Tiago Forte's Blog, page 14

The Motivation Behind Building a Second Brain | Focused Podcast

I joined David Sparks and Mike Schmitz on the Focused Podcast to discuss my new book, why building knowledge assets is important, and how to flip the switch from consumer to creator.

We also dived into: 

Why information overwhelm can be a positive problemThe motivation behind Building a Second BrainThe relation between productivity and creativityWhy capturing more information is not always betterThe power of resonance

The show is available on all platforms including: 

Apple podcastSpotifyRelay FM

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.

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A Life of Creativity, Teaching & Service | The Danny Miranda Podcast

I sat down with Danny Miranda from The Danny Miranda Podcast for the deepest interview I’ve ever done. 

We discussed: 

The power of teachingWhy modern life is deceptively comfortableWhy I seek dangerDangerous neighbourhood = better communities?Education vs EntertainmentTwitter vs real lifeWhy a quiet mind is importantAnd much more… 

Danny is a master preparer and interviewer. It was so much fun and meaningful to speculate on so many topics. 

Watch the full video here:

Listen to the podcast version here: 

SpotifyApple podcastsThe Danny Miranda Podcast 

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 A Life of Creativity, Teaching & Service | The Danny Miranda Podcast appeared first on Forte Labs.

Final Book Update: Building a Second Brain Is Out in the World

My book  Building a Second Brain  is now released and available for sale to the world.

I put everything I know and everything I am into it. This book is the end result of 17 years of wanting to write a book, 10 years of building a business, 6 years of teaching a course, and 3 years of writing.

It contains my best recommendations on how to create a personal system for knowledge management. That system is the most powerful way I know of to be far more productive, creative, and effective than you ever thought possible. And it’s delivered in the most succinct, clear way I am capable of and available for the price of an affordable meal.

I reread it in full this past week and continued to be surprised at the simplicity of the ideas I’ve spent my career working on. It is everything I ever hoped it would be and more.

I know the book will resonate with my usual readers and fans of digital notetaking and knowledge management.

What I don’t know is what happens after that.

Will it shoot to the top of the bestseller lists, become a sweeping movement, and reshape how people work and learn all over the world? Or will it flop, barely a blip on the cultural radar?

That trajectory is completely up to you now.

The next few days are a pivotal moment. A unique window of opportunity when something normally impossible will briefly become possible.

All book purchases this week – through Friday, June 17th, will be tallied and added to the pre-orders made since mid-November last year. That grand total will ALL be counted as the “first week of sales” for the purposes of determining who makes the bestseller list.

What does that mean? It means we have one best shot, one opportunity to go head-to-head with the international bestsellers by name brand authors that usually dominate the rankings. We get to distill 7 months of energy into one week to break through the noise and propel a new concept into a stable orbit in the media universe.

If we do, so many doors will open up. The New York Times bestseller list, in particular, is what Fortune 500 CEOs look to when deciding what to invest in. It is what government agencies look to when deciding who to listen to. Professional sports teams, non-profits, schools and universities, public libraries, overseas companies – the NYT bestseller list is the gateway to shaping how all these institutions educate and train their people.

As I said, we’ve done everything we can to make that a reality. I’ve left no stone unturned.

Now I’m asking you to step up and believe in that potential future with me. To stand for it, even though it doesn’t exist yet. A future where everyone in the world – no matter their income, race, level of education, or access to technology – has the chance to build a Second Brain for themselves and realize the full potential of all the ideas inside and around them.

Here are a few powerful ways you can help spread this book far and wide:

If you haven’t already,  purchase the book .Share a picture of yourself with the book and the hashtag #basb on social media (we’ll add it to a new Wall of Love we’re building).Tell friends and colleagues who you think might benefit from the ideas to check it out.If you’d like your family, friends, book club, or team at work to read it, purchase multiple copies (and get special bonuses we’re continuing to offer based on how many you buy).Tell your followers and subscribers about the book in your email newsletter or on your blog, social media feed, or other channels (use this link).Give the book an honest review on your blog, YouTube channel, or Amazon for others to read and decide if it might help them (and share it with us!)

Today is the dawn of a new era – the Second Brain Era. It’s time for the world to take note.

And that’s not all. I have another exciting announcement for you!

We’re starting…

The Building a Second Brain Book Club

We don’t want to leave you alone on your journey to build your Second Brain.

