Building a Second Brain
Building a Second Brain
"Building a second brain is getting things done for the digital age. It's a ... productivity method for consuming, synthesizing, and remembering the vast amount of information we take in, allowing us to become more effective and creative and harness the unprecedented amount of technology we have at our disposal"--
[[Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte-pdfread.net.pdf]]
Callouts
Summaries
- The four criteria of capturing a note: Is it Inspiring/Useful/Personal/Surprising?
- Distillation is a key property and activity.
- My Personal Knowledge Management is analogous to a Kitchen, which is designed for action. It's where I "cook", not where I file things.
- Building a second brain is about optimizing a system outside yourself, one not limited to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam and wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment - Tiago Forte
- The average person in 2009 consumes 34GB of information a daily, 5 times more then in 1986.
- Part of my own responsibility as a leader is to perform this distillation to make the lives of the people around me easier #leadership #management
- It would be helpful to organize some more things by projects within Obsidian.
- Read page 90 again when I'm ready to advance to a new workflow from Inbox/Note/Reference/Publish to Project/Area/Resource/Archives.
## Notes ### Activity 2024-06-24-Monday **Start time:** 19:20 PM
- We are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for Wisdom
- Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them - David Allen
building a Second Brain is a journey of personal growth. As your information environment changes, the way your mind operates starts to be transformed. You leave behind one identity and step into another—an identity as the orchestrator and conductor of your life, not its passenge
There are people who will be reached only if they are reached by you. People who have no other source for the kind of guidance you can provide. People who don’t know where to look for solutions to problems they might not even know they have. You can be that person for them. You can pay forward some of the immense care that has been poured into you by a lifetime of parents, teachers, and mentors. With mere words, you can open doors to unimaginable horizons for the people around you
Your Second Brain starts as a system to support you and your goals, but from there it can just as easily be used to support others and their dreams. You have everything you need to give back and be a force for good in the world. It all starts with knowledge, and you have at your disposal an embarrassment of riches.
You are committing to a new identity in which you are in charge of the information swirling around you, even if you don’t always know what it means.
chase what excites you. When you are captivated and obsessed by a story, an idea, or a new possibility, don’t just let that moment pass as if it doesn’t matter. Those are the moments that are truly precious, and that no technology can produce for you. Run after your obsessions with everything you have.
Activity 2024-06-23-Sunday
Start time: 15:50 PM
Pages: 191
The truth is, any system that must be perfect to be reliable is deeply flawed. A perfect system you don’t use because it’s too complicated and error prone isn’t a perfect system—it’s a fragile system that will fall apart as soon as you turn your attention elsewhere.
I feel this way about the premise of Communism at times.
Our attitude toward information profoundly shapes how we see and understand the world and our place in it. Our success in the workforce depends on our ability to make use of information more effectively and to think better, smarter, faster
Once you start seeing even your biggest ambitions in terms of the smaller chunks of information they are made up of, you’ll begin to realize that any experience or passing insight can be valuable.
We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.
Activity 2024-06-22-Saturday
Start time: 20:29 PM
Building a Second Brain is really about standardizing the way we work, because we only really improve when we standardize the way we do something.
By identifying the principles that stand the test of time despite huge changes in the underlying technology, we can better understand the essential nature of creativity.
Engineers diverge by researching all the possible solutions, testing the boundaries of the problem, or tinkering with new tools. They converge by deciding on a particular approach, designing the implementation details, and bringing their blueprints to life.
The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence. They help us shut the door to new ideas and begin constructing something new out of the knowledge building blocks we’ve assembled.
An Archipelago of Ideas separates the two activities your brain has the most difficulty performing at the same time: choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing).
Different industries express this in different ways; Vision boards, Design Docs...etc
“Being organized” isn’t a personality trait you’re born with, nor is it merely a matter of finding the right apps or tools. Being organized is a habit—a repeated set of actions you take as you encounter, work with, and put information to use
This is exactly how I want you to treat your attention—as an asset that gets invested and produces a return, which in turn can be reinvested back into other ventures.
