Tiago Forte
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…
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…
Update: the book club is now closed Books are the worst. Seriously. Think about it. Most books have one good idea wrapped in layers and layers of fluff. Like one of those giant gift boxes you keep opening with smaller and smaller boxes inside, only to find a keychain. Books are static. By the time…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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:
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.
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:…