Tiago Forte's Blog, page 37

Superhuman: The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made

This is a recording of a live walkthrough of Superhuman, an email client that works in the browser and on iOS and connects to any Gmail account.

They have made waves in the productivity world over the past few years for “completely reinventing” the email experience from the ground up. They are also known for their eye-popping price of $30 per month, and a waitlist to even try the product of several hundred thousand people.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

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How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion

The Theory of Constructed Emotion offers a radical new take on what emotions are, where they come from, and how they shape our lives.

Presented by psychology professor and neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett in her best-selling book How Emotions Are Made (affiliate link), it also contradicts many of our most firmly held ideas about how human emotions work.

For example, it argues that:

Emotions are not hard-wired in an ancient, “reptilian” part of the brain
Emotions cannot be detected through facial expressions or any other physiological measurement
There are no “universal” emotions across people, nations, or cultures
There are no distinct parts of the brain dedicated to specific emotions (such as the amygdala for fear)
Emotions are not “reactions” to external events

Over the last 25 years, Dr. Barrett and her team at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University have poked and prodded the faces, bodies, and brains of thousands of subjects, trying to unlock the secrets of the emotional brain.

In this article, I’ll summarize the main ideas from the book to help them spread as far and wide as possible. Assume everything below is directly taken or paraphrased from the book, although I’ve tried to explain it in my own words. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine.

Emotions are concepts

The Theory of Constructed Emotion takes its name from its central premise: that emotions are concepts that are constructed by the brain.

Consider your brain for a moment. It’s sitting there in your skull, receiving all sorts of data from your eyes, ears, nose, skin, and mouth. This data is informative, but also ambiguous. It has to be interpreted.

For example, it might think:

What is that rectangular source of light with changing patterns of color? A window!
What is this intermittent pattern of small, cold spots sweeping across my body? Rain!
What is that rhythmic pattern of air pressure changes? A song

In this way, the brain is constantly trying to make sense of the data it is receiving. One of the easiest ways for it to do that is to use past experience as a guide. If it can match the current experience with a past memory, it can save a lot of time and energy.

But it would take too long for it to consider thousands of old memories, one at a time

Instead, the brain uses concepts. A concept is like a compressed version of hundreds or thousands of past experiences. Instead of having to remember every encounter you’ve ever had with a “chair,” for example, your brain stores a concept of a chair. The next time you encounter a chair, your brain only has to match it with this concept for it to understand what it’s seeing.

Concepts are like labels or categories that your brain has created to make sense of the world around you. When you see something new, your brain doesn’t ask “What is this?”; it asks “What is this like?”. In other words, your brain is constantly trying to put everything you perceive into an existing category. This is much easier than trying to figure out what it is from scratch.

The idea that we use concepts to make sense of our experience isn’t new. But Dr. Barrett’s work makes the leap to applying this idea to the messy, subjective world of emotions. Emotions like “fear,” “sadness,” and “disappointment” are concepts just like any other. Just as your brain interprets a pattern of light as a “window,” it might interpret a pattern of bodily sensations as “fear” or “disappointment.” These emotions don’t feel like concepts because we experience them so intensely. But they are.

As an example of how this works, Dr. Barrett tells the story of watching the news about a recent school shooting. It felt in the moment like she was reacting directly to the news. She felt terrible grief and sadness, and tears seemed to come spontaneously to her eyes.

But it would be more accurate to describe what happened like this:

“I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss. Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of shootings and my previous sadness about them, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy. Its predictions caused my thumping heart, my flushed face, and the knots in my stomach. They directed me to cry, an action that would calm my nervous system. And they made the resulting sensations meaningful as an instance of sadness.”

In other words, her experience of sadness was a “simulation” or prediction of the appropriate way for her body to react to the news. The sadness wasn’t a pure reaction to something happening on the outside. It emerged from a complex interplay of systems making a self-fulfilling prediction about what was needed for her body to cope.

Emotions are predictions

Why does Dr. Barrett use the word “simulation” and not just “interpretation”? Because the brain is not passively observing incoming data from the outside world. That would make its decisions very slow, potentially threatening our survival

In order to act more quickly, the brain starts reacting even before it has received all the data – it creates a “simulation” or prediction of what it thinks might happen next. Basically, the brain is constantly making its best guess of what it thinks is about to occur, and then preparing to act on that guess

If your brain guesses that you are playing soccer, for example, it might start predicting all sorts of likely scenarios based on past experience: opportunities to sprint for the goal, fast-moving balls flying toward your head, or incoming attackers from any direction. The brain might start preparing the body for these scenarios ahead of time, by redirecting blood flow to certain muscles or becoming more vigilant for flying soccer balls.

The same thing happens with purely mental activities. As you read this text right now, your brain is predicting which word or idea is likely to come next, based on a lifetime of reading experience. These predictions save energy and help you read faster than would otherwise be possible. As the largest and most energy hungry organ in the body, the brain greatly prioritizes this efficiency.

And the very same process happens with our emotions. On your way to the airport to pick up a friend you haven’t seen for years, your brain is busy predicting the feelings of joy and happiness you will soon be feeling. Which means you are already feeling happy before the event has occurred, and feel even happier when you actually see her.

Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain’s default mode of operation. Your brain cannot help but constantly build predictive models of every experience you have, or any experience it thinks you might have.

This leads to a profound conclusion: that the simulations we create in our heads are more real to us than the physical world. What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are simulations of the world, not reactions to it. We might think that our perceptions of the world are driven by events in the world, but really, most of what we see is based on our internal predictions. The data coming in from our senses merely influences our perceptions, like a small stone skipping across a rolling ocean wave.

This startling conclusion is reinforced by research on how humans see. The part of the brain responsible for sight, the visual cortex, receives only 10% of its connections from the retina. The other 90% are connections from other parts of the brain, making predictions about what they think we might be seeing.

What does the brain do when its predictions are wrong? It can change its prediction to match what the senses are telling it. But it is just as likely to do the opposite: stick with the original prediction, and filter the incoming data so that it matches the prediction.

In a sense, your brain is wired for delusion: you experience an elaborate world of your own creation, which is held in check by bits of sensory input. Once your predictions are correct enough, they filter your perception and determine what you’re able to see in the first place. This can become a closed loop where the brain only sees what it believes, and then believes what it sees.

