Tiago Forte's Blog, page 12

The Story Behind Building a Second Brain | Google Talk

It was the experience of a lifetime to have my own Google Talk. I shared the story of how my chronic pain condition was the catalyst to build a Second Brain. 

I also discussed:

How to know what to capture in your Second BrainThe power of taking notes on the goHow to effectively preserve the context of your notesMoving beyond the fear of externalizing private thoughtsAnd much more… 

Watch my full Google Talk:

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The Story Behind Building a Second Brain | Google Talk appeared first on Forte Labs.

Tiago’s Ultimate Guide to Traditional Book Publishing

Publishing my book has been the experience of a lifetime.

I’ve learned so much about myself, discovered new horizons of creativity, met so many fascinating people, and heard stories from all over the world about how my message has made a difference for others.

Writing a book gave me the opportunity to dig deep into my soul and find out who I was and what I was truly made of. And it has already transformed the trajectory of my career and business through the vastly greater level of exposure it has brought to my ideas.

I encourage any writer who has an important message to share and wants to do so on the biggest possible scale to consider publishing a book. It is a singular experience that will be one of the achievements you are most proud of when you look back on your life.

Over the past few years, I’ve done my best to document every small step of my learning and progress toward publication. I’ve collected, analyzed, and summarized a ton of resources that helped me navigate the process, from finding an agent to landing a book deal to writing the manuscript.

Today, I want to pay back some of the incalculable generosity shown to me by so many friends, mentors, advisors, and of course, loyal readers and share back my best advice on how to follow in my footsteps.

Each of the links below will take you to a separate resource I’ve shared in the past. In this article, I’ll weave them together into a coherent process you can follow from start to finish. 

The Four Pathways of Modern Book Publishing

This is an opinionated explanation of the 4 main ways to publish a book these days, including my reasoning for choosing the most difficult one: Traditional publishing. 

The Case for Traditional Book Publishing

This piece explains my rationale for seeking a traditional publisher instead of self-publishing my book, and why having an online audience and a portfolio of digital products paradoxically makes traditional publishing more attractive, not less.

My 10-Step Book Publishing Strategy

This is the overarching strategy I used for launching my book in very broad strokes. We are currently between steps 7-9 in this plan, and so far it’s gone remarkably according to plan.

The Complete Guide to Landing a Book Deal Series

When I first signed with my literary agent, she recommended I read the book The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published to give me a map of what the journey would look like. I decided to summarize the massive book in my own words to fully internalize its advice. This 8-part series serves as a comprehensive roadmap to traditional book publishing from start to finish.

The Building a Second Brain Book Proposal

Here’s the exact proposal that led to a 4-way competitive auction among major U.S. publishers and a winning bid of $325k, which I’m told was a spectacular outcome, especially for a first-time author.

BASB Book Updates

A collection of play-by-play monthly updates I sent out to my followers over two years as my book progressed. 

Book Pre-Order Bonuses

A complete list of the pre-order bonuses I offered, which we’re continuing to offer after the release date.

The Psychological Toll of Writing a Book

To balance out the enthusiasm and optimism, here’s an honest recount of the psychological, emotional, and physical toll this project took on me and my family. We always hear about the successes and the victories, but I want to be transparent about the personal impacts as well.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Tiago’s Ultimate Guide to Traditional Book Publishing appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Power of Offloading Knowledge | The Small Business Radio Show

I joined Barry Moltz on The Small Business Radio Show to discuss why you don’t need more time in the day to be more productive. 

We also dived into: 

Why learning isn’t just for examsThe steps to be effective at digital notetaking Why distilling knowledge is so importantHow to make knowledge personal

Listen to the full episode on The Small Business Radio Show, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. My segment begins at 19:00. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The Power of Offloading Knowledge | The Small Business Radio Show appeared first on Forte Labs.

Why a Second Brain Transcends Software | Free Time Podcast

I joined Jenny Blake on the Free Time Podcast to discuss how an email you send to friends can become an information asset as well as the link between creativity and productivity. 

