I recently interviewed Federico Gonzalez, an Argentinian educator in Buenos Aires, about his experience teaching some of the methods from my Building a Second Brain course to three groups he works with in Argentina. The first group is sixth-year students at Escuela Técnica del Gran Bs As in the La Matanza municipality of Buenos Aires. They…
This is a summary of my tweetstorm on the history of information technology, drawn from the excellent book Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages by Alex Wright. I mean “information technology” in the broadest possible sense – the methods and tools we use to manage information in all its forms. 1/ This is a tweetstorm…
Now it’s time to look at the JIT Project Manager’s toolkit. How do we put these ideas into practice in our day to day work?
Through Workflow Strategies, a set of practical techniques for executing modern projects. Here is the full list, according to whether they work better for small or large-scale projects, and what
Millions of people around the world have experienced the joy of reading ebooks on Amazon’s Kindle platform. Whether it’s using a dedicated Kindle device, via the Kindle app for iOS or Android, or even for free on a computer, we’ve invested countless hours in reading and learning from these books. But how about all those…
I interviewed the founders of Readwise, Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon, for the October Praxis Town Hall last week. Readwise is a service that’s popular with Praxis readers, allowing you to get more out of what you read by emailing you excerpts you’ve highlighted on Kindle, iBooks, Instapaper, and Highly. By reminding you periodically about the best ideas…
I’ve argued strongly for the category of notes apps as the ideal home of your personal knowledge library, which I call a “second brain.” I believe there are ten core capabilities that digital apps uniquely provide to the note-taking process: Searchability: type in a few characters and see everything that matches, regardless of where it’s…
I recently published my new ebook, a compilation of 19 Praxis posts from 2017, on the Amazon Kindle store. Click here to view it on Amazon (Affiliate Link) Read the Foreword below Foreword from Extend Your Mind This book is made up of 19 essays (or long-form blog posts) published in 2017 on the blog. 2017…
In our course Building a Second Brain, we teach people how to capture, organize, and share their most valuable knowledge and know-how using technology. We call this practice Personal Knowledge Management, or PKM. One of the most common questions I am asked is “Why digital notes?” This article will explain why, out of all the…
I recently sat down with Andrew Gorham for an interview and case study of progressive summarization, a method of summarizing notes in a form that is easily discoverable in the future. It is one of three techniques I teach in our online course Building a Second Brain. Andrew works for BMNT, an innovation consultancy that…
It might seem absurd that something as simple as a method of highlighting could be so important to a person’s productivity and learning. Even I’m surprised that’s turned out to be the case.
But as testimonials and stories have streamed in from people putting it to use around the world, I’ve become convinced that it
In Part 19, I argued that continuously finding new sources of motivation was the most important challenge for knowledge workers, and that the best way to get started was to generate momentum through a series of small wins.
Although Progressive Summarization can bootstrap you to a minimum level of motivation, at some point you do
In Part 18, I introduced the idea that our states of mind come and go in “waves of motivation,” and that we should try to use them to our advantage, instead of forcing our mind to conform to our will.
A “motivational state” is more colloquially known as a “mood.” Moods usually have a negative