Building a Second Brain in One Tweet

Here’s how participants of Building a Second Brain, our online course on digital note-taking and personal knowledge management, described the course in one tweet (140 characters or less): How to take digital notes, increase their value, store them for easy retrieval, and use them for projects and/or to create new connections. — Greg Scholes BASB…

Interview on the Super Power U podcast

Check out my new interview with Lisa Betts-Lacroix on the Super Power U podcast below (38m). We talk about “creative productivity,” how I was deeply influenced by my artist father, and how I identify people’s “superpowers.” You can find highlights and resources mentioned on the official podcast page.

Case Study: Alex Hardy’s Successful Quest to Conquer Inbox Zero

Just a month ago, I had ~100,000 work-related and personal emails in my inbox. Nearly 60,000 of them were unread. I had haphazard systems of tags, folders, and various inbox extensions to help me manage it. Suffice it to say, my email organization “system” (if you could call it that) wasn’t working. me everytime I…

My interview on the Metalearn podcast

I recently had a great conversation with Nasos Papadopoulos on the Metalearn podcast. We talk about the fundamental pillars of a great note-taking system, how design thinking can be used to improve your productivity and life, and actions you can take to prepare yourself for the future of work. Visit the podcast page for the…

Second Brain Case Study: Teaching Progressive Summarization in an Undergraduate Classroom

Tiago’s note: this case study is from C. Wess Daniels, a professor of religious studies at Guilford College. It explains how he’s adapted the progressive summarization technique to help undergraduate students learn faster, retain it longer, and preserve their notes for lifelong use. After learning about Progressive Summarization in Tiago’s Building a Second Brain course…

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: