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’ve published a few ebooks over the past year, and have plans for a couple more before the end of the year. In contrast to fears about the “end of reading,” my self-publishing experiences have led me to believe that we’re in the midst of a transformational revolution in reading. But it remains to be…
Imagine if we had a learning curriculum for modern knowledge work. This curriculum would reliably produce elite performers, training them in the fundamental skills required to thrive in the digital age. It would impart concrete skills that could be generalized to any kind of knowledge work, not just one discipline or career path. In our…
Reading through the previous three parts, a question probably popped into your mind: does this apply only to text?
It’s an important one, because we are becoming a less text-based society. Ubiquitous cameras, real-time video chats, and visual displays of information have become the norm. Which means expressions of creativity will increasingly take on these forms.
You enter your kitchen for a quick lunch: how is it exactly that your brain solves the problem “prepare lunch as efficiently as possible”? Your brain effortlessly, almost instantaneously “assembles” a diverse mix of problem-solving resources on the spot. These “resources” can include knowledge, tools, or structures, and can be: Mental: knowledge, experience, intuition Physical:…
Note from Tiago: This is the first in a series of guest posts I hope to eventually publish, showing how knowledge management principles and techniques, from my course Building a Second Brain and elsewhere, can be implemented in a wide variety of software programs. Check out the Part 2 here. Getting Things Done (GTD) is…
In Part I, I described a new kind of worker called the Full-Stack Freelancer.
I argued that more affordable and user-friendly software-as-a-service (SaaS), among other things, has enabled individuals to manage portfolios of complementary income streams, instead of focusing on only one specialized skill.
But you may have noticed something missing: what is in the stack?
Here’s mine:
On 10/25/17 I delivered a talk at ReactiveConf, an annual conference held in Bratislava, Slovakia centered on the React Javascript front-end development technology and ecosystem. Here are a few followup resources: #1 The slides from the talk: #2 A followup blog post I wrote, presenting the same ideas in the context of massively increasing project throughput…
Matthew Crawford’s book The World Beyond Your Head (Affiliate Link) is the most important book I’ve read in quite some time. It makes a sweeping argument about what it means to be an ethical, autonomous human in the digital age. Crawford draws a strong connection from the distractions buzzing on our phones, to the evolving…
At the end of 2014 I received an email informing me that I had read over a million words in the ‘read it later’ app Pocket over the course of the year. This number by itself isn’t impressive, considering our daily intake of information is equivalent to 34 gigabytes, 100,000 words, or 174 newspapers, depending…
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs This post was republished on the Evernote blog. To learn more, check out our online bootcamp on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain. Let’s imagine how you would use Evernote if you had a brain. I previously explained how the standard tag-based approach basically contradicts everything we know…
Why the tagging concept in Evernote and everywhere else sucks By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs This post was republished on the Evernote blog There is an axiom in the productivity world that goes something like this: “Tags are inherently superior to folders” The reasons seem compelling at first glance: Tagging allows the same files/notes/items to exist…
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