I’ve had some form of a Second Brain (a personal system of knowledge management) for a couple decades now, and during that time it’s been hosted on four different platforms: Paper was sufficient for most of my school years when I didn’t have my own computer (and wouldn’t have been allowed to use one if…
I don’t know about you but I spend a BIG chunk of my workday in my browser (I use Chrome). It’s where I draft landing pages in Google Docs, send emails in ConvertKit, publish blog posts in WordPress and check sales numbers in SamCart. Everything I create becomes ultimately a link, a URL that needs…
I recently completed one of the most powerful exercises I’ve ever invented for delegating aspects of my work to others. After hosting an insightful weekend retreat with other founders last month, some of whom had significantly larger businesses than mine, I realized I was ready to take a major step I’d been contemplating for some…
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.
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…
I recently sat down to attempt something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create a high-quality book summary. As I wrote in my Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books, writing book summaries is one of the very best ways I’ve found to absorb an author’s ideas deeply into…
One of the most common questions I’ve received since the release of Building a Second Brain has been how I used my own Second Brain to write it. There is absolutely no way I could have done this without my Second Brain. I honestly cannot imagine how anyone undertakes an endeavor of this magnitude without some kind of external content management system to depend on.
This is an introduction to Building a Second Brain, the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. How many brilliant ideas have you had and forgotten? How many insights have you failed to take action on? How much useful advice have you slowly forgotten as the years have passed? We…
Our digital world is constantly colliding and overlapping with the digital worlds of others. No one is an island, and that is especially true in our hyperconnected age where information can be so easily shared and intermixed. I’ve long advocated for individuals to create a personal system of knowledge management to help them skillfully navigate…
Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your life – every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research – and exactly where to find it when you needed it.
Mike St. Pierre invited me to speak at his 2022 Nonprofit Productivity Summit. In less than 25 minutes, we covered… Why I’m not a fan of digital minimalism The simple mindset shift to step out of the information overload crisis How taking notes can have a miraculous impact on you and your career The under-appreciated benefits…
I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Jason Frand, THE personal knowledge management (PKM) pioneer. In 1999, Dr. Jason Frand and Carol Hixon wrote the revolutionary paper ‘Personal Knowledge Management: Who, What, Why, When, Where, How?’. This article coined the term PKM and changed its trajectory forever. In this interview, we discussed: Where the idea for PKM…
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