Tiago Forte's Blog, page 32
November 5, 2019
The Forte Labs Community
I’ve never really written publicly about “community.”
It’s not because I don’t think it’s important. It’s because I think it’s all-important. Almost too important to address directly.
I believe community has to emerge. Like creativity, it can’t be directly created – only cultivated.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of watching a community emerge around Forte Labs and the Praxis blog. I’ve been continuously astonished to see such an interesting, smart, accomplished group of people gather around the ideas I’ve explored in my writing and teaching.
Without all the people willing to engage with me, based on nothing but shared interests and curiosity, none of this would be possible. Every time I interact with you, online or in person, it sparks new ideas and renews my motivation to keep going. Every time I see the incredible ways you are putting to use what you’ve learned here, I am deeply moved and given fresh hope for the future.
Now I want to make this community a little more official, so that all of you have the same opportunity to connect with each other. Until now, Forte Labs has been mostly one-to-many, with me sending broadcasts and receiving replies. But if the new way of working that we are pioneering is to stand a chance of making it out into the real world, we’ll need many-to-many connections.
We’ve done small experiments on various platforms, but I’ve settled on two that I think are the most accessible and promising: the Forte Labs Slack and Building a Second Brain Official Facebook Group.
The Slack workspace is like a series of semi-private workshops. We have channels on dozens of topics, all created by people wanting to discuss a topic or idea. It has grown slowly over the past few years, to the point that every thread I encounter already has several answers that are more thoughtful and thorough than anything I would have come up with. You can join using the link above, and join whichever channels interest you.
The Official Facebook Group is just getting started, but I think has the potential to be our most public and accessible discussion forum. I’m currently posting one note per day there, to give you a sense of the diversity of content you can save in your digital notes. That’s the main show for now, but I am hoping it will soon be a vibrant place for people to share their Second Brain victories and challenges alike, for others to borrow or give feedback on.
Both are free to join, and can be accessed via one link at https://community.fortelabs.co/. You can send this link to anyone you think might be interested, and they can have their pick of platform. I’ll be posting this link in various places so that there’s a steady trickle of new people joining.
I’m not interested in building the biggest online community on productivity – only the best one. I will always optimize for quality over quantity.
Please send me any suggestions or ideas you have for how I can help you talk, share, and collaborate more effectively. . I’m trying to be as hands-off as possible, so that whatever emerges is organic and sustainable. But I’m all ears for how I can kickstart that process.
Thank you for being here. You are the reason I do what I do.
Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
October 28, 2019
The Forte Labs 8 Pillars of Education
Our approach to education is based on 8 pillars. They are our guiding principles in designing every aspect of the learning experience for our students:
1. Deep trust
Learning cannot happen without trust. Community cannot happen without trust. Growth cannot happen without trust. Our students demand an environment of deep trust, and we will do everything we can to protect and promote it. This includes safeguarding student privacy, fair refund policies, transparency around our decisions, and complete honesty in our marketing.
2. Accountability
Our courses are not about the content. Students already have access to an infinite stream of content on every conceivable subject. We give them the accountability they need to make use of what they’ve learned. They trust us to help them achieve their most important goals. We set clear expectations, hold students to high standards of performance, and give them direct feedback on how to improve.
3. True community
Learning is a social experience. Great schools give people friends and mentors, so students can collaborate on projects and help each other succeed. Our role is to bring together a like-minded group of highly committed learners in a structured learning environment. Our goal is to guide them through a process of shared discovery where they can teach each other.
4. Commitment
Our job as instructors is not to provide the “right answers,” but to coach students in structuring their own learning. We take responsibility for asking questions, surfacing examples, and providing feedback based on what we’ve seen in the past. But learning is a process of wrestling with and applying knowledge, and students must ultimately be responsible for doing that for themselves.
5. Peer teaching
Our perspective as instructors is inherently limited. We can provide guidance and ask questions, but fellow learners are an even greater source of insight. We will not assume students know how to teach and learn from each other. As part of our instruction, we’ll train them to collaborate and give them opportunities to practice. Teaching is one of the best ways to learn, and we won’t deprive our students of that opportunity.
6. Growth experiences
We know that learning isn’t comfortable. It inherently involves pushing past one’s comfort zone, challenging perspectives and mental models, and tackling projects with the possibility of failure. We will provide as much support in this process as we can, without protecting students from the growth they need. Learning is a process of personal growth, and we won’t shy away from addressing that in our programs.