We also dived into: 

Why you should “only start projects that are already 80% done.”How to apply the “campsite rule” to information in your businessHow our Second Brain transcends software Why Twitter is a laboratory And much more… 

Listen to the full episode on the  Free Time Podcast, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Why a Second Brain Transcends Software | Free Time Podcast appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Psychological Toll of Writing a Book

(While Having Our First Child During a Global Pandemic)

Writing and publishing my book Building a Second Brain was by far the longest and hardest project I’ve ever completed. 

From the first call with the agent (who would eventually represent me) in January 2019 until June 2022 when the book was released to the world, it took almost exactly 3.5 years. That’s 10% of my life! 

Along the way, it reshaped every aspect of my life – my psychology, my routines, my relationships, my time management, my energy levels, my business decisions. Everthing was geared towards arriving at a final manuscript.

Before it fades from my memory, I want to share the part of the story that usually goes untold: what it cost my biological brain and my body to write this book.

It all comes down to the immense, inhuman amount of energy it takes to move a project of this magnitude forward step by step. Every decision, every action, every edit to the manuscript has to be made while keeping in mind the totality of the whole. If I wanted to make a single change – such as changing “digital notes app” to simply “notes app” – that couldn’t be done in isolation. I have to then consider not only all the other places that term was used, but a cascade of other implications that spring from that one-minute edit.

“Will it be clear that I’m talking about software?” “Will the reader understand that it can be a program on their computer as well as an app on their smartphone?” “Is there such a thing as a non-digital notes app and would this advice apply to it?” Those are just a few of the multitude of questions that I’ve suddenly created.

And this level of complexity potentially applies to any of the 65,000 words the manuscript contains. Sometimes a future edit means previous edits have to be revisited again. And every word has to be absolutely final, since it will be printed thousands of times, potentially translated into dozens of languages, and can never be changed.

All this means that absurd amounts of time went into even the smallest detail of the manuscript. For example, I’d spend 10-20 hours writing about every facet of “knowledge building blocks” – publishing an in-depth article about it on my blog, testing it with hundreds of people, refining and distilling the most resonant points – to ultimately produce just one short section of one chapter. Many times I’d spend a similar amount of time for an output that ended up becoming a footnote, or being cut altogether.

Writing the manuscript meant treating my own time like it was worth nothing. Like hours and hours of my time were worth saving readers 1% of the mental bandwidth needed to grasp an idea. 

The only way I know how to write effectively so that others will understand is to run a simulated model of the reader’s mind in my own mind, like two operating systems running on the same computer. And then I rapidly switch back and forth between those two points of view while making a constant stream of micro-decisions at various levels of abstraction simultaneously. This is also the most mentally taxing kind of thinking I know of, like an overclocked computer expending every resource while ignoring the heat building up inside.

Which brings us back to the subject of energy. 

Time by itself doesn’t convey the toll writing this book had on me. It took thousands of hours, but hours alone cannot explain the psychic and emotional impact of bringing it to completion. Besides the raw biochemical energy all this required, the kicker is that I had to truly care – to perform emotional labor on behalf of many thousands of people I would never meet. I had to do it far in advance, anticipating their questions and doubts, adapting my advice for the most likely challenges, all while keeping everything at a level of simplicity that a child could understand. I had to insist on finding the absolute best and simplest way to phrase a sentence as if someone’s life depended on it.

The only way to convey what this took is to describe some of the things I didn’t have energy for as a result. I used every self-care and self-awareness tool I had at my disposal – the most regular daily meditation of my life, like a lifeline to my sanity; deep emotional fluidity work through working with a coach named Joe Hudson; all the skills I had learned from Landmark and Tony Robbins and Michael Singer; and of course plenty of walks in nature in and around Long Beach where we live.

Yet even with all these skills, tools, and resources, there were days when I didn’t have the energy to take a shower, and would just drag myself from my bed to my desk and back again in the evening. There were many times I couldn’t summon the energy to make myself a sandwich, and would order Chipotle to be delivered so I could get right back to writing. Or I’d wear the same outfit day after day because I didn’t have it in me to choose another one, much less do laundry. It was like a window into depression at times, a deep deficit of life force as every ounce of my available energy went into writing this book. 

I quickly learned that there were really only a few precious hours each morning, starting almost the moment I woke up, when I truly had the energy and clear mind to make real progress. The rest of my time turned into rest and recovery, planning and distilling my notes, pondering thorny writing problems, or trying to keep the remainder of my life at bay. 

My usual morning routine went out the window so that I could take advantage of those precious hours. I fought like hell to defend those hours from any meeting, call, or appointment, because I not only knew that I would lose an entire morning of focus time if I had even one call, the following day would also be even harder because I’d have been away for two days at that point. 

As the size and scope of the manuscript expanded and I had to load more into my brain just to be able to write one more sentence, my window of productive focus time shrunk even further. Toward the end, I’d optimize my whole day to get perhaps one hour when real progress was being made.

At the same time, I was leaning hard on nearly every member of both mine and my wife’s families. It is no exaggeration to say that it took two entire families stepping in to fulfill our basic responsibilities as adults in order to see this book through. My mother-in-law watched our infant son for 5 hours per day, 5 days per week, an almost unheard of luxury during the COVID pandemic. My wife’s 3 sisters and brother took care of him, came over to babysit, or helped us with other errands almost every day. My family lives further away and served as occasional babysitters, a much-needed weekend getaway, or support on other projects such as organizing our home and remodeling our garage into a home office.

At several points when I was facing imminent deadlines, I went on 4-day writing retreats. Staying at hotels or Airbnbs a couple hours from home, I’d write from morning till night. I’ll share the design of those writing retreats later, but they required an even more heroic effort from our support network to fill in for our family’s needs while I was away. At one point, my mom stayed with my wife for several days to help her. A cast of babysitters, both family members and friends, took turns watching our son so that we could make it through. 

I had to become very comfortable with asking for help, which was a sharp departure from my usual dedication to total self-reliance. Almost every day it seemed like I had to ask a new person for help with one thing or another. I’m shocked and amazed that hardly anyone ever said no.

We also spent an absurd amount of money to save even the tiniest amount of time or energy. A house cleaner 3 times a week, who we eventually asked to take over doing our laundry because we weren’t up to the task. A meal delivery service providing almost every meal. Every purchase ordered online and delivered to save a trip to the store. A personal assistant we hired to help with administrative tasks in the business, but also for the simplest household tasks we found ourselves unable to get to for weeks. I’ll never forget asking her to help us buy a new dishwasher when we were simply unable to summon the mental energy required.

Much of this also coincided with the birth of our first child in October 2020, which created a backdrop of sleep deprivation and general chaos during this period. I gained the most weight ever and developed all sorts of aches and pains in my back and shoulders from sitting for hours a day at my desk. To combat these developments, I hired a personal trainer twice a week to keep me at a minimum level of fitness and worked with a wonderful massage therapist on deep fascial massage to correct my distorted posture and bad habits. I also hired a business coach to help me surface emotional blockages and see blindspots, which gave me tremendous relief and clarity. Basically, I spent lavishly on anyone who could solve a problem or relieve a symptom for me in an effort to preserve every bit of energy possible. 

I keep saying “we” because so much of the burden of the responsibilities I had to push aside fell on my wife Lauren. She stepped back from working in the business with me and became our “household CEO,” making sure that each of us and our son were getting our needs met. There were dark days when we were so close to our limits, or beyond them, searching desperately for any unused resource we could find. We had to draw on every communication tool we had ever learned, years of training in emotional intelligence and coaching and listening, to survive the stress this dramatically increased load placed on our relationship. This is one reason I dedicated the book to her.

As all this was going on, we also had a business to run. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we grew from 2 to 10 full-time equivalent employees, which meant payroll to meet, staff to manage, and decisions to be made that impacted people’s livelihoods. While the book advance was multiple six figures (a great blessing for a first-time author) it was also taxed heavily, paid out in installments over a long time, and completely spent before it was even received on the best editor and promotional agency money could buy. That meant the business was the true funding engine of this entire endeavor, fueling dozens of projects, full-time and contractor hires, and investments in email list growth, video production, social media marketing, and brand design, among others. 

The online course that is our flagship product had to keep going and growing to fund our lives and the creation of the book, while continuing to improve and innovate in its own right. About midway through writing the manuscript, at one of our staff retreats, our team had to practically stage an intervention to get more access to me because I had sequestered myself so completely that they weren’t able to move forward on critical decisions. I’m sure the business suffered compared to what would have happened otherwise.

I drew on every mind available to me. My team constantly surfaced new insights or ideas or feedback from our students about what was helping them succeed in building a Second Brain. I sent drafts and had discussions with many dozens of friends, collaborators, and advisors in our network, poking and prodding their brains to give me just one more juicy turn of phrase or vivid expression I could use. I constantly polled my Twitter audience for alternative names for technical terms, or ideas of illuminating metaphors, or examples of a certain concept. 

Any time I encountered a kind of thinking that I thought someone else could do at least as well as me, I turned to them. Over time I found that writing a book is mostly a matter of seeing very familiar ideas from a new perspective, so I constantly borrowed their beginner’s eyes and beginner’s mind to help me see what I was trying to express as if for the first time.

I also relied heavily on my editor. I knew from the beginning that I needed not only someone extremely skilled and smart, but with a wealth of experience and credibility that would allow them to stand up to me and push back on my opinions. I can be a stubborn bastard, so I try to surround myself with others who are equally strong-willed. I ended up working with Janet Goldstein, who edited the book Getting Things Done, a key source of inspiration for my work. That authority allowed her to shape the writing in a way that was far more than correcting mistakes. There were times she pushed so hard on certain points I almost got angry. But ultimately, her ability to turn my raw material into a form that anyone could pick off the shelf and understand was crucial. 

My agent and publisher also gave me tons of useful advice, helping me understand how the non-fiction book market works, how the reading public evaluates books and the ideas in them, and how to build not just a piece of writing but a scalable product that could drive our business for years to come.

The most difficult aspect of my book writing experience to express is what it was like funneling every last bit of my excitement, enthusiasm, and passion into this book. If I listened to a beautiful song and felt moved by it, I would immediately try to turn that energy to productive use. The pleasure of every meal became a salve for the pain of pushing myself too hard. Friendships got whittled down to the minimum necessary for social survival, which was somewhat aided by the risks of the pandemic. My entire psychology – what I thought about in my free time, what I was interested and curious about, all casual hobbies and intellectual pursuits – they all got warped to serve the needs of this all-consuming project, like spacetime being distorted around an invisible black hole. I think it will take many months to fully recover from the effects of that distortion.

I’m normally an open, curious person with many ongoing interests at any given time. In a word, the natural way my mind works is divergent. But that all had to change for the last couple of years. Instead of moving like a pendulum between divergence and convergence every few months – starting new projects and bringing them to completion before moving on to something new – I had to purposefully enter the longest and most focused period of convergence of my life. I had to say no to every new project that didn’t directly advance the book. I had to postpone every subject I wanted to learn about if it wasn’t necessary to complete the book. Every creative outlet or art form or fun diversion that wasn’t contributing to the book project had to be shut down, postponed, or canceled.

This was all the more strange as I was writing a book on creative self-expression. My own expression had to be channeled into the most narrow and exacting sliver of output imaginable. The tension between the desire to say what I wanted to say boldly and unequivocally, and the need to put it into the precise language of non-fiction self-help, often felt like trying to scream but having no mouth.

To be able to write this book from a personal perspective, I had to consciously slow down my own rate of personal experimentation and innovation. I knew the contents of the manuscript had to remain valid for at least 10 years, which meant I needed to focus on evergreen principles and mature software platforms that weren’t likely to change soon. That meant identifying what worked for the broadest set of people, recommending the most mainstream software, and giving advice that had already stood the test of time. My usual inclination is to jump headfirst into the exciting wild west frontier of personal knowledge management, which during this period was the emerging “networked thought” paradigm represented by platforms like Roam and Obsidian. But I knew all that would take years to mature, and in the meantime would just be a distraction. I chose to retreat from the frontier, and to make my own Second Brain into the very embodiment of the accessible, approachable, mainstream approach to notetaking I was advocating for.

Lastly, my constant challenge was finding the motivation to continue. I wish I could say that the ultimate positive impact this book would have on my readers was the only source of motivation I needed. But for most of this period that was a far-off, abstract outcome. I had to discover smaller, more immediate sources of motivation along the way. Some weeks, it was the inherent interestingness of the material. At other times, it was the discovery of illuminating new metaphors or framings, or the joy in solving an intractable logical problem. And sometimes it felt like scraping the bottom of an empty barrel, searching and searching for just one more calorie of desire to eke out just one more page, one more paragraph, one more sentence. Finding new sources of motivation is in itself an act of creativity, requiring courage, vulnerability, and the willingness to hope just like any other creative medium.

It wasn’t just that I had to motivate myself, but everyone around me – every member of my team, every member of my family. Making so many bold claims and predictions of absolute certainty that all this would ultimately be successful required something like blind faith. I believed because I had decided to believe, in the complete absence of evidence and results. I drew on the mindset of faith I remembered from my Christian youth – even the tools of a discarded past identity served as tools in my psychological toolkit. 

I tell you all this because I don’t want to romanticize the cost of a creative endeavor of this magnitude. Even with an abundance of resources of every kind, an incredibly supportive community on every side, a powerful network of advisors and allies, and of course, the supreme privilege of being able to draw down all these resources for the benefit of a creative project. Even with a Second Brain taking care of all the factual details for me, it still exacted a tremendous toll. It’s so easy to focus on the strategies, the tactics, and the successful outcome. It all seems inevitable in hindsight. But it didn’t feel that way while it was happening. It felt like betting everything on an almost impossible outcome.

I share this story with you because I believe all parts of the creative process are important and worthy. They all deserve to be brought into the light and understood. In a way, this is the message of my book: to demystify creativity and remove it from its pedestal so it can take its place alongside the other mundane, practical tools we use to live our lives. 

Now that it’s finished, not only can I say it was all worth it, it was also the most meaningful and profoundly transformational experience of my life. I am a completely different person now than I was before. I discovered what I am truly capable of. I found out just how much the people in my life love and support me. I learned that I can rely on others and that doing so is so much more gratifying than doing everything myself. I witnessed what is possible when a community rallies around an inspiring goal and gives it everything they have. I uncovered new depths to my marriage, my psyche, and my emotions – depths accessible only in the moments I went beyond what I thought were my limits. 

Whatever level of success the book achieves, these experiences and lessons are what make this grand journey ultimately worth it.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The Psychological Toll of Writing a Book appeared first on Forte Labs.

How to Deal With Information Overwhelm | Modern Wisdom Podcast

I joined Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom Podcast to discuss how to be productive while still being creative and how to make the mindset shift from content consumer to content creator. 

We also dived into:How to make productivity part of your day-to-day life and avoid productivity obsessionThe power of divergence and convergenceHow to become effective at capturing informationLearning how to organize and distill informationThe purpose of a Second BrainMy 5 most used appsHow to make productivity less of a chore

Watch our chat below or listen to the audio version on Modern Wisdom Podcast, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post How to Deal With Information Overwhelm | Modern Wisdom Podcast appeared first on Forte Labs.

Moving Beyond Self-Improvement | Interintellect Supersalon With Visakan Veerasamy

I joined “friendly, ambitious nerd” Visakan Veerasamy for a 2-hour Interintellect Supersalon about the secrets of living a good life.

We also discussed: 

What lies beyond utility and analytical thinkingHow we can open ourselves to wonder, joy and community How we can move beyond self-improvement And much more…

Watch the full discussion here: 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Moving Beyond Self-Improvement | Interintellect Supersalon With Visakan Veerasamy appeared first on Forte Labs.

Project People vs. Area People: Are You Running a Sprint Or a Marathon?

When I started my career, all the work I was doing felt like a giant blob labeled “work.”

The tasks I was responsible for stretched out before me toward an endless horizon. No matter how hard I worked or how many hours I logged, that horizon never seemed to get any closer.