Started a page called Information Science and put some resources from here
Activity 2024-06-17-Monday
Start time: 06:57 AM
- Bonus chapter for [[Chapter 11 - Building a Second Brain.pdf]] related to tagging
- A universal taxonomy (means of classification) is out of date
- Local taxonomies are still quite useful
- Resist the temptation to overbuild tags
Activity 2024-06-16-Sunday
Start time: 19:52 PM
Page 146
Artists would often sketch for inspiration to distill later
Activity 2024-06-15-Saturday
Start time: 10:18 AM
Page 143
professional creatives constantly draw on outside sources of inspiration—their own experiences and observations, lessons gleaned from successes and failures alike, and the ideas of others. If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences. - Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte-pdfread.net, page 125
If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences - Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte-pdfread.net, page 125
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. If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again - Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte-pdfread.net, page 126
Reusing Intermediate Packets of work frees up our attention for higher-order, more creative thinking. Thinking small is the best way to elevate your horizons and expand your ambitions. - Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte-pdfread.net, page 128
By “thinking small,” you can focus on creating just one IP each time you sit down to work, without worrying about how viable it is or whether it will be used in the exact way you envisioned. This lens reframes creativity as an ongoing, continual cycle of delivering value in small bits, rather than a massive all-consuming endeavor that weighs on you for months - Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte-pdfread.net, page 130
I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational system. It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your folders. However, tags can come in handy in specific situations when the two previous retrieval methods aren’t up to the task, and you want to spontaneously gather, connect, and synthesize groups of notes on the fly.III - Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte-pdfread.net, page 136
Five types of Intermediate Packets
- Distilled Notes
- Outtakes
- Work in Progress
- Final Deliverables
- Documents created by others
Activity 2024-06-09-Sunday
Start time: 13:42 PM
Page: 145 (122 on pdf)
- The paradox of having more notes leading to less discoverability.
Progressive Summarization Technique
Captured notes > Bolded passages > Highlighted Passages > Executive summary
Activity 2024-06-02-Sunday
Start time: 12:05 PM
Page: 118
- The purpose; the work of note taking is not only to capture, but to organize, distill, and express. PARA fits into this within the Organize section. In reality, it’s like C(PARA)DE
- New term: Discoverability, ability got a system to discover what they contain and access the information inside.
Activity 2024-06-01-Saturday
Start time: 08:19 AM
Page: 113
- Can PARA be used in larger organizations?
- #reading-list Forte Labs seem to think so!
- Found a new book The Creative Habit - Twyla Tharp
Activity 2024-05-31-Friday
Start time: 23:57 PM
Page: 96
- The concept of "Putting something in a box" is to mentally commit space for it in your mind.
A super important aspect is probably the inclusion of Archives. This is likely a huge missing piece from the overall organization so graph view works properly.
Activity 2024-05-26-Sunday
Start time: 14:43 PM
Page:74
I really enjoyed the story of how most people don't actually need to organize and store all that stuff in the forefront of their mind.
Activity 2024-05-24-Friday
Start time: 14:42 PM
Page: 62
An interesting idea from Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman is that he constantly keeps a list of 12 open questions that he would like to solve. I should try to do the same!
12 Open Questions I'm working on
Activity 2024-05-19-Sunday
Start time: 06:32 AM
Page: ~35
There’s an interesting source mentioned called the extended mind by Annie Murphy Paul
The 4 main ways that a second brain does for us well:
Making ideas concrete
The second brain makes the ideas more real but committing it to a medium that can be edited and organized.
Reveal new associations between ideas
Nancy C. Andreasen, “Secrets of the Creative Brain”
Putting diverse ideas in one place leads to more creative
Incubating ideas over time
Sharpen our perspectives
Activity 2024-05-15-Wednesday
Start time: 21:15 PM
- Got to page 24
- We often receive valuable information but can’t act on it immediately.