7. Practical application
We are not teaching for a test, certification, or diploma. Our measure for success is real-world action. We teach practical effectiveness instead of academic knowledge and theoretical insights. That is why we will use hands-on projects and realistic exercises whenever possible. We know we have succeeded when our graduates secure raises or promotions, excel in work that is rewarding or fulfilling, or make an impact on their organizations or industries.
8. Service
Our fundamental attitude is one of service. Service to our work, our customers, our collaborators, our communities, and the world. We are in business to help people fulfill their potential, and ultimately to contribute to a better future. We know that we are part of a movement that is much bigger than ourselves, and will take any opportunity to inspire our students to play their own role in it.
Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
October 15, 2019
Building a Second Brain at Knowledge Conf 2019 (Russian)
This is a presentation by Andrei Aleksandrov at Knowledge Conf 2019, in which he summarizes my Progressive Summarization technique for highlighting passages while reading for easy retrieval. It is in Russian without subtitles.
Here is the automatically generated transcript in Russian (anyone willing to translate it to English for me?):
07:40
наткнулся на мудрую черепаху тяга форта
07:42
и значит мудрая черепаха много лет
07:47
консультировала разные компании этом как
07:49
делать продукты она делала это
07:50
параллельно известно у него печаль какая
07:53
да ей также нужно много чего помнить
07:57
потому что консультирует как и я и у нее
08:01
постоянное переключение контекста то
08:02
есть каждый день разные клиент нужно все
08:04
время помнить а что этот клиент делал
08:06
там последние полгода нужно помнить
08:09
какие рекомендации ты ему давал и зачем
08:11
нужно помнить что ему советовать дальше
08:13
и опять же нужно в голове держать кучу
08:15
информации соответственно поэт наверно
08:20
черепаха решила создать свое собственное
08:21
движение называется suck and brain
08:23
кто-нибудь видел эту картинку раньше
08:25
один человек 2
08:27
она в общем теперь вы знаете что автор
08:32
этой картинке это как раз вот этот самый
08:34
тяга форта то есть он создал такой клуб
08:37
закон brain не может наверное лет 5
08:39
может даже больше идея клубов чем
08:42
сделать второй мозг цифровым
08:45
на то есть загрузить из компьютера как
08:47
можно больше информации и не пытаться ее
08:50
запомнить а сделать так чтобы мы могли
08:52
могли быстро из компьютера достать
08:54
информацию и закинуть себе в голову
08:57
перестать пытаться использовать
08:59
собственную память на потому что все
09:00
равно не работает но все равно все
09:01
забываем наденет на и даже знакомишься с
09:05
человеком проходит месяц ты ему уже не
09:06
помнишь но если мы не можем запомнить
09:09
имя то запомни все что мы записали к
09:12
себе в заметку после прочтения книги ну
09:13
вообще анрил вот соответственно они
09:17
начали пытаться с этим клубом как на
09:19
выработать какие-то подходы которые
09:21
позволяют вам все оцифровать не
09:26
получится например это применить к
09:27
бумажным книгам получится конечно но это
09:31
будет очень больно то есть все практики
09:35
напирают на то что вы все храните в
09:37
компьютере и компьютер это ваш основной
09:38
рабочий инструмент управления знаниями
09:41
соответственно основная их практика с
09:45
которой они рекомендуют начать
09:46
и из которой в принципе как раз начали
09:48
это progressive самореза и шин в чем ее
09:52
вообще суть ее суть в том что чтобы
09:56
делать как бы это сказать это примерно
09:59
как конспект нод по конспектам над
10:01
конспектом над конспектом но ключевое
10:05
отличие в том что это делается очень
10:06
быстро и это делается поверх оригинала
10:08
есть вы берете условную статью вы берете
10:13
книжку в ее добавляйте там свои в свою
10:15
читалку в свой заметочки куда угодно и
10:17
дальше поверх нее начинаете добавлять
10:21
слои которые вам позволяют как можно
10:23
быстрее это прочитывать от вас больше
10:25
нет цели помнить все что было в голове у
10:27
вас есть цель прочитать ее как можно
10:29
быстрее ответственно какие у нас есть
10:33
вот эти слои раз мы берем оригинал там
10:35
допустим мы возьмем q нибудь книжечку и
10:37
дальше у нас пункт второй это выделить
10:40
основные выделить жирным идея в том что
10:44
пока вы читаете вы можете прямо жирным
10:47
текстом выделять какие-то ключевые
10:48
моменты и поэтому следующий раз когда вы
10:50
будете продвигаться по книжке вы уже
10:52
