Creativity

Part 3: The 5 Pillars of My Writing Process

The 5 Pillars of My Writing Process

In the second part of this blog series, I shared how I treated my book as a series of small projects culminating in a final product. The same was true for each of the 10 chapters it contained: each one was its own project, with a deadline and a goal for what that chapter was trying to achieve. Each chapter had its own project folder (according to my PARA Method), where I collected everything I would draw on – notes, sources, supporting materials, stories, action steps, and key details.

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Inventing the Digital Filing Cabinet

The modern era didn’t start with the invention of the car, the television, or the internet. It was the arrival of the humble filing cabinet – a simple metal box with drawers that held pieces of paper on their edge – that changed everything. As Craig Robertson argues in his book The Filing Cabinet: A…

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Amplify your open questions

Amplify Your Thinking Ability With Open Questions

Writing down your open questions is an act of “externalization” – you are taking passing curiosities and interests from your mind and externalizing them into the outside world. That is a first step to making those questions active generators of possibility in your life, but certainly not the last. Once they exist in written form, such as in your notes, you now have a place to begin collecting potential answers to those questions without having to memorize them.

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The Psychological Toll of Writing a Book

The Psychological Toll of Writing a Book

(While Having Our First Child During a Global Pandemic) Writing and publishing my book Building a Second Brain was by far the longest and hardest project I’ve ever completed. From the first call with the agent (who would eventually represent me) in January 2019 until June 2022 when the book was released to the world,…

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Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

The True Meaning of Productivity | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

I sat down in person with my friend, productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal, for a 1-hour deep dive conversation. We covered a lot of ground, including… How having a child impacted my productivity My journey into the world of productivity How to keep up with managing information flows Is the world moving away from productivity? What productivity…

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Nobody Told Me! Image

How to Organize the Creative Process | Nobody Told Me! Podcast

I joined Jan Black & Laura Owens on the Nobody Told Me! podcast to discuss all things Second Brain. We discussed: How to improve your digital notes by learning about traditional notetaking Why no one app will save you How to organize the creative process The chronic medical condition that jump-started Building a Second Brain…

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