🪴 Сад Знаний

Search

SearchSearch

Building a Second Brain

Nov 20, 2024, 17 min read

Building a Second Brain

rw-book-cover

Metadata

  • Author: Tiago Forte
  • Full Title: Building a Second Brain
  • Category:#books
  • Document Tags: basb productivity
  • Summary: In “Building a Second Brain,” Tiago Forte emphasizes the importance of organizing notes to capture valuable insights effectively. He suggests separating the steps of capturing and organizing ideas to make information easier to revisit later. By treating notes as knowledge assets, individuals can enhance their creativity and discover which ideas resonate most with others.

Highlights

  • Whether you call it a “personal cloud,” “field notes,” or an “external brain” as some of my students have done, it is a digital archive of your most valuable memories, ideas, and knowledge to help you do your job, run your business, and manage your life without having to keep every detail in your head. Like a personal library in your pocket, a Second Brain enables you to recall everything you might want to remember so you can achieve anything you desire. (View Highlight)
  • Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (View Highlight)
  • More than half the workforce today can be considered “knowledge workers”—professionals for whom knowledge is their most valuable asset, and who spend a majority of their time managing large amounts of information. In addition, no matter what our formal role is, all of us have to come up with new ideas, solve novel problems, and communicate with others effectively. We have to do these things regularly, reliably, not just once in a while. (View Highlight)
  • When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note. (View Highlight)
  • Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me? (View Highlight)
    • Note: Правильная мысль, и у меня есть метка Inspiration в заметках и Readwise. Можно открывать список и листать эти заметки и посты в поисках вдохновения!
  • Inspiration is one of the most rare and precious experiences in life. It is the essential fuel for doing your best work, yet it’s impossible to call up inspiration on demand. You can Google the answer to a question, but you can’t Google a feeling. (View Highlight)
  • Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful? (View Highlight)
  • Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal? One of the most valuable kinds of information to keep is personal information—your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos. (View Highlight)
  • I often save screenshots of text messages sent between my family and friends. The small moments of warmth and humor that take place in these threads are precious to me, since I can’t always be with them in person. It takes mere moments, and I love knowing that I’ll forever have memories from my conversations with the people closest to me. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Хорошая идея - делал так иногда, и добавлял в DayOne. Спустя годы, очень любопытно смотреть на такие артефакты!
  • Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising? (View Highlight)
  • Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know. (View Highlight)
  • if you take away one thing from this chapter, it should be to keep what resonates. (View Highlight)
  • As you consume a piece of content, listen for an internal feeling of being moved or surprised by the idea you’re taking in. This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.” 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.” (View Highlight)
  • I can’t think of anything more important for your creative life—and your life in general—than learning to listen to the voice of intuition inside. It is the source of your imagination, your confidence, and your spontaneity. You can intentionally train yourself to hear that voice of intuition every day by taking note of what it tells you. (View Highlight)
  • There is even significant evidence that expressing our thoughts in writing can lead to benefits for our health and well-being.11 One of the most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that “translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.” (View Highlight)
  • Once our thoughts are outside our head, we can examine them, play with them, and make them better. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Это действительно так. Мысли проще доработать и проанализировать, если они выведены в форме текста.
  • the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Интересно, как транслировать эту мысль на цифровое окружение? Напрашивается аналогия “высоких потолков” с работой с простыми Markdown-файлами на диске, где можно творить что угодно. “Низкие потолки” - это зажатость в тесных рамках проприетарных программ.
  • The project becomes the main unit of organization for your digital files. Instead of having to sort your notes according to a complex hierarchy of topics and subtopics, you have to answer only one simple question: “In which project will this be most useful?” (View Highlight)
    • Note: Вызывает множество сомнений! Многие заметки могут быть полезными в десятках проектов. Как их можно привязать только к одному?..
  • Knowing which projects you’re currently committed to is crucial to being able to prioritize your week, plan your progress, and say no to things that aren’t important. (View Highlight)
  • a note could include a passage from a book or article that you were inspired by; a photo or image from the web with your annotations; or a bullet-point list of your meandering thoughts on a topic, among many other examples. A note could include a single quote from a film that really struck you, all the way to thousands of words you saved from an in-depth book. The length and format don’t matter—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note. (View Highlight)
  • So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we’re never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest. (View Highlight)
  • You are on your smartphone just like everyone else, but you aren’t doing what they are doing. You are creating value instead of killing time. (View Highlight)
  • Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” (View Highlight)
  • I call this approach the “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 manic hustle. Having a Second Brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for the long term turns the passage of time into your friend, instead of your enemy. (View Highlight)
  • The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid. They use their digital notes to save facts and ideas that they would have trouble recalling otherwise: takeaways from meetings, quotes from interviews, or the details of a project, for example. (View Highlight)
  • The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connect ideas together. Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily a memory tool to becoming a thinking tool. A piece of advice from a mentor comes in handy as they encounter a similar situation on a different team. An illuminating metaphor from a book finds its way into a presentation they’re delivering. The ideas they’ve captured begin gravitating toward each other and cross-pollinating. (View Highlight)
  • Eventually, the third and final way that people use their Second Brain is for creating new things. They realize that they have a lot of knowledge on a subject and decide to turn it into something concrete and shareable. Seeing so much supporting material ready and waiting gives them the courage to put their own ideas out there and have a positive impact on others. (View Highlight)
  • Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Делать комментарии к highlights, если не очевидно, почему цитата привлекла внимание.
  • 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. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Заметками нужно пользоваться и подтверждать их практикой. Иначе, они бесполезны.
  • Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” (View Highlight)
    • Note: Зафиксировать эти вопросы, и все получаемые крупицы знаний сопоставлять - могут ли они помочь найти ответ? Вдохновлено Фейнманом Отчасти делаю нечто похожее, только вопросы надо сформулировать и записать.