Interoception and body budgets

How do emotions fit into this picture?

From the brain’s point of view, the body is just another part of the external world that it must explain. And it uses the very same mechanism we just examined to interpret sensations coming from inside the body – the changing rhythms of your heartbeat, the feeling of breathing, the rumbling of your stomach, and the contraction and dilation of your veins

It’s important to understand that these purely physical sensations from inside the body have no objective meaning. They feel so intense because they’re coming from inside you. But an ache in your stomach, for example, could just as easily be “explained” as:

Hunger (if you’re sitting at the dinner table)
Impending sickness (if it’s flu season)
Heartbreak (if you are going through a breakup)
Certainty that a defendant is untrustworthy (if you’re a judge in a courtroom and haven’t had lunch

The process of interpreting these bodily sensations is called interoception. It is managed by an “interoceptive network” in the brain that takes in information from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system, among many others, and labels this information with a concept such as “hunger” or “heartbreak.” These emotions may feel like they are coming directly from your body. But in fact they are being constructed by the interoceptive network in your brain, based largely on your predictions.

What is the purpose of interoception?

Everything your body does, inside or out, requires energy. To manage its “body budget” across hundreds of body parts and billions of cells, the brain has to constantly predict the body’s energy needs. Just as a finance department needs a budget to forecast where money will be needed, the brain makes predictions and issues corrections about when and where it thinks energy will be needed.

Many of these “budgetary changes” we experience as emotional experiences. Your muscles running low on energy might feel like “exhaustion.” Too little sleep might be interpreted as “overwhelm.” A lack of positive social interaction might be experienced as “loneliness.” But these emotions are not objective facts. They are concepts built by the mind out of pieces of sensory data, cultural knowledge, and a history of social interactions. Interoception evolved to balance our body budgets. Experiencing emotions is a fortunate (and sometimes unfortunate) side effect.

What this means is that a “bad feeling” is not evidence that there is something wrong. It just means you are taxing your body budget. Emotions are real, but what they seem to be telling you is not necessarily real. Knowing that “negative” emotions are simply our brain’s way of telling us that reserves are running low, we can make intentional decisions to refill those reserves, instead of reaching for less healthy coping mechanisms.

Experiential blindness

Even with all the scientific evidence in the world, it can be very difficult to believe that emotions are internally generated concepts driven by mental simulations. They feel so intense and overwhelming in the moment, like a wave sweeping us away against our will.

The reason emotions feel like reactions to things happening in the outside world has to do with how concepts are used by the brain. Concepts are not just labels for the things we passively observe. They are necessary for us to perceive things in the first place. A concept serves as a lens (or sometimes, a filter) for what we are able to see in the first place.

Imagine you are sitting in a Parisian cafe on vacation, sipping fine wine and eating cheese. You may overhear a French couple at the next table over immersed in conversation. The conversation contains all the information you would need to understand what they’re saying. But if your mind is missing a set of concepts known as “the French language,” it will sound meaningless to you.

This is known as “experiential blindness” – the inability to perceive what you don’t already have a concept for. Remember that we are not experiencing the world directly; we are experiencing our mental simulation of it. And without a concept for something, we can’t incorporate it into our simulation

In her excellent TED talk, Dr. Barrett shares this example:

[image error]

As you examine the photo, your neurons are firing like mad trying to perceive something besides black and white blobs. Your brain is sifting through its library of concepts, making thousands of guesses and weighing the probabilities, to find a category to put the picture in.

Now look at the following picture:

[image error]

Going back to the first one, you can probably now see a snake:

[image error]

But what changed? The image is the same as before, but now you have a new concept in your brain. You’ve gained a “conceptual lens” that allows your brain to fill in the information that is missing. This process is so automatic, that you probably can’t go back to how you saw it before, even if you tried.

Our concepts allow us to perceive things in a world that always provides only incomplete, ambiguous information. They help us recognize things quickly and (usually) accurately, while saving time and energy. But the process of using concepts to perceive things happens so invisibly and automatically, our senses can feel like reflexes rather than constructions. We do not feel any sense of agency for the simulations we are running.

This explains why an emotion like “happiness” can feel like it’s a reaction to external events, rather than generated from within the brain. Even before your brain has finished categorizing a situation as “happiness,” it is also simulating happiness in advance. External perception meets internal construction before you know what’s happening, so it seems like happiness is happening to you when in fact your brain is actively constructing the experience

This can also become a self-fulfilling prediction: the more you expect happiness to arrive, the more preparations you make for its arrival, and the more likely you are to experience it. Even on a neurological level, you create your own reality.

The importance of emotional granularity

One of the most challenging implications of the Theory of Constructed Emotions is that, if someone doesn’t have a concept to describe an emotion, they won’t be able to perceive it. They’ll still feel the bodily sensations, but won’t be able to label them precisely.

In other words, the range of emotions a person can experience is limited by their emotional granularity – the ability to construct and identify more precise emotional experiences.

Imagine an extreme example: someone who only has the ability to distinguish between “good” and “bad” feelings. They exhibit low emotional granularity. Because they have only imprecise information about what is happening inside their bodies, it will be difficult for such a person to handle many of life’s challenges. They will be experientially blind to even their own feelings.

This illustrates the critical importance of high emotional granularity. Making sense of bodily sensations requires energy, and trying to sort a huge amount of sensory data into a broad feeling like “happiness” takes a lot of energy. Now imagine if you had a more precise concept for the feeling of attachment to a close friend, such as the Korean word jeong (정). Your brain would require less effort to construct this more narrow concept. Preciseness leads to efficiency; this is the biological payoff of higher emotional granularity.

When you experience an emotion without knowing the precise cause, you are more likely to treat that emotion as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world. This is known as affective realism. Affective realism causes us to experience supposed “facts” about the world that are in fact created by our feelings. It can leave us trapped in an emotional world of our own making, without realizing that we are the ones who imprisoned ourselves.

Luckily, emotional granularity can be improved. If you can learn to distinguish more precise meanings for “Feeling great” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful . . .) or “Feeling crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy . . .), your brain will have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and  perceiving emotions.

High emotional granularity gives us a much greater range of tools, allowing more flexible responses to our challenges. It allows us to tailor our actions to the underlying causes of our emotions, rather than their immediate appearance.