быстрее впитаете все что там есть потому
10:55
что вы не будете читать все вы будете
10:57
читать только жирные моменты на вопрос а
11:07
вот здесь первом ряду это на самом деле
11:14
просто уточнение что первый слой это
11:16
скорее не весь оригинал целиком отрывки
11:18
и цитаты
11:20
нет то есть если мы возьмем у него
11:23
примерчик любой книжке которые него
11:25
лежит в блоге потом прямо тексте и
11:27
книжки с выделениями всем чем можно
11:29
проходила курсы разбирал например окей
11:32
тогда надо будет это да после доклада
11:36
обменяемся опытом посмотрим как она
11:37
работает вот соответственно жирным
11:41
текстом выделяете кита основные мысли
11:42
чтобы вы могли быстрее пробегаться в
11:45
следующий раз если вы понимаете что это
11:47
цитата вам что-то книжка вам полезно да
11:50
вы выделяете вы выделяете там цветом
11:54
какие-то основные моменты из основных
11:56
моментов нарезаны можете пробежаться
11:57
теперь ещё быстрее дальше вы пишете
12:00
мини-мини конспект и вот последний
12:03
уровень он нужен далеко не для всех
12:07
заметок
12:07
это сделать что то свое на основе того
12:09
что вы прочитали и фактически можно
12:11
сказать что то что я сейчас рассказываю
12:13
это 5 этот пятый уровень по практикам
12:16
тяга for the notes тех выделил ужином
12:19
основные моменты выделил цветом основное
12:21
из основного написал имени конспект а
12:23
теперь на основе всего что я знаю я
12:26
сделал вам доклад почему вообще все это
12:29
работает во первых потому что эти слои
12:32
очень легко добавлять
12:33
вы читаете и тут же прямо во время
12:36
чтения можете выделять какие-то основные
12:38
цитаты основные моменты оригинал у вас
12:41
всегда перед глазами поскольку вы
12:43
делаете вот эти вот выделения прямо в
12:46
оригинале
12:47
вам ничего не стоит в голову загрузить
12:50
контекст который вокруг вы выделили
12:52
цитату вы ее прочитали поняли что чё-то
12:56
не то и вам ничего не стоит вокруг вот
12:59
так слегка пробежаться
13:00
сами чтобы загрузить в голову все что вы
13:01
все что вокруг текст будет вам сам
13:05
подсказывать
13:06
чего вам не хватает вы просто бежите по
13:07
тексту глазами и впитываете
13:10
соответственно вас остается возможность
13:12
считать с нужным уровнем погружения в
13:14
детали я чуть позже покажу как это
13:16
работает но самое интересное что вот эти
13:19
хайлайты выделение жира на проще они
13:22
помогают вам быстро содержимое
13:23
распознавать при чем тут вообще
13:28
распознавание на мы вроде говорим про
13:30
чтения про книжки причем при чем тут
13:32
распознавания что это все такое это
13:35
когда мы по какому-то маленькому
13:37
элементу по кусочку чего-то мы
13:40
распознаем всю картинку
13:41
радость ну например да мы забыли
13:48
какого-то человека мы услышали там его
13:50
вот нам сказал вы ими мы вспомнили как
13:52
раз кто он такой чем занимается что
13:55
зачем почему вы тоже самое работает с
13:58
текстом также то же самое работает
14:00
абсолютно со всем что мы знаем например
14:02
да вот я думаю что если кого то
14:05
попросить иска и назвать определение
14:07
интернета вряд ли под его вспомнит но
14:10
при этом как если она муку это
14:11
подсказочку вспомнить будет уже легче да
14:13
то есть если вам скажу там система
14:14
объединенных во то скорее всего у вас
14:17
уже в голове если вы когда-то с этим
14:19
термином сталкивались
14:20
а черкнёт что до этой системой
14:22
объединенных компьютерных сетей там для
14:24
хранения и так далее вот это работает со
14:27
всем что мы знаем я это регулярному себя
14:29
наблюдаю с тем что опять же вот клиенту
14:31
нужно рассказать что смотри вот тебе
14:34
нужна такая практика она строится
14:36
вот-вот таким-то таким-то принципам все
14:39
принципы не всегда получаются сходу
14:41
вспомнить и но просто в это момент как
14:43
бы подходит к коле galaga . ну так нет
14:45
pin это такой какие-то там вот еще
14:48
принцип скорости какой-нибудь adata чем
14:51
сми наш еще с десяток информация которая
14:53
у тебя про эту тему говорить есть то же
14:58
самое это нам помогает на сам деле все
15:00
время искать да то есть мы можем
15:02
подсказывать нашей голове но что вообще
15:04
обращать внимание обратите внимание в
15:07
следующий раз когда вы будете гуглить
15:12
что когда вы что-то ищете вы не смотрите
15:14
вообще всю выдачу
15:15
ваш глаз сам цепляется за вещи которые
15:19
вам нужны на потому что него уже с
15:21
опытом сложились киты паттерна например
15:23
вы знаете что если вы будете что-то
15:26
искать формате что такое
15:28
в моем случае dns дата у вас вот первое
15:30
что вы сделаете ваш глаз зацепиться за
15:31
википедию можно уже знаете о википедии
