47: You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates. Just look for the signs: your eyes might widen slightly, your heart may skip a beat, your throat may go slightly dry, and your sense of time might subtly slow down as the world around you fades away. These are clues that it’s time to hit “save.” We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8 When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1014-1016 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:51:20: “Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without our conscious awareness.” If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowly quiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is telling you, the inner voice will grow stronger. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1108-1109 | Added on Monday, 30 January 2023 18:59:43: On average I capture just two notes per day—what are two ideas, insights, observations, perspectives, or lessons you’ve encountered today that you could write down right now? - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1235-1241 | Added on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 02:10:03: I eventually named this organizing system PARA,I which stands for the four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.II PARA can handle it all, regardless of your profession or field, for one reason: it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1276-1281 | Added on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 02:12:13: With the PARA system, every piece of information you want to save can be placed into one of just four categories: Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1433-1437 | Added on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 02:19:03: Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize. The true test of whether a piece of knowledge is valuable is not whether it is perfectly organized and neatly labeled, but whether it can have an impact on someone or something that matters to you. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1439-1443 | Added on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 02:19:24: This is a challenging idea for a lot of people to wrap their head around. We are used to organizational systems that are static and fixed. We expect to find a strict set of rules that tells us exactly where each item goes, like the precise call numbers for books in a library. When it comes to our personal knowledge, there is no such assigned spot. We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is always changing. Sometimes we can receive one text message or email and the entire landscape of our day changes. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1487-1489 | Added on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 02:21:50: The first is that people need clear workspaces to be able to create. We cannot do our best thinking and our best work when all the “stuff” from the past is crowding and cluttering our space. That’s why that archiving step is so crucial: you’re not losing anything, and it can all be found via search, but you need to move it all out of sight and out of mind. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1490-1492 | Added on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 02:22:00: Second, I learned that creating new things is what really matters. I’d see a fire light up in people’s eyes when they reached the finish line and published that slideshow or exported that video or printed that résumé. The newfound confidence they had in themselves was unmistakable as they walked out of the store knowing they had everything they needed to move forward. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1502-1504 | Added on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 02:22:36: My mentor advised me to “move quickly and touch lightly” instead. To look for the path of least resistance and make progress in short steps. I want to give the same advice to you: don’t make organizing your Second Brain into yet another heavy obligation. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?” - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1551-1551 | Added on Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02:27:25: To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1624-1628 | Added on Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02:31:32: The most important factor in whether your notes can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful. Discoverability is an idea from information science that refers to “the degree to which a piece of content or information can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system.” - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1821-1824 | Added on Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02:41:05: Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly. To be clear, it takes skill and courage to let the details fall away. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1828-1828 | Added on Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02:41:26: Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1840-1841 | Added on Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02:42:01: Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1854-1858 | Added on Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02:43:04: The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future self—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it. This ensures that the notes you interact with most often will naturally become the most discoverable in a virtuous cycle. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 1858-1859 | Added on Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02:43:10: Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2018-2019 | Added on Thursday, 2 February 2023 11:27:32: If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2070-2073 | Added on Thursday, 2 February 2023 11:41:22: Making the shift to working in terms of Intermediate Packets unlocks several very powerful benefits. First, you’ll become interruption-proof because you are focusing only on one small packet at a time, instead of trying to load up the entire project into your mind at once. You become less vulnerable to interruptions, because you’re not trying to manage all the work-in-process in your head. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2308-2311 | Added on Thursday, 2 February 2023 11:59:57: To truly “know” something, it’s not enough to read about it in a book. Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action. Thoughts are fleeting, quickly fading as time passes. To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it. You have to get your hands dirty and apply that knowledge to a practical problem. We learn by making concrete things—before we feel ready, before we have it completely figured out, and before we know where it’s going. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2375-2377 | Added on Thursday, 2 February 2023 12:07:51: We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. I learned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine that systematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of our awareness. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2498-2502 | Added on Thursday, 2 February 2023 12:16:12: Besides his prolific works, Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.” He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2508-2516 | Added on Thursday, 2 February 2023 12:16:49: reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes: Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect. Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing. Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2677-2684 | Added on Friday, 3 February 2023 13:45:39: Chefs can never afford to stop the whole kitchen just so they can clean up. They learn to keep their workspace clean and organized in the flow of the meals they are preparing. In the kitchen, this means small habits like always putting the mixing spoon in the same place so they know where to find it next time; immediately wiping a knife clean after using it so it’s ready for the next cut; or laying out the ingredients in the order they’ll be used so that they serve as placeholders. Chefs use mise en place—a philosophy and mindset embodied in a set of practical techniques—as their “external brain.”1 It gives them a way to externalize their thinking into their environment and automate the repetitive parts of cooking so they can focus completely on the creative parts. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2733-2737 | Added on Friday, 3 February 2023 13:52:51: Capture my current thinking on the project. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2741-2745 | Added on Friday, 3 February 2023 13:53:16: Here are some questions I use to prompt this initial brainstorm: What do I already know about this project? What don’t I know that I need to find out? What is my goal or intention? Who can I talk to who might provide insights? What can I read or listen to for relevant ideas? - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2797-2802 | Added on Friday, 3 February 2023 14:02:20: Mark project as complete in task manager or project management app. Cross out the associated project goal and move to “Completed” section. Review Intermediate Packets and move them to other folders. Move project to archives across all platforms. If project is becoming inactive: add a current status note to the project folder before archiving. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2872-2873 | Added on Friday, 3 February 2023 14:22:00: Clear my email inbox. Check my calendar. Clear my computer desktop. Clear my notes inbox. Choose my tasks for the week. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 2906-2907 | Added on Friday, 3 February 2023 14:23:49: Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 3019-3020 | Added on Saturday, 4 February 2023 07:10:29: Now our challenge isn’t to acquire more information; as we saw in the exploration of divergence and convergence, it is to find ways to close off the stream so we can get something done. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 3095-3097 | Added on Saturday, 4 February 2023 07:23:41: We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: that more is better, without limit. Through the lens of scarcity, we constantly crave more, more, more information, a response to the fear of not having enough. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 3107-3109 | Added on Saturday, 4 February 2023 07:25:32: An Abundance Mindset tells us that there is an endless amount of incredibly powerful knowledge everywhere we look—in the content we consume, in our social network, in our bodies and intuitions, and in our own minds. It also tells us that we don’t need to consume or understand all of it, or even much of it. All we need is a few seeds of wisdom, and the seeds we most need tend to continually find us again and again. - Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) Your Highlight at location 3142-3145 | Added on Saturday, 4 February 2023 07:30:47: The practice of building a Second Brain is more than the sum of capturing facts, theories, and the opinions of others. At its core, it is about cultivating self-awareness and self-knowledge. When you encounter an idea that resonates with you, it is because that idea reflects back to you something that is already within you. Every external idea is like a mirror, surfacing within us the truths and the stories that want to be told