I long ago stopped reading books on note-taking. They were always too vague and boring, full of platitudes that had little to do with the world outside academia. I especially avoided “how-to” style books on the subject. They would often list dozens of tips and tricks that had little to do with each other. There…
I recently spoke with Ian Lenny via videoconference for his series showcasing interviews with entrepreneurs, experts, high performers, and thinkers. We talked about my Building a Second Brain methodology, and what I’ve learned about the most effective ways for people to build one for themselves. Watch or listen below, or visit the episode webpage for…
I recently spoke with Boomer Anderson on his podcast Decoding Superhuman, about my ideas on productivity and knowledge management. Including: [2:18] Why I moved to Mexico City [5:19] My influences in developing productivity theories [9:14] Benefits of network effect and momentum on productivity [17:14] The guy who doesn’t like Cal Newport [27:56] Organizing the endless…
I’m very excited and proud to announce that I’ll be co-organizing a series of free meetups in cooperation with Notion, the up-and-coming productivity and knowledge management software. We’ll be hosting events in the following 6 cities to start, with possibly more to come later next year (click each link to register): Mexico City (12/4) Sao…
My favorite scene in all the Harry Potter books is when Harry uses a “Pensieve.” A Pensieve is a large, enchanted dish into which wizards can pour their memories, so that they can later be “re-lived” in full detail: (Here’s a 5-minute clip from the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in which…
We’ve developed a live, in-person creative writing workshop called The Creative Process. First prototyped in New York City, we’ve since delivered it in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Arizona, with many more cities around the world planned for the coming year. As the name suggests, this isn’t just a workshop to help you write better….
I recently joined Janelle Allen on her podcast to talk about “organizing” our learning for better productivity. She is the founder of Zen Courses, where she helps business owners apply learning & marketing strategies to create profitable online courses that change lives. Here’s some of the things we talked about: 5:08 My entrepreneurial journey 9:17 The…
Illustration by Mark Weaver We are living in the midst of an Informational Apocalypse. The volume of information we’re exposed to every day continues to explode without regard for the number of hours in a day. “Information overload” has evolved from a narrow preoccupation to a pervasive state of mind. Every minute of our day…
This is a presentation by Andrei Aleksandrov at Knowledge Conf 2019, in which he summarizes my Progressive Summarization technique for highlighting passages while reading for easy retrieval. It is in Russian without subtitles. Here is the automatically generated transcript in Russian (anyone willing to translate it to English for me?): 07:40 наткнулся на мудрую черепаху…
I’m proud to announce the official launch of Second Brain Meetups, a network of local meetup groups for anyone interested in using technology to build a “Second Brain” – a trusted system for saving your most valuable ideas, insights, and knowledge. These groups are meant to connect people with like-minded peers in their local city…
I have a confession: my Second Brain hasn’t been working very well lately. The problem is the “Resources” stack, one of the four main buckets that are part of my PARA organizational system. It has ballooned to more than 100 individual notebooks, and I can’t even remember which ones exist. Which means the decision of…
By guest contributor Ergest Xheblati Recently I was asked by Tiago to see if I could do something interesting with his Instapaper article collection stored on Evernote. I had recently completed a similar project at work where I looked at product descriptions and generated tags from them. I thought I could do something similar for…
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