15:34
это точно как здесь какой-то адекватный
15:36
ответ по тегу это первое на что вы
15:37
обратите внимание и поэтому как раз
15:41
хайлайты и выделение жирным посреди
15:43
оригинал они работают вы во время чтения
15:45
ваши глаза сразу же прилипает к нужным
15:48
вещам и поэтому вы быстрее как бы это
15:50
все впитываете
15:54
соответственно даже если вы открываете
15:56
какую-то статью мы обращали внимание что
15:59
когда вы что-то ищете вы не читаете всю
16:01
статью
16:02
вы обращали внимание что вы что-то
16:07
гуглите открываете статью который вроде
16:09
как по теме но вы не читаете слово в
16:11
слово вы бежите по диагонали по всему
16:13
тексту и ваш глаз сам цепляется за те
16:15
моменты которые вам нужны потому что вы
16:17
плюс-минус знаете какие ключевые слова
16:19
на срез на той же википедия
16:22
если вы читаете статью вы уже знаете там
16:24
что вот там где .
16:26
там где будет слово
16:29
теряя значит там какое-то определение
16:31
дай соответственно вы сразу же
16:32
цепляетесь за все эти моменты
16:35
соответственно идея практик в том чтобы
16:40
использовать вот это вот распознавание и
16:44
цепляние глаза за какие-то основные
16:46
моменты во время перечитывания наших
16:48
заметок таким образом мы быстрее все это
16:50
закинем к себе в голову известно
16:56
как это вообще плюс-минус все работает
16:58
на то есть мы сейчас будем потихоньку
17:01
спускаться сверху вниз мы пропустим
17:04
remix а мы пойдем со слоя 4 да то есть
17:07
мини конспекте к я взял для примера
17:10
книжку который называется превратив себя
17:12
бренд она отличный пример потому что она
17:14
очень водянистая вот и в итоге там они
17:22
просто проще сделать примерчик
17:23
соответственно если я открываю заметочку
17:26
да у меня там максимум обычно четвертый
17:29
слой
17:29
там есть какая-то цитата цитаты которые
17:31
суммирует они солдатами не самаре
17:34
который я написал который суммирует всю
17:35
главу местной а вот ее читаю полагаться
17:40
только на себя действует независимо
17:41
работает достижениями ну как бы если ты
17:44
давно не сталкивался с этой книгой да то
17:46
скорее всего эта цитата тебе вообще ни о
17:48
чем не скажет
17:51
наверное это как-то связано с брендом
17:53
как непонятно соответственно чтобы это
17:56
понять я ныряю нас ну ниже на я ныряю на
18:01
слове на котором я выделил основное из
18:04
основного
18:05
вот я уже считаю что да мы начинаем
18:08
думать как независимый подрядчик
18:09
подрядчик значит полагается только на
18:11
себя у подрядчика и собственно список
18:13
достижений стало чуть лучше я потому что
18:16
это что-то про независимость понял что
18:18
что-то это как-то вроде про то что я
18:20
должен относиться к себе как
18:21
предпринимателю как компании но все
18:24
равно контекста чтобы понять всю мысль
18:26
вроде как не очень хватает
18:29
соответственно в этот момент я могу
18:31
нырнуть
18:32
еще глубже в детали еще глубже в
18:34
контекст то есть генри анала на уровень
18:38
ниже я уже вижу то что вот это это
18:44
работает даже в том случае если вы
18:45
остаетесь наемникам что ваше достижение
18:48
месту какие-то проекты которые вы
18:50
делаете на работе до города то есть мне
18:52
не хватило деталей я спустился на
18:55
уровень ниже дети детали есть и это было
18:57
причем совсем не обязательно делать вы
19:00
соответственно если вдруг не страной
19:01
чему не хватило я опускаюсь на уровень
19:04
еще ниже
19:05
где у меня оригинал
19:06
[музыка]
19:11
соответственно все эти слои вы видите в
19:14
один момент времени и погружайтесь них
19:16
выборочно вы открываете заметочку у вас
19:20
наверху какое-то вашу самаре не хватило
19:24
прыгали на уровень ниже
19:26
не хватило спустились еще ниже не
19:28
хватило спустились еще ниже и таким
19:30
образом известно
19:32
вы сильно быстрее перечитывать этот
19:35
материал который вас есть не знаю
19:37
например или книжки
19:38
там едет на примере до книжки примерно в
19:42
20 раз быстрее прочитано это скорее
19:44
потому что она очень водянистые той
19:46
самой действительно это чуть ли не там
19:48
единственном зацвести и книги который
19:49
выделен вот на что брус на в принципе
19:53
так с большей части литература
19:55
если ты в какой-то теме уже
19:58
разбираешься то вот ты больше снежки
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October 14, 2019
Announcing Second Brain Meetups
I’m proud to announce the official launch of Second Brain Meetups, a network of local meetup groups for anyone interested in using technology to build a “Second Brain” – a centralized system for saving your most valuable ideas, insights, and knowledge.