But eventually I began to notice a pattern: there were “chunks” of work that seemed to start and stop, and “flows” of work that seemed to run continuously.

Once I noticed this simple pattern, I began to see it everywhere. 

In physics, we know light is both a discrete particle and a flowing wave. In supply chain logistics, we have both discrete stocks and flows of material. In mathematics, we have discrete numbers and continuous numbers.

I began to organize my work according to these two categories: the chunks became “projects” and the flows became “areas of responsibility.” 

I had no way of knowing that this miniscule change would dramatically reshape my relationship to my productivity, my creativity, and my commitments.

Let me introduce you to the most effective way I’ve found to organize my work and life: by project and area of responsibility.

What are projects and areas?

A project is any endeavor that has 1) a desired outcome that will enable you to mark it “complete,” and 2) a deadline or timeframe by which you’d like it done.

An area of responsibility has 1) a standard to be maintained that 2) is continuous over time.

In short, projects end, while areas continue indefinitely.

Every project has a corresponding area that it falls within. For example:

Running a marathon is a project, whereas Health is an areaPublishing a book is a project, whereas Writing is an areaSaving 3 months’ worth of expenses is a project, whereas Finances is an areaA vacation to Thailand is a project, whereas Travel is an areaPlanning an anniversary dinner is a project, whereas Spouse is an area

In all these examples, the projects have completion dates. They are either complete or incomplete at any given time.

Projects finish when the desired outcome is achieved (or fails to be achieved) – the marathon has been run, the book is published, the savings are tucked away, the vacation is over, or the anniversary dinner is successful. And you’d like each of these things to happen by a certain time, whether that is an externally imposed deadline or just a personal preference.

But just because a project is over, that doesn’t mean you never have to pay attention to that area of your life again.

Every area of responsibility has a standard to be maintained. And there is no end date or final outcome. Your performance in this area may wax and wane over time, but the standard continues indefinitely and requires a certain level of attention at all times.

In the examples above, the areas have no particular outcome to be achieved. There is no finish line you can reach that allows you to “complete” managing your health, or “achieve” writing once and for all, or “check off” finances as an ongoing concern, or never have to worry about travel or your spouse again.

Areas are crucial to your wellbeing, security, fulfillment, and peace of mind. Whereas projects have outcomes, areas have standards of performance that you want to maintain.

For example, if you’re responsible for an area like leading product development, there is a standard of performance (or a “quality bar”) for the product you are responsible for. That may include maintaining its speed and performance, fixing bugs, and approving new updates to be released. Quality and performance may wax and wane over time, but if it ever dips too far below a certain level for too long, there will be consequences. Not only do you seek to maintain that standard, you may even want to “raise the bar” and improve it over time.

For managing your finances, your standard may be that you pay all your bills on time and provide for your family’s needs. For being a homeowner, it may be that you do your household chores and maintain the safety and security of your home. For parenting, it may be that you spend quality time with your kids every evening and make sure they are always loved and protected.

Once you view your life through the lens of discrete projects and continuous areas, it becomes clear that both of these structures are essential. Projects bring you excitement, achievement, and recognition, whereas areas bring you balance, peace, and meaning. 

But they can only do that when you consciously feed both. 

Projects and areas are interdependent

Projects and areas depend on each other at a deep level.

Let’s say you start a project to apply for a new job. It has a desired outcome – to land a job – and a preferred time frame – by the end of the year. In order for this new project to succeed, you will need to draw on the order and energy you’ve cultivated as part of your areas. 

For example, you’ll need to conduct interviews on Zoom, which means your home environment better be reasonably tidy. You might need to dip into your savings between jobs, so your finances will need to support that. Looking for a job can be stressful, so the standard you’ve maintained for your health and supportive relationships will be crucial.

A project is much like a rocket taking off from a launchpad. It is an explosion of energy toward an objective, like a rocket pushing against gravity before finally hitting escape velocity and reaching orbit. Your areas are like the stable infrastructure that has been built up over time and enables that rocket to take off: the launch pad, the scaffolding, the cooling systems, and the command center.

