The Forte Labs Blog

Dedicated to Exploring the Frontier of Modern Productivity

Progressive Summarization III: Guidelines and Principles

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 gathered from several years of using the technique in my own projects, and teaching it in my workshops and courses.

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This Is Product Management Podcast Interview

Here’s my live interview with Mike Fishbein on the This is Product Management podcast: Here’s the original page, with show notes below: Tiago Forte, Founder of Forte Labs, shares his approach to achieving focus in a fast-paced work environment, managing projects with multiple stakeholders, and “building a second brain.” Product managers have many responsibilities. They…

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Progressive Summarization II: Examples and Metaphors

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 hand, it’s a lot of attention to pay for nothing. Especially considering this is dense, challenging material.

For Layer 2, I bolded what I thought were the key points:

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Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes

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 digital from one app to another. We know how to copy and paste text, save an image from a webpage, archive an email attachment, or import a video file.

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Supersizing the Mind: The Science of Cognitive Extension

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:…

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Building a Second Brain in Emacs and Org-Mode

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…

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The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer, Part II: The Stack

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:

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A Productivity Expert Goes to Burning Man

This is the story of my experience at Burning Man 2017. The first day I ran around like a kid at Disneyland, poking my head into every corner, trying to see and try everything. Black Rock City (what the encampment is called for a few weeks each year) is indeed a theme park — except for adults,…

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The Monthly Review is a Systems Check

In The Weekly Review is an Operating System, I detailed the process I go through each week to capture any new open loops, clear my workspaces, and nail down the events and commitments for the week. In this article, I’d like to do the same for my Monthly Review (MR). Because the MR touches on…

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Press, Reviews, Articles, and Case Studies on Building a Second Brain

The following is a collection of customer reviews, interviews, online articles, case studies, and other third-party sources related to my online course on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain. For customer testimonials, click here. We’ll update it periodically with new links. Interviews Interview with Austin Brawner and Andrew Foxwell on The Ecommerce Influence Podcast:…

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The React Productivity Revolution

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…

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