Building a Second Brain Course

Notes

Intro Session

Understanding the purpose & end goal is single biggest driver for student success.

Less concerned with "what is it", more with "what does it allow you to do."

Methodology pillars: capture, organize, share.

We're not capturing for fun, but to have an impact on the world. So that's why sharing is so crucial and the end of the loop.

Current situation is using all your apps randomly. The overflow ends up on your brain, because you don't trust any of the apps and systems. Leads to difficulty organizing, prioritizing, etc.

Your second brain is not a single program.

Level 2 of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is managing knowledge, with your own interpretations etc. Level 3: enabling action, allowing you to go out and get specific results.

"What these findings suggest is that creativity doesn't just involve imagination. It also involves motivation, organization and collaboration." — Scott Barry Kaufman, The Atlantic on/creativity

Promise of the course: You will learn how to capture, organize and share your ideas and insights using digital notes, with a systematic approach and tools that you trust to support creative breakthroughs in your work.

Order: start in the middle with organize.

Great split between course & discussion. "Core, static curriculum" in Teachable, everything dynamic is in the discussion forum (circle.so).

10-year countdown: visualization exercise. Then bring it back to the present.

Adapting to corona virus = start of my digital-first thought leadership.

Investing in a job now which isn't consistent with the on-my-own path now. Really entertaining living in a team. Was hard to pull 10y back to 5y or 1y. In 1y Sn be started.

Every time you get blocked in note taking, write about the blockage. Writing

Capstone project? Catches my mind: cursus, start an email newsletter, make a film.

Embrace uncomfortable. This will question and shift how you think about learning, note-taking and thinking. It'll get uncomfortable so when it does, lean on the teachers.

There's no right way. Almost everyone thinks they've done it wrong in some way.

Wednesday Group Call April 8, 2020

Part of what you're learning here is learning to learn differently online.

Unit 2

Projects and Areas (of Responsibility) require completely different approaches.

Project have a goal and end date
Areas are ongoing standards to maintain

Confusing Projects & Areas is one of the biggest sources of frustration and productivity bottlenecks.

Create a project list and goal list; connect them
Project without goal is a hobby
Goal without project is a dream

If you re-create PARAs across your systems down to the spelling and punctuation, it creates the sensation that there's no mental switch requried.

The most important distinction in productivity: actionable vs. non-actionable.

Actionability is more of a gradient and not just black and white.

Knowledge management is never done. So that's why you don't have to worry about when it's done.

Project List Mindsweep

Purpose: having a stick in the ground for every project you're tracking. Not some dusty list.

David Allen (The Elusive Inventory of Your Projects): Bizzare how difficult it is for most to grasp what a "project" is and to consistently their total inventory.

Project list = link between task manager and notes. See this as the axle of the car, what keeps it all together.

You project list is also motivational. Shouldn't be a list of downer things that you have to do. Motivation

Be very selective about what's on the project list. It's all that you have to pay attention to frequently, it's your dashboard of what's going on now. For most people, will not be more than 10-20 items.

Projects have to have three things: X by Y = Z.

Project name
Timeframe (can be hard or soft, when you prefer it to be done)

Because you have a clear line that's a trigger for the project to be re-verified.
Outcome (what has to be true, objectively? Be very black and white here.)

Often you can create a list of outcomes but there's often one number that summarizes it all.

Anyone else who sees the outcome should be able to verify it.

So a project is a sort of hypothesis: I think that by doing X by Y, I'll get Z.

Priorities are fickle for tasks—they can change with for example just one phone call. So prioritize by projects.

The evaluation questions are possible once you have finished the steps before.

Your future is the average of the 5 projects you're working on.

Projects matter. Think of it as deciding where it's taking your life.

Website re-architecture case study

Tiago likes switching projects as he travels. Gives him more feeling of rest, better focus etc.

Live Session 4

Mentor: Josh Carr.

Definition of "what is a project?" is a very difficult one.

If something seems more like an area (you could always be working on it), you can convert it into a smaller project.

