One of the most common questions I receive is how I write long-form blog posts. And especially how I write them frequently, at high quality, drawing on numerous sources. It’s taken me a long time to be able to make the process explicit. The Building a Second Brain course is basically my long-form writing workflow…
In Part I, I introduced Progressive Summarization, a method for easily creating highly discoverable notes. In Part II, I gave you examples and metaphors of the method in action. Part III included my top recommendations for how to perform it effectively. Part IV showed how to apply the technique to non-text media.
In Part V,
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…
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…
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
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
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
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
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:…
Note from Tiago: This is the first in a series of guest posts I hope to eventually publish, showing how knowledge management principles and techniques, from my course Building a Second Brain and elsewhere, can be implemented in a wide variety of software programs. Check out the Part 2 here. Getting Things Done (GTD) is…
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:…