The Annual Review is a Rearchitecture

I previously described how the weekly review is an operating system, funneling each bit of information you captured during the week to its proper place. I also described the monthly review as a systems check, periodically making sure your systems are in good working order. Now we’re ready to dive into the annual review, which…

Progressive Summarization IV: Compressing All Types of Media

Reading through the previous three parts, a question probably popped into your mind: does this apply only to text?

It’s an important one, because we are becoming a less text-based society. Ubiquitous cameras, real-time video chats, and visual displays of information have become the norm. Which means expressions of creativity will increasingly take on these forms.

Masters of Creative Note-Taking: Luhmann and Da Vinci

This post also available in Dutch Note-taking is an ancient activity, practiced across cultures, languages, and writing systems for millennia. It is distinct from simply writing things down. For our purposes, note-taking is: Personal, informal, quick and dirty: notes are optimized not for public consumption, but for your own personal use, like a leather notebook…

Progressive Summarization III: Guidelines and Principles

In Part I, I explained Progressive Summarization, a method for easily creating highly discoverable notes. In Part II, I gave you many examples and metaphors of the method in action.

In Part III, I will give you further guidelines on how to make Progressive Summarization (PS) a part of your daily work. They have been gathered from several years of using the technique in my own projects, and teaching it in my workshops and courses.

This Is Product Management Podcast Interview

Here’s my live interview with Mike Fishbein on the This is Product Management podcast: Here’s the original page, with show notes below: Tiago Forte, Founder of Forte Labs, shares his approach to achieving focus in a fast-paced work environment, managing projects with multiple stakeholders, and “building a second brain.” Product managers have many responsibilities. They…

Progressive Summarization II: Examples and Metaphors

These are Layer 1 notes I took on an article on postrationalism, a topic I’m interested in. This is 373 words, which would take about 2 minutes to read at an average reading speed. 2 minutes doesn’t seem like much, but when you consider that these notes could have no relevance to the task at hand, it’s a lot of attention to pay for nothing. Especially considering this is dense, challenging material.

For Layer 2, I bolded what I thought were the key points:

Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes

Modern digital tools make it easy to “capture” information from a wide variety of sources. We know how to snap a picture, type out some notes, record a video, or scan a document. Getting this content from the outside world into the digital world is trivial.

It’s even easier to get content that is already digital from one app to another. We know how to copy and paste text, save an image from a webpage, archive an email attachment, or import a video file.

Supersizing the Mind: The Science of Cognitive Extension

You enter your kitchen for a quick lunch: how is it exactly that your brain solves the problem “prepare lunch as efficiently as possible”? Your brain effortlessly, almost instantaneously “assembles” a diverse mix of problem-solving resources on the spot. These “resources” can include knowledge, tools, or structures, and can be: Mental: knowledge, experience, intuition Physical:…

The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer, Part II: The Stack

In Part I, I described a new kind of worker called the Full-Stack Freelancer.

I argued that more affordable and user-friendly software-as-a-service (SaaS), among other things, has enabled individuals to manage portfolios of complementary income streams, instead of focusing on only one specialized skill.

But you may have noticed something missing: what is in the stack?

Here’s mine:

Press, Reviews, Articles, and Case Studies on Building a Second Brain

The following is a collection of customer reviews, interviews, online articles, case studies, and other third-party sources related to my online course on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain. For customer testimonials, click here. We’ll update it periodically with new links. Interviews Interview with Austin Brawner and Andrew Foxwell on The Ecommerce Influence Podcast:…