Constructing social reality

Although emotions are generated from within, they don’t stop there. We use emotions to construct our social reality.

When you interact with people you know and like – your spouse, friends, lovers, children, teammates, or close companions – you synchronize your heart rates, breathing, and other physical signals, leading to measurable benefits. Something as simple as holding hands with a loved one or keeping their picture on your desk can improve body budgeting and reduce pain. In other words, we also use other people to regulate our body budgets

But this goes far beyond managing our own body budgets. Concepts like “fear,” “anticipation,” and “contempt” are concepts your brain uses to regulate others’ bodies as well. As soon as we construct an emotion concept and label it with a word, we can share it with others, allowing them to see what we see and thus rewiring how their brains work. Once you and I share a concept, I can merely utter a word to start launching predictions in your brain, a kind of linguistic telepathy.

Instead of a limited set of emotions built in from birth, nature provided us with the raw materials to bootstrap a conceptual system, including emotion concepts. With input from the adults who spoke emotion words to us in an intentional and deliberate way, we gained the ability to perceive not just physical objects, but ideas that reside only in the minds of people: goals, intentions, preferences, and their own emotions.

Over time, this intergenerational transfer of emotion knowledge – in the form of stories, traditions, myths, fables, or really anything that we can communicate – allows each generation to shape the brain wiring of the next. This body of knowledge constitutes the essence of our civilization just as much as the books in our libraries.

Modern culture and body budgets

Once you understand body budgets and how they impact our emotions, it becomes apparent how much of modern culture seems engineered to disrupt them.

Much of the food we eat is full of refined sugar that warps our body budgets. School and jobs have us waking early and going to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between 13 and 64 regularly sleep-deprived, which leads to chronic misbudgeting. Advertisers play on our insecurities, suggesting we’ll be judged badly by our friends if we don’t look or buy a certain way (and social rejection is toxic for our body budgets). Social media offers even more opportunities for social comparison, while constant mobile device usage means we never truly relax

Remember that the entire experience of emotions relies on our brain’s predictions about what it thinks our body needs. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with our body’s actual needs, it can be hard to bring them back into balance. Your body budgets don’t respond easily to warning signals from your body as it is. Once our predictions have been off-base for long enough, you will feel chronically miserable without knowing why.

What do we do when we feel miserable? We self-medicate. Thirty percent of all medications consumed in the United States are taken to manage some form of distress. We use alcohol, drugs, TV, and sugar to achieve a semblance of budget balance, but at a terrible cost in addiction and obesity. It has become clear in recent decades that the immune system has an impact on far more illnesses and harmful conditions than we imagined, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, depression, insomnia, cancer, reduced memory, and other cognitive functions related to premature aging and dementia. And the immune system suffers when our body budgets go out of balance

Looking more closely at depression provides a window into how chronically imbalanced body budgets can have compounding negative effects.

Depression can be thought of as a relentless feedback loop of negative thoughts and feelings. Each feeling drives the next thought, and vice versa. The brain dwells on negative past experiences, and thus keeps making withdrawals on an already taxed budget. Alarm signals from the body are turned down or ignored. In effect, the body and mind are locked into a cycle of uncorrected predictions, trapped in an adverse past when metabolic needs were high.

Since the body budget is chronically in debt, the body tries to cut spending. The easiest way to do that is to stop moving around and stop paying attention to the world. If a depressed person then starts avoiding people, others cannot help balance their body budget either. This is the unrelenting fatigue of depression.

This cycle also applies, of course, to people who grow up in adversity, lacking basic necessities like safety, food, and sleep. These conditions change the interoceptive network, reducing the brain’s ability to accurately regulate its budget throughout life. This translates into a higher lifetime risk of heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, and other diseases.

A new take on personal responsibility

In light of the possibility that we construct our emotions based on concepts, the next question is, are we responsible for our concepts?

Not all of them, certainly. You can’t choose the concepts you learned as a child. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what experiences you expose yourself to, which shapes the concepts that ultimately drive your actions. Responsibility, in this view, is about making deliberate choices to change your concepts

The Theory of Constructed Emotion argues that every aspect of our emotions is malleable and flexible. You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain. You have more control over your emotions than you think.

You can’t just snap your fingers and instantaneously change what you’re feeling, of course, but here are six practical steps you can take to improve your emotional granularity over time, based on the most recent findings from scientific research.

1. Try on new perspectives

According to the Theory of Constructed Emotion, the concepts we hold directly impact our body budgets, and therefore our experience of emotions. Concepts don’t exist in an abstract, rarified realm separate from biology. Learning or changing concepts (also known as mental models) directly impacts how our body functions minute to minute.

By trying on new perspectives the way we try on new clothes, we can “try out” different body-budgeting regimes. The same way we might allocate more financial resources to one budget category or another, we can do the same with our body budgets.

This can include anything from travel in foreign countries, to spending time with different kinds of people, to reading literature, to trying new experiences. These experiences expose us to different ways of meeting human needs that we may want to borrow for ourselves.

2. Recategorize what you’re feeling

Anytime you’re feeling bad, recognize what is actually happening: you are experiencing unpleasant affect based on interoceptive sensations. With practice, you can learn to deconstruct the emotion into its constituent parts, instead of letting it become a lens through which you view the world.

For example, the broad, ambiguous feeling of “anxiety” can be broken down and recategorized into “tension across the upper back,” “rapidly beating heart,” and “clenched jaw.” This deconstruction robs the sensations of some of their emotional power.

Try labeling what you are feeling more precisely, meditating on different parts of the body, or looking for more immediate, physical causes such as hunger, dehydration, or lack of sleep.

3. Talk about what you’re feeling

One of the most effective ways of questioning the mind’s often overly dramatic interpretations is to talk about them with others. Getting feelings out into the open lends us a degree of objectivity, and allows others to show empathy and understanding.

In studies, men who expressed a lot of emotion that they didn’t label were found to have the highest levels of cytokines, proteins that over the long term cause inflammation. Female breast cancer survivors who explicitly label and express their emotions have better health and fewer medical visits after surgery.

This isn’t fluffy self-help advice: talking about your feelings measurably improves your health and happiness.