The goal of these groups is to provide a forum for people to share what they’re learning, new tools and techniques they’re trying, and other interesting resources related to personal knowledge management. They will provide a discussion forum for people who are leveraging the power of technology to improve their thinking and turn their ideas into reality, and connect them with like-minded peers in their local city or region.
These groups will absolutely NOT be limited to students, customers, or followers of our Building a Second Brain course. Our goal is to stimulate the growth of the entire field, whether it is called digital note-taking, personal knowledge management, extended cognition, idea capture tools, or something else. We encourage alternative approaches, healthy debates, and the sharing of every kind of tool or system that can be used to “externalize” ideas outside the human brain, whether digital or analog.
When I first began writing and teaching on the practice of digital note-taking, I thought it was a tiny niche with limited potential. But as the idea has spread, I’ve slowly realized that the concept of creating a Second Brain is both profound and universal. It affects everything about how we work and live, including our productivity, creativity, communication, time management, stress levels, information overload, career paths, and goals. It is a way of life. And no one adopts a new way of life until they see how others are doing it.
We are part of a historical arc, offloading more and more of our capabilities to computers as they become more and more powerful. Each time we do so, it is a wrenching and difficult transition for society. Industries implode, careers disappear, and people lose their jobs. My hope is that these groups will be a tiny part of the social infrastructure needed to help people transition to more knowledge-intensive, creativity-driven work over the coming decades.
I want to reiterate that this is NOT about promoting my particular methodology or selling my products. They will serve as useful defaults for those who just want an off-the-shelf solution, but I sincerely hope that we go far beyond that. We need alternative but equally powerful solutions. We need better designed software and hardware. We need simpler options if anyone but the most tech-savvy people are to ever use software to effectively manage their ideas.
We’re launching one city at a time, starting with San Francisco, which already has a meetup scheduled for 10/24, hosted by Russell Kroeger. To be notified when we launch in other cities, join our official Facebook group, where we’ll maintain a centralized directory of all known local groups. We will send people to this official group from across our websites, social media, and courses, and encourage them to join a local group in their region (or start one if it doesn’t already exist).
Meetup groups will be run by local organizers, with minimal support from our side. This ensures that we won’t become the bottleneck and won’t stop groups from innovating. We’re going to start slow, ensuring that groups have a critical mass of members. But we are at the very beginning of what I believe will eventually be a movement, and as it grows you should be able to find more and more like-minded people where you live.
Thank you for reading, and please email us at hello@fortelabs.co with any comments or suggestions, or if you are interested in organizing a Second Brain meetup group in your city.
In the meantime, click the button below and join our official Facebook group for discussions and updates:
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Interview with Billy Bross of Email Boss
This is an interview with my online course marketing coach and creator of the Email Boss program Billy Bross. It is an in-depth discussion into what really matters in the marketing of online courses, contrary to what most programs promise (10 easy steps to a profitable online course!). He built and sold his own course Homebrew Academy, and now helps other course creators expand their own businesses. He’s worked with creators in over 30 niches and has a wealth of real-world experience on what it takes to make money teaching online.
Join his newsletter for daily, bite-sized bits of wisdom: http://www.billybross.com
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October 10, 2019
Organizing Ideas Using Machine Learning
I have a confession: my Second Brain hasn’t been working very well lately.
The problem is the “Resources” stack, one of the four main buckets that are part of my PARA organizational system.
It has ballooned to more than 100 individual notebooks, and I can’t even remember which ones exist. Which means the decision of where to put a new note is extremely taxing and time-consuming, requiring me to look through this massive list.