That’s why we’re running a free 3-week Book Club to connect you with other readers so you can exchange perspectives, examples, and ideas.

After teaching thousands of people in our course, we know that seeing how others implement the Second Brain methods will help you take action.

Here’s what you’ll get when you join the free Book Club:

Get prompts and action steps for each chapter in your inboxJoin the discussion in our official Facebook group and meet fellow readersHave your questions answered at an exclusive Q&A with me on July 6th at 12 pm ET (view in your timezone)

The Book Club will kick off on Wednesday, June 22nd. Click the button below to join us.

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How to Organize the Creative Process | Nobody Told Me! Podcast

I joined Jan Black & Laura Owens on the Nobody Told Me! podcast to discuss all things Second Brain. 

We discussed: 

How to improve your digital notes by learning about traditional notetakingWhy no one app will save youHow to organize the creative processThe chronic medical condition that jump-started Building a Second BrainWhat is responsible for information overloadHow fear plays a role in productivityHow you can build an intentional relationship with technology

The show is available on all platforms including: 

Apple podcast Spotify Nobody Told Me!

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 Organize the Creative Process | Nobody Told Me! Podcast appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Full Tour of Tiago Forte’s Apps & Workflow | Keep Productive

I joined Francesco D’Alessio, the host of Keep Productive, on his YouTube channel. His mission is to help you find the most suitable productivity tools for your work and life.

We discussed: 

Why I’ve used Evernote for 10 yearsMy favorite capture, to-do, and calendar appsWhat is the bottleneck to creativityThe power of a weekly reviewWhy having boundaries is the key to success

Watch the video 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.

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The Difference Between Our First and Second Brain | Bullet Journal

I sat down with Ryder Caroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal, to discuss all things personal knowledge management (PKM) and the differences between our first and Second Brain. 

We covered:

The differences between PKM and productivityThe biggest misconception about PKMThe true purpose of PKMHow to deal with “data debt”My project-oriented approach to organizing informationAnalog components of a Second BrainThe last meaningful thing I changed my mind about

Read the full interview 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 The Difference Between Our First and Second Brain | Bullet Journal appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Evolution of My Second Brain | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

I joined Anne-Laure Le Cunff founder of Ness Labs, a mindful productivity school for knowledge workers, to talk about all things productivity and notetaking. 

We covered: 

The evolution of my Second BrainThe difference between note-taking vs note-makingThe need for mindful productivityMy book writing systemAre there 3 or 4 notetaking archetypes?

It was a pleasure to finally meet Anne-Laure in person after years of connecting online. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. 

Watch the full video 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 The Evolution of My Second Brain | Anne-Laure Le Cunff appeared first on Forte Labs.

Notetaking As a Tool for Personal Development | Scott Young

I joined Scott Young, the author of Ultralearning, to discuss all things Second Brain. 

We covered: 

The power of habitsHow life can be a marathon or a sprintHow notes are tools for thinkingMy personal tech stacksHow notetaking can be a tool for personal developmentWhat we can learn from artists

Watch the full video below or listen to the audio-only version 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.

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The 4 Notetaking Styles: How to Choose a Digital Notes App as Your Second Brain

A “Second Brain” is a system for knowledge management – a trusted place outside your head to preserve and protect your most valuable knowledge.

But it’s not one piece of software – it is the entire ecosystem of apps and tools you use to handle information. 

That said, there is one kind of app that is the centerpiece of your Second Brain: a digital notes app. It’s the long-term memory bank where all your important information gets sent for safekeeping.

Notes apps are perfectly suited to the demands of modern work. They are inherently informal and messy, allowing new and unexpected ideas to emerge free of rigid rules. They are open-ended, allowing you to free-form sketch without necessarily knowing where you’ll end up. These apps can save many kinds of content – not only text but images, drawings, links, tables, attachments, and more.

There’s been an incredible explosion in this category of software in recent years, and we now have too many options. 

How do you pick the right app? You don’t! You don’t choose a notes app – a notes app chooses you. It calls out to you based on the natural ways your mind works.

Trying to force yourself to use a piece of software that isn’t compatible with your temperament, your style, and your personality is a recipe for frustration. While adopting one that aligns with how you already think is a formula for accessing an incredible amount of energy.

In this article, I’ll guide you through the process of choosing the perfect notes app for you, taking into account your personal notetaking style.