4. Move your body

Sometimes the predictive loops between body and mind are so strong that it is difficult to consciously interrupt them. Luckily, we have a backdoor: the body. Whether through walking, yoga, stretching, weight-lifting, or other forms of exercise, we can re-synchronize the signals flowing between our body and mind, putting our body budgets back into balance

All animals use movement to regulate their body budgets. If a dog has too much glucose in its system, it can run around or spin in circles to burn it off. Humans are unique in that we can use purely mental concepts to shift our budgets. But when that fails, a quick run or aerobic routine can correct the runaway feedback loop keeping us down.

5. Improve your vocabulary

This might seem implausible, but there is substantial evidence that emotional granularity is closely linked to linguistic granularity. The more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can identify what’s happening in the body and calibrate its budget accordingly.

In a study, it was found that people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. In contrast, lower emotional granularity is associated with major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, eating disorders, autism spectrum disorders, borderline personality disorder, and general feelings of anxiety and depression.

Whether it is reading sophisticated and nuanced works of literature, watching movies with complex characters, or looking up words you don’t know, expanding your vocabulary can directly impact your body function.

6. Write about your experiences

One of the clear conclusions from How Emotions Are Made is that the world of concepts and the world of biology are not separate. Our brain relies on models of what is happening or likely to happen in the outside world to make budgeting decisions. We are able to consciously influence and enrich these models by what we expose ourselves to.

Writing is one of the most effective ways to directly shape the concepts our brain is constructing. Writing allows us to make our thinking more concrete, outside our heads, where it can be more objectively evaluated, analyzed, and changed. The words we put on the page can be reflected back to us, forming a different predictive loop in which we have much more agency.

A final word

All six of these approaches can turn a negative spiral of suffering into mere physical discomfort. Pain is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to mean there is something wrong with your life. No technique is guaranteed to work every time, but they open up the possibility of working toward a healthier body, more fulfilling relationships, and a more flexible and potent emotional life.

The promise of constructed emotions is not that we will somehow gain complete control over how we feel. Emotions are inherently uncertain, and that uncertainty is exactly what makes a vibrant emotional life possible. Life can be unexpectedly joyful, unexpectedly meaningful, unexpectedly profound. The promise is not that we can control the emotional waves that sweep over us as we move through life. The promise is that we can learn to surf those waves with skill and with pleasure.

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5 Things I Learned From the Anti-Book Club

Last year I launched the Anti-Book Club, my own take on the tradition of book clubs.

The idea is simple: instead of everyone in the group reading the same book, duplicating time and effort, we each read a different book on the same topic. Then each person summarizes the book they read, and I compile and share the summaries with everyone who contributed.

The goal is to divide the effort of reading a large collection of works, and thus to conquer a complex topic in a small fraction of the time it would take one person to read all of them. Along the way, we produce a valuable collection of succinct book summaries that we can easily refer to in the future.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

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Interview with Timothy Kenny, #1 Productivity Instructor on Udemy

I recently had the opportunity to interview Timothy Kenny, the #1 productivity instructor and creator of 79 courses on the online course marketplace Udemy. He is also the author of Accelerated Learning for Entrepreneurs and a speaker and coach.

You can find out more about Timothy on his website, including an overview of how his courses fit together.

In this 62-minute conversation we talk about:

His background and experience creating productivity courses


The problem with speed-reading and “accelerated learning”


Timothy’s path from live teaching to online courses


Why annotation is the bottleneck to information consumption, not reading speed


Visual mnemonics, memory palaces, and creating your own visual language


The business model for courses on Udemy (an online course marketplace with 30 million users)


How he uses courses as milestones and funding mechanisms for his personal learning process


Screenshare of his master planning organizational system in Google Drive


How he uses a “personal Dewey Decimal System” to organize his entire life and more than 2,000 active learning projects


His model of education as Intellectual Property Accumulation


The difference between life-long learning vs. cramming for a test


How to use planning to maximize motivation, time spent in flow, and what you’re interested in


Using templates to manage and optimize your calendar


Overview of his PAMeLa master planning system

Timothy has generously offered discounts for the two courses he believes would be the best fit for Forte Labs followers: on his Mastering Planning and Ultimate Accelerated Learning System courses.

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.

Using Notion as Your Second Brain

This post was originally published by Kim Sia on SimKimSia.com

For productivity topics, I follow Tiago Forte (blog here, twitter @fortelabs). He has a course that I have taken before called Building A Second Brain (BASB). It covers the use of modern toolsets such as Todoist and Evernote to augment your human brain, leading to a higher performance boost in the modern information-dense economy.

He recently wrote a blog post where he lists out point by point what he considers must-haves and nice-to-have features when selecting a notes application. Tiago then tweeted out asking for help evaluating popular notes apps based on his criteria.

Fig 1: Tweet about Choosing a Notes app requirements

Over the past 10 months or so, I went from using Evernote, to Quiver, and now Notion. I also ended up paying for Evernote and Notion to unlock more features.  So I wrote a long twitter thread replying to his question point by point. (ThreadReader unrolled it here).

I promised Tiago I would expand into a longer version of that thread with greater elaboration, so here it is.

Tiago’s criteria

Tiago broke down his 15 requirements into 3 categories.

Deal breakers

1. Quick capture and editing
2. Scales to thousands of notes without performance lag
3. Basic formatting options
4. Strong search feature
5. Ability to handle images and attachments
6. Private space, with public sharing

Must-haves

7. At least 3 levels of hierarchy
8. Many ways to capture information
9. Native and web versions
10. Capturing and syncing across multiple devices
11. Exportable as plain text

Nice-to-haves

12. Side-by-side viewing
13. Bullets or lists
14. Automatic date stamps
15. Tags

I will follow the same structure and answer each one point by point. Bear in mind, I have a difference in opinion with Tiago about which points are deal-breakers and must have. However, in this article, I will adopt Tiago’s criteria and structure accordingly. Perhaps I will write a separate follow-up article to explain my own preferences after this.

Fundamental Differences between Evernote and Notion

Before I go into the evaluation of Notion, I want to point out that Notion has a different paradigm from Evernote. In Evernote, the fundamental building blocks are notes. Whereas in Notion, the fundamental building blocks are blocks.

