Building a Second Brain

The Case for Traditional Book Publishing

In The Four Pathways of Modern Book Publishing, I described the four main routes to publication for writers in the digital age. After considering all these factors, I’ve chosen to pursue the most traditional publishing route, for six main reasons (from most to least important): Credibility and authority that comes with a big name publisher…

Read More »

Building a Second Brain: A 45-Minute Presentation

This is a 45-minute video recording of a talk I delivered at a conference recently. It is a condensed version of some of the material from my course Building a Second Brain, with how-to examples of each of the three main parts of the methodology: Remember, Connect, and Create.

Read More »

The 7 Benefits of Building a Second Brain

In my online course Building a Second Brain, I teach people how to create an external repository of their best ideas, knowledge, and experiences, called a “second brain.” But one of the most common questions I receive is, “Why should I?” In this article I’ll summarize the 7 main capabilities that a second brain gives…

Read More »

The Future of RandomNote (Seeking Developers!)

“I must admit that after many years of work in this area, the efficacy of randomness for so many algorithmic problems is absolutely mysterious to me. It is efficient, it works; but why and how is absolutely mysterious.” – Michael Rabin, from Algorithms to Live By We recently launched version 3.0 of RandomNote, our free…

Read More »

Behind the Scenes of a Profitable Online Course

I advise everyone I know to create an online course. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has valuable knowledge that others could benefit from. I believe that in 10 years online courses will be like websites today – everyone who works online will have at least one. And without one, you will be all but…

Read More »

Building a Second Brain: Premium Edition

This article outlines the extra features found in the Premium Edition of Building a Second Brain, our online course on personal knowledge management (PKM): 5 live Q&A calls with Tiago Forte during the live cohort (including recordings if you can’t attend live) Q&A library with over 40 short clips of Tiago’s best answers to common…

Read More »

Second Brain Case Study: Citation Management in Academia

This is an interview and case study with Addison Shockley, a Phd in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Rhetoric. He has developed a customized workflow to use with his second brain that allows him to precisely track citations for writing academic articles, including multi-colored progressive summarization (red for arguments/debates, blue for external significance, black…

Read More »

Commonplace Books: Creative Note-Taking Through History

One of the clearest predecessors to the modern practice of Personal Knowledge Management are “commonplace books” – centralized, personally curated, and continuously maintained collections of information from various sources that rose to popularity during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution in Europe. These books helped educated people cope with the “information explosion” unleashed by the printing…

Read More »

Introducing RandomNote Web

I’m very proud to present version 3.0 of RandomNote Web, a free web app we created to help people serendipitously resurface and rediscover their Evernote notes, with the goal of improving their learning and creative output. [button link=”https://evernote-random.glitch.me” type=”big” newwindow=”yes”] Visit RandomNote Web[/button] Version 3.0 was generously created by Chris Galtenberg, Callum Flack, and Ben…

Read More »

Second Brain Case Study: How a GTD Master Trainer Uses PARA

This video walkthrough is by Mohammed Ali Vakil, Co-Founder of Calm Achiever, the official GTD franchise and Holocracy Licensee in India. Mohammed is a certified GTD Master Trainer who has taught thousands of people and organizations how to implement productivity methods and new ways of thinking about their work and lives. In this video, he…

Read More »

A Complete Guide to Tagging for Personal Knowledge Management

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)  is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily life, whether from personal experience, from books and articles, or from our work, and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher quality work. I teach people how to master PKM in my online course Building…

Read More »

The Official Second Brain Note Template

Presenting the first-ever official note template for use with my Building A Second Brain online course and methodology! Click below to download the template to your own Evernote account: View note template Here is a quick 2-minute demo video showing how to make use of the template:

Read More »