The Four Notetaking Styles

Through my work with thousands of people seeking to create a Second Brain for themselves, I’ve discovered four common groups, or “styles,” that people tend to fall into. They are:

The ArchitectThe GardenerThe LibrarianThe Student

By understanding which group you fall into, you’ll know not only which software program you should adopt, but also how to use it in a way that complements your own mind. These insights extend beyond notetaking apps to any tool you use to manage information.

Let’s look at each of them:

The Architect: Building Systems

Architects want to fit all their information into an all-encompassing “ultimate system” with a clear hierarchy. The same way a real architect needs a precise blueprint that details exactly where each part of a building goes, information architects tend to use a single overarching goal as the driving force in their knowledge collection.

Architects are ideally suited to large-scale projects that demand significant resources, where a plan is needed in advance. They excel at interpreting every piece of information through the lens of their overarching principles, and fitting it all into an elegant framework that many kinds of people can make sense of and act on. They are masters of structure, using a systems mindset, and making tradeoffs between form and function.

The pitfall Architects must avoid is inappropriately “force fitting” information into the system when it doesn’t fit. Because their thirst for order is so strong, they may sometimes ignore information that doesn’t fit with their mental model or follow a favored approach when the situation has changed and it no longer makes sense. 

Their need for consistency often leads Architects to plan their system upfront. If their needs change, the system needs to be rearchitected from scratch at significant cost. Often Architects seek out collaborators with other styles that balance and complement these tendencies.

Succeeding at knowledge management as an Architect requires you to make executive decisions about how you want your notes to work: the hierarchy of pages or folders, which categories you want to use, where an index or table of contents is needed, or which columns should be included in a database, for example.

Apps like Notion and Craft are well-suited to architecting your knowledge as part of a holistic system.

The Gardener: Cultivating Knowledge

Gardeners are the exact opposite of Architects. They tend to think in a “bottom-up” way, cultivating many kinds of ideas and possibilities at the same time like seedlings sprouting in a wild garden. They are most at home imagining, dreaming, wandering, and making spontaneous creative connections in a way that no upfront plan could ever predict.

Knowledge gardening is about favoring relationships and connections, so that each individual seed can entangle itself with others and grow into something greater than the sum of its parts. The Gardener’s job is to create space for them to emerge, to cross-pollinate promising ideas, and harvest them once they’ve matured. This requires a nurturing, exploratory approach of protecting new ideas until they’re ready to make their debut. 

The pitfall of Gardeners is that they often don’t know where they are headed. They can sometimes go off on tangents too easily and get distracted by new information that might be fascinating, but has nothing to do with their goals.

Succeeding as a Gardener requires the courage to react quickly and follow your spontaneous interests and curiosities, even if you’re not sure where they lead. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with organizing methods that can be used in the moment – such as adding a link to a related note, changing the title of a note, pulling relevant ideas into an outline – without requiring you to rearchitect the entire system (which you will find very challenging). 

Apps like Obsidian and Roam are perfectly suited to the Gardener mindset, allowing you to create connections on the fly without your fingers even needing to leave the keyboard.

The Librarian: Researching for Projects

Librarians have a fundamentally practical relationship to information, valuing books and ideas for their own sake but also seeking to organize information for specific purposes. They have a deep desire to find and save the most useful, interesting knowledge to be able to retrieve it as needed.

Librarians often have a project orientation, like Architects. But unlike Architects, instead of architecting their entire lives, they prefer to do research that informs their projects, goals, obsessions, and curiosities. They like to capture information from a wide variety of sources, though not all the sources have to fit into one overarching system to make sense. They thrive on the varied and eclectic.

Librarians are all about curating a collection of knowledge, deciding what’s in and what’s out, and organizing it to be easy to find in the future. With that in mind, they often adopt a hierarchical system with “a place for everything and everything in its place.” In other words, they will try to stay consistent with their organizing for the sake of clarity and minimizing the effort required.

If you find yourself often collecting new nuggets of knowledge, categorizing your ideas, and combining old and new information into a new understanding, you are likely a Librarian. Your strength is your consistency and commitment to serving your future self’s needs, while a common pitfall is acquiring tons of content without ever actually doing anything with it. 

Apps like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote kicked off the digital notetaking revolution years ago, and remain the best in class at collecting information from a wide variety of sources, often automatically. They support a wide variety of devices and operating systems and often prioritize reliability and stability over releasing new features.