Each block can be a separate Page, Table (which behaves like AirTable), or just a paragraph. There are about 9 different types of blocks in Notion. You want a bullet point? That’s a type of block. You want a checkbox? That’s another type of block. A H1 heading? Block again. For the purposes of the evaluation, when Tiago talks about a note, he’s largely using the paradigm of Evernote. I will make the assumption that the equivalent of a note in Evernote is a Page in Notion.

Already, you can tell this means Notion allows you greater granularity of control over the content you create compared to Evernote. With that said, let’s get started with the first deal breaker of Tiago’s.

Deal Breaker #1: Quick capture and editing (Yes)

For this point, Tiago wrote:

“My most fundamental test of a knowledge capture app is whether, if you’re walking down the street and a brilliant (or wacky) idea suddenly pops into your mind, you will actually pull out your phone and capture it.

This is a common daily occurrence for photos, but not so much for ideas and insights. I can’t imagine this happening with Google Docs, or other heavy-duty text editing apps. One of the key strengths of notes apps is that they are made for just this kind of quick capture.”

He also added another point about quickly searching for an existing note in order to edit it.

Putting on my hat as a product person, I distilled his requirements into 2 user workflows:

Got idea > whip out phone > open app > create new note
Got idea about existing note > whip out phone > open app > find existing note > edit it

The short answer is Yes to both workflows. In this case, I want to point out that Notion search is slightly slower compared to Evernote depending on what you search for. The reason is I do not think Notion stores all the notes you have created locally. The Notion mobile app does store the last few notes you have opened in your phone. In an environment with high-speed internet, this is not an issue. Might be an issue for offline reading, but that’s another separate topic I will address later in this article.

Deal Breaker #2: Scales to thousands of notes without performance lag (Yes)

Notion is essentially free up to 1,000 blocks for individual use. I’m long past that point. While I cannot tell you how many notes or blocks I have created thus far because I cannot find that stat within Notion, I can say I am definitely in the “thousands”. Tiago also wrote for this point that:

“Instead of giant Microsoft Word or Google Docs documents, each note should be small and agile, so it can easily be mixed and matched with other notes.”

Mixing and Matching is Better in Notion (for Database)

The beauty of blocks in Notion is such that this mixing and matching is actually a first class citizen because almost anything can be a block. Mixing and matching in Notion is superior to Evernote. For instance, I have a table that holds all the interesting people I found on the internet and their contact details.

Fig 2: The Original Database for People I Found Interesting on the Internet

I can then link to this same table in a different page using Create a Linked Database option.

When I change the data on the original table, the changes appear in both Pages instantly. Evernote allows links between notes which act as hyperlinks. But this ability to embed content of existing blocks (Table blocks so far, but not Page blocks) is certainly unavailable in Evernote. I demonstrate this concept in the video below.

Deal Breaker #3: Basic Formatting options (Yes)

Tiago gave examples of what he considers basic formatting options. They include “bold, italics, underline, font colors, and highlighting”. A picture is worth a thousand words. So I will answer this with screenshots of the formatting options available.

Fig 3: Text Formatting options available in Notion

Fig 4: Color formatting options in Notion
Deal Breaker #4:  Strong search feature (Yes and with fuzzy search)

There’s a recent rise in adoption of the Apple macOS spotlight search UI in web apps. Notion adopts this for its search and I love using it. I call it up using Cmd+P (Ctrl+P for you Windows users) and I can search across all the notes in their bodies and titles. Tiago mentions searching across meta-data as well. I am not entirely sure what that means, so I skip this in the evaluation. He also mentions that ideally the search provides autocomplete as well. Respectfully I disagree with this optional criteria. Because as long as there’s fuzzy search, autocomplete probably is less needed.

You can watch the demonstration below as I purposely mistyped my search text and still find what I needed.

Deal Breaker #5: Ability to handle images and attachments (Yes, but I don’t recommend embedding internet content)

Notion allows easy attachment of images and PDFs, and other typical files such as videos. However, there are a couple things I need to highlight for a better user experience.

Notion allows embedding of internet content such as tweets. Such embedding loads slowly when you open the note that holds the embedded file. So I will recommend either taking a screenshot and embedding the image, or if it’s a PDF file, download the file and then embed directly.
When you attach the image, be patient and let it finish the upload completely. I often will take screenshots on my phone and then attach the screenshot to a Notion note. What happens is there will be a progress counter at the bottom right of the image. Do not leave the Notion app until the counter hits 100% and the image loads properly. More than once, I pasted the image and switched away from the Notion app. Then the image won’t be embedded properly.

Deal Breaker #6: Private space, with public sharing (Yes, but anonymous users need to sign up for account to comment)

By default, notes are private. You can then share select notes to anonymous users or to other Notion users belonging to certain groups. Notion calls the groups you belong to Workspace Access. For granting anonymous access, Notion calls it Public Access.

Fig 5: Different access levels at the individual Note

Public Access allows Read Only and Read and Comment. No edit function is possible. I experimented before and when an anonymous user wants to comment on a Public Accessible note, they need to sign up for an account before actually commenting.

As for Workspace Access, there’s more granular functions that includes editing the note content.

Must-have #7:  At least 3 levels of hierarchy (Hell yes!)

As I mentioned previously under Fundamental Differences, Notion uses a different paradigm by having everything as modular blocks. So you can build a page within a page within a page ad infinitum. So strictly speaking, it does not restrict your levels of hierarchy.

Though I must note that there’s no concept of folders. So to maximize your productivity in Notion, you need to adopt Notion’s paradigm of blocks. Forget about the metaphors of Documents and Folders in apps like Google Drive or Notes in Evernote.

Must-have #8:  Many ways to capture information (it depends)

In this criteria, Tiago lists several ways of capturing content such as web clipper, email capture, dropping files on dock icon, etc. At the end, he recommends thinking about the 2 or 3 most common kinds of information you save and making sure that the notes app supports those.

So this really depends on your most common kind of information.

Personally, I like to clip content from web pages, and take quotes from Twitter and Kindle books. I also need to copy and paste code with syntax highlights.

Based on my personal inclination towards certain info, I can safely say that:

Notion does have web clipper but it’s inferior to Evernote.
Notion does have integrations with other third party apps but I haven’t really tried them out yet. My workaround so far is to take screenshots and paste them directly into the notes.
Notion supports code syntax extremely well. Whereas this feature is totally absent in Evernote.
In Notion, Markdown is a first class citizen so you can copy and paste Markdown content and have it render correctly.