It hasn’t been working for the very same reason that I developed PARA in the first place – when you categorize information by topic, it eventually expands to a completely unmanageable number of overly specialized subcategories. Ideas get siloed and completely forgotten.
I took to Twitter and asked whether someone would be willing to help me come up with a better set of categories. I use a free service that automatically saves any article I “favorite” in Instapaper to a dedicated Evernote notebook. I’ve had it running automatically in the background for years, and recently realized I had collected nearly 300 of my favorite articles going back to May of 2015. I wanted to use this body of articles to better organize the ideas I drew from my reading.
Ergest Xheblati (@ergestxheblati) generously volunteered to use his knowledge of machine learning to give it a try. You can read his full technical report here, along with details of the algorithms and tools he used, the workflow file in case anyone wants to play with it, and other observations on his process. Here are the results in a Google Spreadsheet, with separate tabs for the raw output, an article-by-article index, and my own labels.
The reason I find this approach so exciting is that it is aligned with my fundamental approach to organizing information – discovering the topics within an existing body of knowledge in a bottom-up way, instead of trying to determine them upfront in a top-down way. The result is a fascinating window into a new way of organizing knowledge that uses the power of algorithms, rather than human effort.
Here’s the main takeaway: the algorithm identified 19 topics, with 1 to 94 articles in each of them. Here is a summary of the results, with labels I added to describe each topic:
[image error]
This is a remarkable result, in my opinion, since this list is a highly accurate representation of my interests, and was created without any upfront categorization on my part. The topics are fairly broad, but also have clean edges, at least in my mind. The pairing of topics makes complete sense to me, even though they might be unorthodox. There are few enough that I can keep them all in mind and see them all at once, while being specific enough that it’s clear where a given piece of information goes.
I decided to reorganize my Resources stack according to this new list of topics. This was a test of the flexibility and plasticity of my Second Brain – in theory, it should be easy to change its structure, and yet I find that I rarely do so because I don’t know what to change it to. This experiment gave me a clear direction for improvement based on real-world data.
As I did this reorganization, I found that most of my existing Resource notebooks already fell into these topics to a large extent. This meant that I didn’t have to refile one note at a time, which would have taken forever. Instead, many smaller, more specific notebooks could easily be “collapsed” into the new notebooks. Here are some examples of how my existing notebooks fit into the new, broader topics:
“Books & writing” incorporated:
writing
publishing
“Design” incorporated:
design thinking
workspace design
“Software & product” incorporated:
agile
software
lean
“Business & strategy” incorporated:
strategy
sales
entrepreneurship
social entrepreneurship
personal branding
“Culture and creativity” incorporated:
creativity
culture
magick
“Knowledge management” incorporated:
crowdsourcing
extended cognition
group knowledge management
pkm
note-taking
learning
“Therapy & personal growth” incorporated:
ethics
pleasure
moods/emotions
“Systems & information” incorporated:
networks
emergence
Here’s what my Resources stack in Evernote looks like now, with 36 notebooks instead of 106 (the new topics are in ALL CAPS):
[image error] [image error] [image error]
Here are a few other observations about the process:
1. There are actually two kinds of Resources notebooks
As you can see in the screenshot above, not every existing notebook could easily be recategorized. The ones in lower case I felt were more “functional,” more like true “resources” that deserved to be kept separate for specific use cases. For example, I know exactly where to look when I want to see examples of “annual reviews,” and don’t need those notes to mix with others.
2. Progressive Summarization makes broader topics possible
At first, I had some fear that dumping 100 notes from 6 notebooks together in one place might lead to overly broad collections that weren’t as easy to search.
On the other hand, I know my best work comes from connecting ideas across different domains. I want there to be some overlap and “bleeding” of ideas across the typical boundaries between fields. For example, there is a lot in common between “workflow design,” “workspace design,” and “product design,” and I want those notes to freely mix together. This is more likely to happen when I’m able to see those notes juxtaposed against each other in the same notebook.
Luckily, with the power of progressive summarization, I can very quickly scan a large number of notes, and within seconds determine if a given note is relevant to my needs. In other words, I can have the benefits of large, broad collections without paying the penalty of tediously re-reading one note at a time. And in fact, I found that even among my existing notebooks, I was already using overly broad topics such as “productivity” and “psychology.” So this new categorization didn’t really cost me anything.
2. This reorganization gave me the chance to make other changes
With any organizational system, there is the constant threat of inertia. The “way you do things” can easily become a rigid convention that limits change, not only in your note-taking but also in your work and life. It’s hard to find the time in daily work to make decisions about what to archive or move. But I found that since I was making this major change, I also had the chance to delete or archive or move many notes and even entire notebooks that no longer serve my purposes.