The Student: Acquiring Knowledge

Student types are often beginning their notetaking journey. Whether they are actual students in school or university or merely novices in knowledge management, the scope and complexity of their notes are limited to specific use cases, such as preparing for a test, writing an essay, or applying for a job.

Students have a lot of things going on and juggle different priorities, so their Second Brain is often focused on one specific part of their life that requires them to manage a lot of information. It could be their college studies, their first job, a complex project, or learning a brand new subject. Their Second Brain is “purpose built” to help them be effective in that area, without going too deep in the others.

Students are oriented toward the short term, since they’re not sure where their thinking will lead or which is the right system to get them there. For that reason, they prize ease of use above all else – something quick, easy, and accessible on different devices.

Getting caught up in unnecessary complexity is a liability for Students, so they tend to choose the simplest, most straightforward apps, such as Apple Notes or Google Keep. Their notes are usually a mix of practical lists for buying groceries or keeping track of a travel itinerary, alongside learning resources from books or classes. 

The Student is the most common kind of notetaker, and it is what we default to when we’re short on time or energy. If you have any doubts about where to begin, I recommend sticking with a “minimally viable solution” until your needs become clear, and waiting until your current system breaks or reaches its limits before adopting a more powerful one. The default apps found on our smartphones are often the perfect place to start, as they offer just a few key features to allow practical, quick, flexible notetaking.

Which style resonates with you?

Now ask yourself, which of the above descriptions most resonated with your approach to taking notes? Which one felt the most natural and familiar?

Though your style can and will change over time, I’ve found that most people have a “home base” where they get started. As your confidence builds you can always learn to master the other styles as well. But for now, choose a notes app that aligns with how your brain works. 

And if you’d like an in-depth visual guide to the notetaking styles I’ve described above, check out our YouTube series “Pick a Notes App” starting with Part 1 below:

Subscribe below to receive free weekly emails with our best new content, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Or become a Praxis member to receive instant access to our full collection of members-only posts.

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Peeking Into People’s Second Brains: 6 Videos to Inspire Your Second Brain Setup

After teaching over 5,000 students how to build a Second Brain, I know that there’s no one right way and no one true app.

I also noticed that my personal setup not always resonates with everyone. Most students find it helpful to see how other people have implemented the principles of the Building a Second Brain method in their app of choice. 

If you’ve taken our online course, then you already got the chance to hear from our experienced mentors how they’ve implemented a Second Brain.

And for anyone who hasn’t taken our course yet, there are more and more people sharing their setups and takes on my methods on YouTube. 

Here are six videos to inspire your Building a Second Brain journey: 

The Second Brain – A Life-Changing Productivity System | Ali Abdaal

Ex-BASB Mentor Ali AbdaaI shares the 10 principles of Building a Second Brain in this video. You’ll hear about the capture habit, idea recycling, slow burns, and much more.

The ULTIMATE Second Brain Setup in Notion | Thomas Frank

Thomas gives you a complete, in-depth look into his Second Brain system that tracks tasks, projects, notes, and goals to organize his entire life. 

What’s interesting is that he combined my Second Brain principles with David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. His setup resembles a fully functioning Second Brain with an integrated task management system.

This Productivity System Changed Everything: How to Build a Second Brain | Mariana’s Corner 

Mariana created a succinct introduction to what a Second Brain is and why you need one. She also breaks down two of the fundamental principles behind Building a Second Brain: CODE and PARA.

My Second Brain in Notion | Elizabeth Filips 

Medical student and productivity YouTuber Elizabeth Filips, shares how she set up her Second Brain in Notion from scratch inspired by the Zettelkasten method. 

Elizabeth shares what questions she asks herself when capturing notes and resources, and how she organizes her Second Brain.

Also, check out Elizabeth’s video on why she has a Second Brain and how it has changed her life for the better.

Notion for Knowledge Management: Second Brain Template (PARA inspired) | Red Gregory

Notion ambassador Red shares a different take on the PARA method for organizing a Second Brain. 

You’ll learn how to organize and collect information, manage your tasks, and share your accumulated knowledge.

Obsidian For Beginners: Building a Second Brain From Scratch | Danny Hatcher

Danny created an in-depth, one-hour-long walkthrough on how to set up the Obsidian notes app from scratch and start building your Second Brain. 

This is great for beginners who are just getting started with Obsidian. 

Subscribe below to receive free weekly emails with our best new content, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Or become a Praxis member to receive instant access to our full collection of members-only posts.

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