So it really depends on your most often saved information. As a developer, the code syntax is non-negotiable and that’s what swung me to Notion.

Must-have #9:  Native and web versions (Yes and equally good but no offline access for app-wide search)

There are native desktop and mobile apps as well as web versions of Notion. The sync is great as well. However, I need to highlight that offline access is not complete. When offline, your mobile or desktop app can only search amongst the last few dozen notes you recently accessed. From my conversations with Tiago, this is his non-negotiable, so he won’t likely switch to Notion anytime soon. Personally, I live in Singapore where internet is readily available and I don’t take flights often. Offline access is not crucial for me.

You can still write notes offline and the sync will happen when you’re back online. Therefore, this is good enough for me.

Must-have #10:  Capturing and syncing across multiple devices (Yes)

Before Notion, I was experimenting with Quiver because Evernote doesn’t support code syntax at all. Quiver adopts many of the conventions of Evernote so it was easy to migrate from Evernote to Quiver. With the two additional features of supporting Markdown and code syntax highlights.

Sadly, Quiver doesn’t support write-syncing across multiple devices. For e.g. I can only do read only access on my mobile device. No write access at all. Naturally, when I discovered Notion supporting Markdown and code syntax and multiple device syncing, I migrated one more time to Notion.

Must-have #11:  Exportable as plain text (Yes and in fact as markdown syntax)

Tiago lists this criteria for the reasons to “protect against catastrophic data loss, the company going out of business, or simply because your needs change and a different app better suits your needs.” For those who care, not only is this available, Notion provides exporting in Markdown syntax as well.

Nice-to-have #12: Side-by-side viewing (Yes by opening multiple windows on desktop app)

On the mobile app, you cannot really do this.

On the desktop app, I recommend opening multiple windows. Notion doesn’t have the concept of tabs.

On web, you naturally have tabs or windows in the browser.

Nice-to-have #13: Bullets or lists (Yes in fact they are first class citizens)

I like to call this list formatting. In Notion, this is well-designed. There are nice shortcut keys (cmd+shift+4, 5, 6, 7) to convert any text block into different list formats.

The available formats include: numbered lists, bullet lists, todo lists (where you have checkboxes you can check and uncheck), and toggle lists (where you can collapse and expand).

I highly enjoy using the shortcut keys to switch between the different list formats.

Nice-to-have #14: Automatic date stamps (Yes, but not highly visible. Then again, there’s page history for restoring past versions)

Tiago chose this requirement, I suspect, because this is how Evernote arranges its notes by default. Notion doesn’t have a typical mail app layout where there’s a column where you can sort your notes by dates. Notion does have date stamps though it’s not highly visible.

On the other hand, it does have a nice page history which allows you to restore older versions which is similar to what you see in Google Docs.

Fig 6: Page history
Nice-to-have #15: Tags (Yes, but you need to create a table first and then create notes in that table)

Page notes do not natively have tags. One way to mimic this behavior would be to simply create a table and then have one of its columns be tags. Each row in the table can be a standalone Page Note. Therefore, you can still have tags for the notes you create in that table.

Conclusion

I have been using Notion since late August 2018 as a paid subscriber. The customer support is built-in with a chat right inside the desktop, web, and mobile versions. I have been highly satisfied with it. And they keep adding new features with a high frequency. It’s this high iterative rate that has kept me as a subscriber.

I see myself continuing my subscription at the end of my current subscription. Do you have more questions for me regarding Notion? Maybe you have more requirements for your personal note-taking workflow? Share more with me in the comments below and let me know.

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Crafting a Book Proposal: The Onboarding Questionnaire

I previously wrote about my thought process for why and how I’ve decided to publish my book Building a Second Brain with a traditional publishing house. In this series, I will share with you in as much detail as possible my path through the biggest challenge in that journey: crafting the book proposal.

The book proposal is the lynchpin of the entire publishing value chain. It is the starting point for all conversations and negotiations about the book. It is the calling card to any editor, agent, publisher, or publicist a writer might want to talk to. It is the only complete document in existence for 90% of the publishing process, until the finalized book pops out the other end.

For that reason, I’ve decided to hire the very best. I am working with Janet Goldstein, who worked with David Allen on his best-selling books Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything, to guide me through writing a compelling book proposal. My first task was to fill out a “client onboarding questionnaire,” an exhaustive brain dump of everything I know and have related to the “book project.”

It was a fascinating and eye-opening experience, because every question addressed the book as a business: which problems or pains it seeks to solve, who are the customers who will gladly pay for it, and which benefits it is intended to deliver to them. Completing the questionnaire helped me step out of the shoes of the writer caring for his baby, and into the shoes of a publisher creating a business model.

Most of the questions I already had existing material on, either in my notes (of course) or in blog posts I’d previously written. Even so, it was a grueling effort that took me about 3.5 full days. The experience was both encouraging – seeing how many incredible experiences and assets  I already had to prove my credibility – but also disheartening, seeing how many things could still be improved.

I’m sharing my responses to the questionnaire in full with you here, because I know many of you would someday like to publish a book. I hope it gives you a good idea of the platform and social proof you’ll need to bring to the table if you want a serious publisher to consider your proposal.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
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Get Yourself Optimized Podcast: The Secret Weapon of the Highly Productive with Tiago Forte

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Stephan Spencer, a well-known marketing and productivity expert, on his podcast Get Yourself Optimized.

You can find a short description of our discussion below, or visit the podcast webpage for a full transcript:

Our brains can hold only so much information. If you’re an ambitious person like me, you probably have many projects and ideas on the go that some things get forgotten. It’s almost like you need a second brain to keep track of everything. You might be surprised to know that you can build a second brain. I’m not talking about some AI Robot. I’m talking about an innovative system that acts an extension of your mind. Tiago Forte is the Founder of Forte Labs and a writer, speaker and teacher who is obsessed with the future of work. He’s used his background in design and technology to create a system for entrepreneurs and creatives to keep track of their ideas using Evernote. It’s so effective. He’s dubbed it the second brain. If you ever wished you could learn faster, work quicker or better manage all your ideas and projects, then you’ll definitely want to build a second brain. On this episode, Tiago and I will be discussing everything from productivity apps to note-taking skills and how you can leverage them to be far more productive than you are.