I archived notebooks on “time-tracking,” “habit mapping,” and “intermittent fasting,” among others, realizing that I was no longer interested in them. Other Resource notebooks I moved to Areas, such as “Music” and Cooking,” since they’ve become permanent, important, ongoing parts of my life.
3. Many Resource notes I realized were applicable to current projects
As I was moving notebooks, some notes caught my eye as I realized they could be useful in my current projects.
A note from an article on cryptocurrency, for example, I moved to a Project notebook for a cryptocurrency conference I’m speaking at this month. I think this points both to the value of what I’ve collected in the past, and the difficulty of discovering it within my previous bloated system. There is tremendous value in our notes – but it is up to us to discover and rediscover them.
Takeaway
This was a technically complex process, but as a proof-of-concept it points the way to a bright future: ideas organized by machines, instead of by humans.
The history of technology shows a continual evolution of humans doing less and less manual labor, and instead dedicating themselves to higher order creativity and problem solving. That evolution is now reaching the world of learning and knowledge, with the potential to free us from boring tasks that take up a huge percentage of our time as knowledge workers.
If we could develop this technology into a product or service, we could see patterns in our thinking continuously resurfaced, leading to new and even better insights. We could make our computers into true thought partners, able to not only store information, but analyze and even understand what it is telling us.
For now, the good news is that you don’t actually need a fancy machine learning algorithm to tell you what your main interests are. If you find that your Resources have proliferated beyond all reason, just look at the notebooks you already have, and sort them into 15-20 broader topics that are still specific enough to tell you where something goes.
We can’t afford to spend our precious time meticulously filing notes into hyper-specialized categories. Spend that time instead reading, capturing the best of what you come across, and creating new creative works that move your career and society forward.
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Topic Discovery Using Machine Learning
By guest contributor Ergest Xheblati
Recently I was asked by Tiago to see if I could do something interesting with his Instapaper article collection stored on Evernote. I had recently completed a similar project at work where I looked at product descriptions and generated tags from them. I thought I could do something similar for Tiago’s project.
My favorite tool for doing this is Knime which is a free, visual data science platform with all the capabilities you need for doing NLP (Natural Language Processing). I thought that I could use the LDA algorithm in Knime in order to do unsupervised (aka unaided) topic discovery. Unsupervised simply means that the algorithm is discovering the topics without being told about them beforehand so it doesn’t need any examples to learn from.
The intuition behind the algorithm is quite simple though the statistics are not. Given a group of documents, assume that there’s only a small number of topics or themes in the documents and that words in the documents can be attributed to the topics. So the output of the algorithm is a collection of topics labeled topic_1, topic_2…topic_n (because it doesn’t know what they actually are) and for each topic a group of words that make up that topic.
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October 1, 2019
Second Brain Case Study: Using Digital Notes for Stand-Up Comedy
In this wide-ranging conversation, I spoke with Michael Skiba, who participated in the very first cohort of Building a Second Brain in January 2017. He talks about how he’s continued using and developing his Second Brain over that time, including:
How he uses his digital notes to maintain a side gig as a comedian, while working a day job, including how he created a pipeline and testing process for jokes
The colorful variety of specialized notebooks he created for storing different kinds of information
How he uses his notes to keep track of elevator pitches, bios, and other notes on his profile as a creator
Screenshare walkthrough of his Evernote setup
How he archives past projects so they are out of the way, but instantly available for later recall and review
How a Second Brain can be used to solve problems with its own creation and management (because it’s a general problem solving system, not a specialized one)
The implications of working on the frontier of knowledge, drawing on the work of Karl Popper and other philosophers, when it comes to building practical knowledge management systems
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September 30, 2019
Live Q&A – Building a Second Brain Live Cohort
This is a recording of a live question & answer session for the upcoming cohort of my online course Building a Second Brain. I run these cohorts 3-4 times per year, taking a group of students through the entire course via weekly Zoom calls and Slack office hours.
Enter your email address here to be notified of future cohorts and other updates:
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September 26, 2019
Announcing the Second Brain Week of Reflection
I’m very proud to announce the Second Brain Week of Reflection, a 5-day immersive seminar dedicated to exploring the deeper implications of “building a second brain” for individuals and society.
From May 17–23, 2020, Lauren and I will host 10 people at the Chateau d’Orion, a guest house and cultural center at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern France.