In this way, projects and areas feed and reinforce each other. By keeping your areas of responsibility healthy and thriving, you are building up reserves of strength. Those reserves can then be spent in an explosive burst of energy toward a goal that matters to you. 

Every project requires a “heavy lift” to some degree, but those heavy lifts are far more powerful and effective (and brief) when you’ve already been collecting material in a “slow burn.” It is only when heavy lifts become a chronic, default way of approaching everything that they lead to burnout and exhaustion.

I’ve noticed that most people tend to favor either projects or areas in the way they manage their energy. Understanding this natural tendency is the first step toward building on our strengths while shoring up our weaknesses.

Project people vs. Area people

“Project people” are good at sprints. Give them a clear goal and a path to get there, and they will ferociously chase after it with everything they have. They are like elite sprinters, able to exert huge amounts of energy over short distances. 

But the weakness of sprinters is that once they’ve reached their goal, they will often have trouble keeping it going. They will often change direction and run after the next goal, leaving their past achievements to wither. Sprinters are prone to starting many things and getting obsessed for a short time, before moving abruptly to something else.

“Area people” excel at marathons. Send them on a long journey with some supplies and they will doggedly keep at it for as long as it takes. They are like marathon runners, able to maintain a steady flow of energy and keep pushing forward across long distances. 

The weakness of marathoners is that they often have trouble generating a lot of power on short notice. When an opportunity opens up that requires quick, decisive action, they’ll have difficulty changing direction and drawing down their reserves to chase it down. Marathoners will tend to stubbornly maintain their current direction and follow through on existing plans even when the situation has changed and requires a different approach.

Knowing which tendency you favor is an important starting point. If you can learn to master your natural energy pattern and know how to activate it consciously, you’ll have a capability akin to a superpower. 

But eventually, you’ll want to round out your strengths by addressing your weaknesses. You can choose to consciously cultivate the other end of the spectrum, learning to identify whether a given situation requires a project or an area. Once you know whether you’re working with a project or area, you can adopt the right mindset and take the most helpful approach for the challenge at hand.

Projects require you to be laser-focused, to ferociously drive toward an outcome, to overcome or circumvent obstacles, and to ignore distractions along the way. Areas, on the other hand, require mindfulness, balance, and reflection. This is the realm of habits, rituals, and intentional communities. Whereas projects tend to be more black and white, areas require more introspection and self-awareness because it takes more nuance to decide if you are meeting your standard in a given area.

Through my coaching and teaching, I’ve come to believe that even the smallest confusion between these two fundamental categories is a deeply rooted cause of many people’s recurring challenges with creating the life they want. 

If you have a project that you are treating like an area (for example, trying to write a book in 30 minutes a day) it will feel like it’s taking forever with no discernible progress. If you have an area that you are treating like a project (like trying to lose 10 pounds as a one-time goal), you’re likely to revert right back after it’s been achieved because you didn’t put in place any mechanism for maintaining that new standard.

If you are a “Project person” and want to improve your ability to sustain your areas, here are some techniques you can try:

Adopt a morning or evening routineSet limits to your working hoursTake regular breaks and walks in natureJournal and write out your internal anxieties and thoughtsCreate a meditation habit (or other mindful habit)Set your intentions each day, week, month, or yearEvaluate your schedule for a balance of intense work and healthy, mindful activities

If you are an “Area person” who wants to improve your ability to execute on projects, here are some techniques you can try:

Set a deadline with consequencesUse “timeboxing” to concentrate your energy outputMake a promise to someone that you’ll deliver by a certain timeSchedule a meeting or presentation during which you’ll unveil your workReduce the scope of the project and drop features as the deadline approachesBreak the project down into smaller pieces and set milestones for each one to be finished byDesign your working environment to promote focus by removing distractions and notifications

A holistically flourishing human life requires a healthy balance of exciting short-term projects and steady long-term areas. When they work together fluidly they allow our true potential to shine. 

But once in a while, you may want to tilt that balance in favor of projects. Here’s why…

The explosive power of projects

Projects and areas make up the first two categories of my PARA organizing method. 

