Imagine a product manager sitting down with his team on a Monday morning to plan the next week. The main item on the agenda is the decision of whether to create a mobile app for their e-commerce website. The team quickly gets excited about the idea, imagining all the possibilities it could entail. They propose…
It doesn’t have to be a huge project. It doesn’t have to be well-funded or prestigious or public. But it does have to draw something out of you so unexpected that it changes your conception of who you are. The kind of creative project I’m talking about creates an unmistakable inflection point in your life….
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…
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.
Richard Phillips Feynman was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. Born on the outskirts of New York City in 1918, his work in theoretical physics radically reshaped our understanding of the universe we live in at the most fundamental subatomic levels. When it was all said and done, his biography would simply and fittingly be titled Genius.
I talked to Robert Breedlove on the What is Money Show about Building a Second Brain, email, PARA, and more. We covered… What is “Inbox Zero” and is it something you want to aspire to How to organize your email with the “executive approach” How I manage my daily calendar and what tool I use…
I joined Rui Dong from The Upgraded Brain for a wide-ranging conversation about… The link between emotions and learning Just-in-time vs. just-in-case Managing your attention The 30-day one-note-a-day experiment Exploring vs. exploiting Fatherhood and my daily routines And so much more Click below to watch it on YouTube:
(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,…
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…
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…
I joined Francesco D’Alessio, the host of Keep Productive, on his YouTube channel. His mission is to help you find the most suitable productivity tools for your work and life. We discussed: Why I’ve used Evernote for 10 years My favorite capture, to-do, and calendar apps What is the bottleneck to creativity The power of a weekly review…
I sat down with Ryder Caroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal, to discuss all things personal knowledge management (PKM) and the differences between our first and Second Brain. We covered: The differences between PKM and productivity The biggest misconception about PKM The true purpose of PKM How to deal with “data debt” My project-oriented approach…
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