The 17th-century chateau has a long and rich history, including serving as a meeting place for the French resistance during World War II. Today, it has been transformed into a cultural center by the prominent German couple Elke & Tobias Premauer. The center hosts exhibitions, concerts, readings, conferences, and seminars dedicated to German-French cooperation and the enrichment of society at large.
The Premauer’s have created a series of week-long philosophical and cultural seminars called “weeks of reflection.” Each seminar is facilitated by an expert in an academic, cultural, artistic, or philosophical field – including poets, chefs, filmmakers, and philosophers – for a select group of participants drawn from across Europe and the world.
The goal is to bring together a small but diverse group of intelligent people to dive deeply into a topic of future importance to society, in a setting and timeframe that allows for deeper engagement than everyday life and work normally allow. This will be the first seminar conducted in English and on a topic with implications primarily for the business world – extended cognition using technology.
I will provide the context for the week, drawing on my work writing, speaking, and teaching on what it means to build a “Second Brain” – an external repository of an individual’s ideas, learnings, research, and knowledge, accessible on demand.
Over the course of 5 days together, we will use presentations, discussions, embodied exercises, and small group breakout sessions to deeply examine the ethics, values, and principles underlying cognitive extension in the modern world. We will consider everything from the potential negative effects of this endeavor, to unforeseen consequences and side effects, to the impact it might have on agency, identity, memory, truth, perception, and the body.
Click the button below to visit the official webpage. The price is $2,450 euros per person (including VAT), which includes a private room in the guest house and gourmet meals for the entire week (full breakfast, 2-course lunch menu, and 3-course evening menu each day). There will be time set aside for breaks, excursions in the beautiful countryside, and intimate conversations with a small group of like-minded thinkers and doers.
Visit the official announcement page
There are currently 5 spots left and we expect to fill them in the next few months. If you have any questions, please email me at hello@fortelabs.co. If you would like to apply for the seminar, email me with your answers to the following questions:
Why do you want to attend this seminar?
How will your experience, knowledge, or skills contribute to our discussion?
What do you believe is the most important implication of cognitive extension for us to consider?
Keep reading below for the full description of our topic.
The Second Brain Week of Reflection
Since ancient times, intellectuals have used writing to record their thoughts, refine their theories, and share their ideas with the world. During the Renaissance, this practice was given a name: “commonplace” books. These books contained interesting quotes, facts, stories, and observations about a world that was becoming increasingly hard to understand. Writers, philosophers, and artists documented the many new ideas they were encountering in an attempt to make sense of their moment in history, and to support them in doing their best work.
Fast forward to today, and all of us find ourselves in the very same situation: too much change and too much information, with not enough time to process and understand it. And more pressure than ever to do our very best work and compete in a global economy. All of us now need to keep a commonplace book. We need it not only to survive the onslaught of information overload, but to make meaning out of the conflicting narratives we are told. The 20th century was about educating our “First Brain.” The 21st century will be about building and enhancing our “Second Brain.”
The only jobs left for humans are those that require creativity. But if we leave creativity to chance, hoping for a flash of inspiration or a “bolt from the blue,” we’ll soon be out of a job. We are told to be innovative, to adapt quickly, to bring our very best ideas to work every single day. Yet no one taught us how to consistently produce creative work. Our teachers told us to “take notes” for a single test or a single class. But now we are engaged in “life-long learning” that never ends. How do we take notes for a lifetime of creative exploration, not just an isolated task?
In this week of reflection, we will explore these questions in depth. Drawing on Tiago Forte’s work writing, speaking, and teaching, we will examine what it means to build a “Second Brain” – an external repository of our best ideas, learnings, research, and knowledge. We are at a pivotal moment in history where technology has finally made it feasible to extend our mind’s abilities. For the first time, this is not a sci-fi fantasy or a dystopian nightmare – it is a real possibility already taking place before our eyes.
The week will take place over 5 days at the Château d’Orion, a hotel and cultural center at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains in Southwestern France. In the depths of World War II, a group of French resisters met at the Château to make their plans. What better place for us to discuss the revolution in thinking that intelligent machines are causing? We have the opportunity to shape how “Second Brains” find their way into society. This week will be our attempt to look deeply into the ethics, values, and principles underlying “cognitive extension. “
We will gather 10 people over 5 days at this special location designed for deep reflection. Tiago Forte and his partner Lauren Valdez will lead the group through a series of presentations, discussions, and embodied exercises. These conversations will focus on the deeper philosophical implications of the “Second Brain,” including the impact it might have on agency, identity, memory, truth, perception, and the body.
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