Jonathan's insight: Things can move throughout PARA. A task can move and expand and become a project, or an area, etc. I see thing small—I see them as a task first and then it grows into a project.

For defining a project, setting the first step is often enough. Things can always grow and evolve.

What about repeating tasks? Tiago probably has a blog post about that. Those tasks would be in an area, but you can have projects in those areas too.

Francois-Xavier "FX": has one "errands" area in Things for random things, one-time tasks that need to happen.

The reason we're working so much on projects is: "Once your projects are clear, PARA is easy."

Areas have lots of potential projects.

Archives aren't your trash bin. Just inactive. Tiago: "I'm constantly moving back and forth from and to the archive. It's just whatever you don't want to have front and center right now."

Moving things to archive = minimizing / closing background screens on your computer.

Tiago has 8 active projects on any 7-day period. They're smaller so they can turn over faster. It's depressing that your project list is the same at the end of the week.

The big picture is for certain times, certain moments. When you're working on tasks, you have to have it out of mind.

The mise en place is a real thing for knowledge work. Knowledge perishes just like food. (From book: Work Clean)

Tiago showed an 8-item area list. Nice sentence:

There's a cognitive load for even looking at this.

Everything that's in any of your systems that is not clearly a project or area, just move it into the Archive folder. Just put everything in Documents into Archive.

Quote from the Golden Age of Apple: "I don't care about organizing, I have a creative project." Those were the kind of people that succeeded. on/creativity Organization

Unit 3: Session 5

PARA list is your real-time dashboard of your current state of affairs.

Today: capture. Making it more strategic and intentional.

My 12 Favorite Problems: #output/exercise

How can I feel an immense amount of energy, enthusiasm and productivity to create amazing things at full speed every day?
How should we organize civilization in the future so that we start going towards the best world possible?
What can I do that the world would benefit most from?
How can I become insanely rich?
How do I gain greater emotional connection and create shared joy with my girlfriend?
How can I spend quality time with the people that matter to me without sacrificing my personal and professional goals?
What can I create that will challenge me in making it and will fill me with joy when sharing it with the world?
How can I spend more time in creative flow, designing new visuals or structures that are gorgeous and bring me joy throughout the creation process?
How can I find joy, passion and inspiration in as much minutes as possible throughout the day?
How to I build a group of tight friends to laugh, debate and create with?
What do I want to give and create for the world?
How do I become the healthiest person I could ever be?
How do I discover who I really am?

Stealing favorite problems is officially allowed.

Tiago's 100 Notes. Looking over the last 100 notes you took.

Tiago keeps mementos, including nice things people have said + good work you've done.

Using PKM for project management, you boot up projects much faster then you would otherwise, knowing very well that things will change, assumptions will be broken an being okay with that process. Because everything you've done in the meantime has been saved and could still be useful in the future. You've saved your lessons.

Purpose of planning is breaking assumptions.

Live Session 6

There will be a 2-week implementation period for all of us to catch up. By the way, there's no way you can be behind, because we're all here to learn different things.

Cohort schedule revised. Friday QA sessions are becoming "real" sessions.

Identify top 5 sources & post to forum
You can really go into the weeds of "how do I capture it all, all of the fancy sources?"
Focus on nailing your top 5 sources.
Train capturing for your top 5 sources.

Robin: a lot of my resources are around these questions.

Top 3-5 sources of information to capture?

Books
Articles
Podcasts
Videos

James uses the note-at-a-point feature of Audible. On YouTube you can copy-with-timestamp.

What form do you want to consume media in?

Sometimes you want to have a bit of friction. So that can actually improve the quality of your handwriting capture, for example.

Perfectionism is a complicated excuse for inaction.

Live Session 7: Progressive Summarization

Don't save in the same unit as the author created in. Spend the extra millisecond to focus on the core of the point of what's interesting.

You progressively summarize but still keep access to the "previous layer" because you might want to get back in the weeds. You can choose to read the 10K foot view or the nitty gritty details.

Keep your notes glanceable. The ratio should be right. "Can you feel that your brain has to spin up?"