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…
The most important practice that I recommend everyone adopt for their personal productivity is a Weekly Review – a regular reflection on their priorities and goals designed to give them a sense of clarity for the upcoming week. Whether you adopt the Getting Things Done method or something else isn’t important. It doesn’t matter whether you…
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
Writing is its own reward. – Henry Miller The Writing Habit Writing forces you to think. It’s nature’s way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is. The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are clear thinkers. As a wise man once said:…
Technology has transformed every aspect of business, from the tools we use to communicate and collaborate, to how products and services are built and delivered, to how we conceive of organizations and communities. But it hasn’t yet transformed the heart of how we manage and execute work – project management (PM). A new paradigm for…
By James Stuber @uberstuber Alex the Plant Manager has returned home from a hectic day at the factory. Hoping to unwind, he decides to try a new game. Alex has loved trains since childhood, so he is delighted when he discovers Mini Metro. The clean, minimalist game promises to be a nice reprieve from his…
One of the most common questions I receive is how I write long-form blog posts. And especially how I write them frequently, at high quality, drawing on numerous sources. It’s taken me a long time to be able to make the process explicit. The Building a Second Brain course is basically my long-form writing workflow…
Just a month ago, I had ~100,000 work-related and personal emails in my inbox. Nearly 60,000 of them were unread. I had haphazard systems of tags, folders, and various inbox extensions to help me manage it. Suffice it to say, my email organization “system” (if you could call it that) wasn’t working. me everytime I…
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
In Part I, I explained Progressive Summarization, a method for easily creating highly discoverable notes. In Part II, I gave you many examples and metaphors of the method in action.
In Part III, I will give you further guidelines on how to make Progressive Summarization (PS) a part of your daily work. They have been
These are Layer 1 notes I took on an article on postrationalism, a topic I’m interested in. This is 373 words, which would take about 2 minutes to read at an average reading speed. 2 minutes doesn’t seem like much, but when you consider that these notes could have no relevance to the task at
Modern digital tools make it easy to “capture” information from a wide variety of sources. We know how to snap a picture, type out some notes, record a video, or scan a document. Getting this content from the outside world into the digital world is trivial.
It’s even easier to get content that is already