The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (highlights)

The Perspective Era

After all of our attention has been used up in the attention era, the most scarce resource and thus most valuable, is perspective.

Book Notes

Foundation

Much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

The biggest problem is that you’re often consuming the information at the wrong time.

You might see BASB as self-improvement but in a sense it’s the opposite. It is about optimizing a system outside yourself, not subject to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

26% of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems. Incredibly, only 56 percent of the time the are able to find the information required to do their jobs.

Every change in how we use technology also requires a change in how we think. To properly take advantage of the power of a Second Brain, we need a new relationship to information, to technology, and even to ourselves.

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks.

Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your own personality.

Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. Not only could this lead to more civil discussions about the important topics of the day; it could also preserve our mental health and heal our splintered attention.

For many people, their understanding of notetaking was formed in school. You were told to remember stuff for the test, implying that you could forget afterwards. Learning was treated as disposable.

For 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.

We are surrounded by knowledge, yet we are starving for wisdom.

With a good note taking system, you are just planting seeds of inspiration and harvesting them as they flower. All that’s left is for you to take action on what you already know and already have, which is laid out before you in meticulous detail.

We’re finally at the place where we can realize the vision of technology as a thinking tool.

How a Second Brain Works

Makes our ideas concrete

Reveals new associations between ideas

Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.

Incubates our ideas over time

What are the chances that the most creative, most innovative approaches will instantly be top of mind?

“Slow burn:” allowing bits of thought matter to slowly simmer like a delicious pot of stew brewing on the stove. It is a calmer, more sustainable approach to creativity that relies on the gradual accumulation of ideas, instead of all-out binges of magic hustle.

Sharpens our unique perspectives

The jobs that are most likely to stick around are those that involve promoting or defending a particular perspective.

Our careers and businesses depends more than ever on our ability to advance a particular point of view and persuade others to adopt it as well.

When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t lost your touch or ran out of creative juice. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with. If it feels like the well of inspiration has run dry, it’s because you need a deeper well full of examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes—anything that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in.

CODE: Capture, Organize, Distill, Express

Capture: keep what resonates

Much of the information we find is useful and interesting, but we can’t consume every bit of information.

Our goal should be to capture only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy.

When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level.

Adopting the habit of knowledge capture has immediate belefits for our mental health and peace of mind. We can let go of the fear that our memory will fail us at a crucial moment. Instead of jumping at every new headline and notification, we can choose to consume information that adds value to our lives and consciously let go of the rest.

Organize for Actionability

Distill: find the essence

The human mind is like a sizzling-hot frying pan of associations—throw a handful of seeds in there and they’ll explode into new ideas like popcorn.

Express: show your work

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.

Information becomes knowledge only when we put it to use.

This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.

The Method: CODE

Capture what resonates

Information isn’t a luxury—it’s the very basis of our survival.

We are planting our own “knowledge garden” where we are free to cultivate our ideas and develop our own thinking away from the deafening noise of others’ opinions.

Do not only capture external information, capture your own thoughts too. Stories, insights, memories, reflections, musings (“shower ideas”).

Keep track of your 12 favorite problems and look at the world through that lens. The key is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in.

Capture criteria:

Does it inspire me?

Is it useful?

Is it personal?

Is it surprising?

Emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking. Our intuitive mind learns, and reponds, even without our conscious awareness. Story of people who get losing card decks and show stress responses when they take that deck, even though they’re not consciously aware.

I can’t think of anything more important in your creative life—and even your regular life—than learning to listen to your intuition.

Organize with PARA

Four folders, in order of actionability. Try the first one, go down to the next one.

Projects

Areas

Resources

Archives

PARA isn’t a filing system, it’s a production system. Organize according to where notes are going.

People need clear workspaces to be able to create.

Creating new things is what really matters.

Completed projects are the oxygen of your second brain. They keep the whole system nourished, fresh, and primed for action.

Move quickly and touch lightly. What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?

Each time you finish a project, move its folder wholesale to the arvhices, and each time you start a new project, look through the archives to see if any past project might have assets you can reuse.

Don’t worry about “cleaning up” existing notes. You can’t afford to spend a lot of time on old content that you’re not sure you’re ever going to need.

Distill: find the essence

When we talk to very important people, we don’t waste their time and be as succinct as possible. What if our future self was as important as these VIPs?

Progressive Summarization:

1. Captured notes
2. Bolded passages
3. Highlighted passages
4. Executive summary

Summarize to the next level when you are reading a note. Then you’re really sure you actually need the note.

Most common mistakes of novice notetakers:

Over-highlighting

Highlighting without a purpose in mind

Making highlighting difficult

Express: show your work

The challenge we face in building a Second Brain is how to establish a system for personal knowledge that frees up attention instead of taking more of it.

It’s about expressing our ideas earlier, more frequently and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.

Intermediate Packets

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.

Thinking small is the best way to elevate your horizons and expand your ambitions.

Advantages:

You become interruption proof because you can load an IP in your mind instead of the entire project

You’ll be able to make progress in any span of time

The quality of your work increases because you ask for feedback earlier and more often

You’ll have to many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects from assembling IPs

Types of intermediate packets:

Distilled notes

Outtakes

Work-in-process

Final deliverables

Documents created by others

You can sit down to purposefully create an IP but it is far more powerful to notice the IPs you have already produced and then take an extra moment to save them to your Second Brain.

Our creativity thrives on examples.

The Express step is the step where we build the confidence that our Second Brain is working for us.

Retrieval

Search is very powerful but studies have shown people prefer browsing manually. It gives them more control and folders of file names give small contextual hints for next parts to look at.

Barbara Tversky: “We are far better and more experienced at spatial thinking than at abstract thinking. Abstract thought can be difficult in and of itself, but fortunately it can often be mapped onto spatial thought in one way or another. That way, spatial thinking can substitute for and scaffold abstract thought.”

We are creating a soup of creative DNA to maximize the chance that life emerges.

We intuitively absorb colors and shapes in the blink of an eye, using far less energy than it takes to read words.

Three stages of expressing

Remembering

Connecting: combine notes to tell a bigger story

Creating: complete projects and accomplish goals stress-free

Only start projects that are already 80 percent done.

Your Second Brain is a vital repository of all of the bits and pieces you’ll want in front of you when you sit down to focus.

Creativity is inherently collaborative. The transformation of IPs comes from the fact that smallrt chunks are inherently more shareable and collaborative.

Everything is a remix.

Instead of thinking of your job in terms of tasks, you will start to think in terms of assets and building blocks that you can assemble.

Even if you’re not writing a book now, or creating a presentation now, or developing a new framework now, that doesn’t mean you never will.

Verum ipsum factum: you only know what you make

It’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas and your potential to contribute in whyatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, ow how many people see it.

You have to value your ideas enough to share them.

The Shift: Making it happen