Note-taking

5 Things I Learned From the Anti-Book Club

Last year I launched the Anti-Book Club, my own take on the tradition of book clubs. The idea is simple: instead of everyone in the group reading the same book, duplicating time and effort, we each read a different book on the same topic. Then each person summarizes the book they read, and I compile…

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Using Notion as Your Second Brain

This post was originally published by Kim Sia on SimKimSia.com For productivity topics, I follow Tiago Forte (blog here, twitter @fortelabs). He has a course that I have taken before called Building A Second Brain (BASB). It covers the use of modern toolsets such as Todoist and Evernote to augment your human brain, leading to a higher performance boost…

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Second Brain Case Study: Building a Second Brain in Higher Education

This is a presentation and conversation with Professor Wess Daniels and a group of professors, college staff, and undergraduate students from the 6 classes that have learned Progressive Summarization at Guilford College in North Carolina. It includes a slide presentation with key themes and learnings from their experience, a live demonstration of performing progressive summarization collaboratively…

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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:

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Second Brain Case Study: Progressive Summarization as Religious Experience

This is a conversation with Allison Andrade, an undergraduate student at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was one of several cohorts of students taught to use Progressive Summarization by a professor, Wes Daniels (who has written about that experience here). In this wide-ranging conversation we talk about: My background in religion and how…

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