That is no accident – a Second Brain can be thought of as a cognitive support system for both executing projects and maintaining areas, which is why those two categories are front and center in how I recommend you organize your digital life.

When you launch a new project, you have to set aside many of your usual habits, routines, and boundaries for a time. In order to recruit the necessary energy for liftoff, you have to let go of some of the structures that you normally rely on to stay balanced.

For example, when you’re about to close a big sales contract with an important client, and every decision is pivotal, that isn’t the time to rigidly stick to your gym routine. When it’s the middle of the night and you’re on the precipice of a major breakthrough in a piece you’re writing, that isn’t the time to dogmatically conform to your usual bedtime. When a window of opportunity opens in front of you, all your clever strategies, productivity systems, meditation rituals, self-reflection practices, and mindful habits may well be liabilities. 

When you temporarily let go of control in this way, a huge amount of extra energy becomes available to you. In essence, you give up the ability to steer where you’re going in exchange for more acceleration and momentum. If you insist on always perfectly maintaining all of your areas at all times, you’ll never gain enough speed to take off from the runway. It’s better to accumulate deficits in those areas temporarily and pay them off later once liftoff has been achieved.

We all know the importance of work-life balance and healthy boundaries, but once in a while we have to let all that go and focus every ounce of energy we have on a singular outcome. This is, by definition, unsustainable. But that is why it’s so important to move fast and break through barriers as quickly as possible: the faster you reach your objective, the sooner you can stop to rest and recover. 

You may be wondering why you’d want to do any of this. Why let go of structure and routine? Why are productive explosions desirable or necessary? For one simple reason: they allow you to get an extraordinary amount done in a short period of time.

I can trace most of the major breakthroughs in my career to just a handful of brief productivity explosions: the 2-week period I outlined the first version of my Building a Second Brain course, which became the flagship product for my business; the week I holed up in a hotel in Portugal and wrote nearly the entirety of my series on Just-in-Time Project Management, shaping my thinking for years to come; and a couple 4-day writing retreats during which I made most of the progress on my recently published book. 

To be clear, I was completely exhausted by the end of each of these sprints. But once they came to an end, I had made so much progress that I had full permission to step back from my work and take the time I needed to recover.

Consistent habits and “1% gains” work for some kinds of progress, but not others. If you’re trying to complete a major creative work, such as a book, website, proposal, or event, for example, these kinds of projects can’t be moved forward by tinkering with them for 30 minutes per day. They are informationally complex, which means you have to spend a lot of time loading up context into your brain before you take even one step. For such endeavors, only sprints will work.

Modern knowledge work is so complex and demanding, it is wise to think of ourselves as “cognitive athletes.” Unlike professional athletes, however, we have to train our mental fitness to run both sprints and marathons at different times.

Some seasons of our lives are all about the journey, but others are more like sprints.

Source: The Universe Will Now Explode for Your Pleasure by Venkatesh Rao

Thank you to Julia Saxena, Beth, Ashpreet Singh, Mike Schmitz, Kevin Mooney, Jeff Brown, and Gavin Rodriguez for their feedback and suggestions on this piece.

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The True Meaning of Productivity | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

I sat down in person with my friend, productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal, for a 1-hour deep dive conversation.

We covered a lot of ground, including…

How having a child impacted my productivityMy journey into the world of productivityHow to keep up with managing information flows Is the world moving away from productivity?What productivity means to meWhy building a business is at the core of what it means to make a positive impact on the worldThe Building a Second Brain bookAnd more

Watch the full deep dive below or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The True Meaning of Productivity | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal appeared first on Forte Labs.

How to Create a Knowledge Library | Art of Manliness Podcast

I joined Brett McKay on the Art of Manliness Podcast to talk about why and how we build a Second Brain, how to free up brain capacity, and the importance of information management. 

We also covered:

How to decide what to capture in our Second Brain The importance of a knowledge library The best capture tool on the market And much more… 

Listen to the episode directly on the Art of Manliness Podcast, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post How to Create a Knowledge Library | Art of Manliness Podcast appeared first on Forte Labs.