New highlights added November 16, 2024 at 9:35 PM

  • the moment you first capture an idea is the worst time to try to decide what it relates to. First, because you’ve just encountered it and haven’t had any time to ponder its ultimate purpose, but more importantly, because forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process. This makes the experience mentally taxing and thus less likely to happen in the first place. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Поэтому, нужно выбрать для себя удобный “контейнер” для всей входящей информации. Я предпочитаю использовать для этой цели чат Saved в Telegram. В нём можно хранить абсолютно любую информацию: идеи, ссылки, файлы.
  • I’ve learned that completed creative projects are the blood flow of your Second Brain. They keep the whole system nourished, fresh, and primed for action. It doesn’t matter how organized, aesthetically pleasing, or impressive your notetaking system is. It is only the steady completion of tangible wins that can infuse you with a sense of determination, momentum, and accomplishment. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Неважно, насколько стройно и красиво организована система заметок. Главное - реальные результаты, которых она помогла достичь.
  • Practice capturing new notes, organizing them into folders, and moving them from one folder to another. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Идея с перемещением заметок между папками кажется непрактичной. Когда их будут тысячи, перемещать их туда-сюда станет невозможно. Лучше пользоваться тэгами.
  • The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart. (View Highlight)
  • For only the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words. The best sign that a fourth layer is needed is when I find myself visiting a note again and again, clearly indicating that it is one of the cornerstones of my thinking. (View Highlight)

New highlights added November 19, 2024 at 3:53 PM

  • As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource. (View Highlight)
  • 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. (View Highlight)
  • Second, you’ll be able to make progress in any span of time. Instead of waiting until you have multiple uninterrupted hours—which, let’s face it, is rare and getting rarer—you can look at how many minutes you have free and choose to work on an IP that you can get done within that time, even if it’s tiny. Big projects and goals become less intimidating because you can just keep breaking them down into smaller and smaller pieces, until they fit right into the gaps in your day. (View Highlight)
  • Third, Intermediate Packets increase the quality of your work by allowing you to collect feedback more often. (View Highlight)
  • Fourth, and best of all, eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Интересная идея. К коду такой подход вполне применим. Если декомпозировать фичи до минимальных шажков, легко использовать ранее написанный свой код в качестве шаблона.
  • The CODE Method is based on an important aspect of creativity: that it is always a remix of existing parts. We all stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. No one creates anything out of a pure void. (View Highlight)
  • Reframing your work in terms of Intermediate Packets isn’t just about doing the same old stuff in smaller chunks. That doesn’t unlock your true potential. The transformation comes from the fact that smaller chunks are inherently more shareable and collaborative. (View Highlight)
  • 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. (View Highlight)
    • Note: С разработкой и программированием именно так.
  • It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Все тезисы применимы к разработке.
  • What I learned from my father is that by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done. We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Абсолютно применимо к разработке, я так и делаю. Прежде чем сесть за реализацию фичи, нужно разложить её на мельчайшие задачи и убедиться, что всё понятно и есть необходимые справочные материалы для реализации.
  • To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Хорошая техника, пробовал так делать. Сначала формировал черновик поста с подзаголовками, основными идеями, ссылками на заметки и т.д. Потом остаётся сесть и довести всё это до ума, основные тезисы и материалы уже под рукой.
  • 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.IV (View Highlight)
  • • 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. (View Highlight)
    • Note: Именно так и делаю при разработке. Расписываю это в GitHub Project/Issues.
  • “Scope” is a term from project management that has been adopted by software developers, from whom I learned it while working in Silicon Valley. The scope refers to the full set of features a software program might include. (View Highlight)
  • Building a Second Brain is not just about downloading a new piece of software to get organized at one point in time; it is about adopting a dynamic, flexible system and set of habits to continually access what we need without throwing our environment (and mind) into chaos. (View Highlight)
  • Highlighting can sometimes feel risky. You may wonder, “Am I making the right decision about which points are most important, or what this source means?” The multiple layers of Progressive Summarization are like a safety net; if you go in the wrong direction, or make a mistake, you can always just go back to the original version and try again. Nothing gets forgotten or deleted. (View Highlight)

New highlights added November 20, 2024 at 2:52 PM

  • We have to remember that we are not building an encyclopedia of immaculately organized knowledge. We are building a working system. Both in the sense that it must work, and in the sense that it is a regular part of our everyday lives. For that reason, you should prefer a system that is imperfect, but that continues to be useful in the real conditions of your life. (View Highlight)

    • Note: Не нужно тратить время на доведение системы до “идеала”. Система должна работать и быть полезной, а порядок нужно наводить понемногу, в процессе работы.

  • Value has shifted from the output of our muscles to the output of our brains. Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention our most valuable skill. The tools of our trade have become abstract and immaterial: the building blocks of ideas, insights, facts, frameworks, and mental models. (View Highlight)

  • That our value and self-worth come from what we know and can recite on command. (View Highlight)

    • Note: Верно, не нужно забивать голову мелкими деталями.

  • The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself? Learning shouldn’t be about hoarding stockpiles of knowledge like gold coins. Knowledge is the only resource that gets better and more valuable the more it multiplies. If I share a new way of thinking about your health, or finances, or business, or spirituality, that knowledge isn’t less valuable to me. It’s more valuable! Now we can speak the same language, coordinate our efforts, and share our progress in applying it. Knowledge becomes more powerful as it spreads. (View Highlight)

📂 Reading | Последнее изменение: 20.11.2024 14:52

Graph View

Backlinks