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Second Brain Case Study: Building a Second Brain in Higher Education

This is a presentation and conversation with Professor Wess Daniels and a group of professors, college staff, and undergraduate students from the 6 classes that have learned Progressive Summarization at Guilford College in North Carolina.

It includes a slide presentation with key themes and learnings from their experience, a live demonstration of performing progressive summarization collaboratively in real time, and at the end a discussion of how and why digital note-taking should be taught as an essential skill for students.

The main points include:

The benefits of adapting Progressive Summarization to the classroom


Creating a life-long knowledge bank for use far beyond the classroom


Starting the class by showing students how to take notes, instead of just reviewing the syllabus


How to organize class notes using Google Docs


Guidelines for source citations and naming conventions


Using “12 favorite problems” to guide learning and class discussions


Designing notes to more deeply interact with the content and enable “glanceability”


Balancing context and compression in class notes


A Progressive Summarization checklist for students


Best practices and recommendations from student’s experiences


Teacher-student feedback using Google Docs


Details of Professor Daniels’ experience teaching P.S. to 6 cohorts of undergraduate students


Live demonstration of real-time collaborative progressive summarization and annotation

Here are some online resources on using Progressive Summarization in the classroom generously provided by Prof. Daniels:

Webpage summarizing the use of Progressive Summarization at Guilford
Slides used in the presentation
Shared Google Doc used in the demo
Student guide to Creating Reading Notes Using Progressive Summarization
Progressive Summarization checklist
Link to Guilford College homepage

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Announcing Write of Passage

I’m very proud to announce Write of Passage, a new online course on how to accelerate your career by writing online. It is my fifth course and the first one co-created with a partner, David Perell.

In the spring of 2017 I appeared as a guest on David’s podcast, the North Star. We had a fantastic conversation about productivity, the future of work, design thinking, and the power of online content. Soon after, David took my course Building a Second Brain (BASB) to help with his own idea collection and content development.

He quickly became a star student, adopting wholesale the system I had taught for cultivating and publishing ideas consistently. His “second brain” became the foundation of his prolific output of podcasting, blogging, tweeting, newsletters, and consulting. At the end of last year David told me that BASB was not only the most impactful course he had done since graduating from college – it was the most impactful experience, period.

As we continued talking, we realized that we had both noticed something: the people who truly got the full benefit of BASB were not the ones who spent the most time on it, or who worked the hardest, or who reviewed the course again and again. It was those who moved on from “organizing” as quickly as possible and actually used their notes to create content.

I’ve talked to hundreds of people about the incredible power of creating content to share their expertise, build a reputation, and connect with like-minded people. But most of them seem to be waiting for something. They’re waiting to share their work until they are perfectly organized, or until they have a “critical mass” of good ideas, or until they know their “brand” or have found their “voice.” Like a surfer waiting on shore instead of in the water, they’re confused as to why wave after wave seems to pass them by. I’m here to tell you that there is no magic moment when everything is completely ready. The only way to know the right direction is to start. You find the way along the way.

The idea for a new course was born. While Building a Second Brain focused on the early parts of the creative process, helping people collect ideas, organize them by project, and summarize and distill them for easy access, this course would focus on the actual process of content creation.

We decided to create this new course as a sequel to BASB, building on digital note-taking with a new curriculum teaching people what to do with the knowledge they had gathered: how to create an online platform for sharing their ideas, consistently cultivate and publish new pieces of content, distribute them to build a powerful network, and use this network to meet anyone and attract unbelievable professional opportunities.

The key realization for me was that David and I have very different approaches to our work. I’m more introverted, while he’s extroverted. My core skill is deep focus on abstract ideas, while David’s is being able to meet and connect with anyone. Writing has always come very naturally for me, while David had to learn to through painstaking effort. But what we have in common is that both our careers are completely driven and enabled by the content we’ve created. I realized that the skill of effective writing could be taught, that there was more than one way to do it, and that any kind of person could benefit from it.

In Write of Passage we will share everything we’ve learned about content creation. By the end of the course, you’ll know how to:

Shift from “outbound” – seeking jobs and clients who might want to work with you – to “inbound,” selecting from among pre-qualified leads who are already interested in your work
Craft a writing premise that targets existing assumptions and misconceptions in your field
Rapid prototype diverse ideas using email, social media, and live conversations
Write in a persuasive, outcome-oriented (instead of academic) style that provokes responses, feedback, and resharing of your work
Build a coherent body of work over time (not just one-off “posts”) that give you unassailable authority in your field
Target specific channels and people with tailored pieces of writing
Construct articles to attract and filter for specific kinds of people and opportunities
Use content as an introduction to meet and collaborate with people you respect online
Create an online profile that clearly communicates what you do and helps your audience find you
Find the unique intersection of expertise and knowledge where you can build a “personal monopoly” of credibility

This is just a small selection of things we’ve learned over years of trial and error, and in this course we’ll share it all with you.

In a world of so many kinds of media, we’ve decided to focus on the most accessible, fluid, and fundamental of them all: writing. Writing is the foundation of every other form of media. It is the only form of expression that is accessible to anyone who can read or write, that can be reused and repurposed anywhere, and that stands the test of time. More and more businesses like Amazon and remote-first startups consider writing a critical skill for every single one of their employees. It clarifies thinking and logic in a way that no other form of communication does.

As our conversations continued and deepened over several months, we realized that creating and publishing content online is not only the key to effective personal knowledge management. It is the key to success in the digital age. If you continue to sell your knowledge in person and by the hour, you will never be free. You will never be free to fully capitalize on the knowledge in your head. You will never be free to focus on something else while your knowledge goes to work for you. You will never be free to step away from the office and your computer and know that things will continue to run smoothly. 

The ability to write something down and distribute it instantly around the world, in a way that compels people to take action, is simply the most incredible superpower ever available to humans. When you have this skill, each piece of writing goes out into the world, seeking opportunities and jobs and projects and partnerships and friendships on your behalf. Your professional sphere of opportunities expands outward in every direction with every word you put to the page.

We built Write of Passage from the ground up to destroy four pervasive myths we’ve noticed about writing online.

The first myth is that creating content is just a means to having an “online business.”

Yes, you can create new income streams and make a location-independent living by writing online. But there are so many more profound benefits available. Every profession and industry is now exchanging ideas online, and you have a chance to stake a claim on a wide open frontier. You can meet thought partners who will push your thinking in new directions. You can find mentors and role models who you would never encounter in normal life. You can qualify clients who your ideas already resonate with before you’ve even spoken. All these benefits are available whether or not you ever make a single dollar online.

The second myth is that writing online is only for digital nomads or content marketers.

The first era of “blogging” was mostly limited to certain kinds of people. But the Internet is no longer a “channel” that you use for specific functions. It is a place. A place where everyone lives a significant part of their lives. A place where you can meet people you would never otherwise be able to find, where you can gather communities around niche interests that could never exist in the physical world. No matter what kind of work you do –whether you are a lawyer or a chef or a bicycle mechanic or an artist – the Internet is a place so full of possibilities that you cannot afford not to be a part of it.

The third myth is that “blogging is dead.”

Many people we’ve talked to feel that they missed the boat on having a successful blog. We believe that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Blogging is reaching maturity, which means that it no longer makes the front pages of glossy magazines, but is now ready to become a foundational building block of industries and careers. For more and more professions, writing is the new resume. The posts and articles you publish are your portfolio.

The fact is, the golden era of blogging is just beginning. Success is no longer about reaching a certain quantity of pageviews – it is about the quality of the readers you attract, even if that’s only a few dozen people. It’s about the virtual relationships you can form with people around the world, based on the quality of your ideas.

The fourth myth is perhaps the oldest – that only a “writer” can publish their work.

Writing is no longer a specialized profession protected by gatekeepers. It is no longer restricted to a certain set of topics, or certain stylistic forms, or a certain educational background. Like the Internet itself, writing has exploded into a general purpose tool accessible to anyone. All it requires is a shift in how we write – from the formal, academic style we learned in school, to an insightful and action-oriented style that is necessary online.

We’re going to change your perspective on writing online, not with interesting lectures, but by catapulting you into action. We’ve come to understand that almost everyone knows intellectually that blogging is a good idea. They can’t help but notice the meteoric rise of people who have built reputations, businesses, and incredible careers by posting articles and essays on their niche.

But in their hearts they don’t believe they can do it. They don’t think they have anything valuable to say. Or they don’t have confidence in their self-discipline or drive. Or they don’t think they can carve out the time. We realized that we needed to not only encourage people to write and publish, we needed to show them exactly how to do it effectively in the current online landscape. Write of Passage is an accountability structure, like a virtual writing group spanning many countries that also guides you in creating results with your writing. 

As we’ve built this course together over the past five months, David and I realized something else we really didn’t expect: that our networks of friends, collaborators, followers, mentors, role models, clients, customers, and thought partners aren’t just a list of email addresses for us. They are an extended system for thinking and learning far beyond what we could manage on our own.

While filming the videos, our videography team was shocked that every time we were stuck or in doubt, we immediately turned to Twitter or called trusted followers to get feedback on our options. The truth is, our best ideas don’t come to us as flashes of insight in the middle of the night. They emerge from conversations, observations, feedback, and high-velocity trial and error. If we had to rely on our own insights, we wouldn’t be able to publish a fraction of what we do.

We realized that our professional networks are actually a “third brain.” A collective brain that encompasses everything from our blogs to our email lists to our social media followers to our friends around the world. With this collective brain, we have instant access to more wisdom, experience, perspective, and diversity in one minute than we could gain in a hundred lifetimes. We are the curators of a hive mind that spawns ideas we can hardly fathom. We have the ability to direct this critical mass of attention toward problems that no human could solve on their own. The only price of admission is that we feed this hive mind a steady stream of our own insights. Every drop of value that we put in gets returned a hundred fold.

I constantly get requests for a “group knowledge management” system of some kind. I think people tend to imagine a new advanced software program with a clever design that will allow them to network their ideas and share their thinking. But such a system exists today – it’s the entire Internet.

Harnessing the Internet as your “third brain” is not an engineering challenge. It requires producing work that is inherently interesting and engaging, so people want to see it and test it and give you their feedback. It requires embracing spontaneity and improvisation instead of careful planning; learning in public instead of hoarding notes in secret; being curious in the face of uncertainty instead of being paralyzed by the fear of the unknown.

Writing in this way is a tacit skill that only comes with practice. Which is why you will publish more in this course than you ever have before. It takes courage and conviction to push through your doubt and fear about sharing your writing. But we know of no better way to develop that conviction than by working shoulder to shoulder with peers who are just as committed to a transformation as you.

In Write of Passage we will teach you how to use your writing to create such an extended mind for yourself. It’s not something you have to build from scratch – all the platforms are ready and waiting for you to hit “publish.” It’s a long-term and challenging endeavor, but one that will begin to produce benefits immediately.

I’ve learned so much from David this past year about how to take action beyond the published post. He is a master of crafting pieces of writing designed to attract attention. He has an almost supernatural ability to use his work to get in touch with anybody, and then recruit them into his vision for how the future should be. The truth is that accomplishing anything meaningful in this world requires working with people. To fully realize the potential of your ideas, you will need to learn how to connect with and enroll people of influence. One such person can unlock a door that years of solitary striving won’t make a dent on. The approach to writing we teach in this course is actually an intensively social and collaborative approach, using the written word as a bridge to the people who can make the biggest difference in your career and your cause.

David and I will be teaching this first cohort together, to provide the best possible bridge from what you learned in Building a Second Brain (and if you haven’t taken it yet, there’s a $100 off discount code you’ll have access to in the checkout process). Each Wednesday David and I will introduce you to a new facet of writing online, and then you’ll have the rest of the week to produce and get feedback on real work. There are no “exercises” in Write of Passage. Only writing deliverables, each of which will be added to a body of work that you’ll be able to show off by the end of the course.

Your tribe is waiting online for you to make your contribution. A world of career opportunities is ready to find you. There is a need that only you can fulfill. There is a group of people that will only have the breakthrough they need by hearing your take based on your unique experience.

Will you step up to the challenge?

Click here to enroll (or to view the full course curriculum, frequently asked questions, and schedule).

If you have any questions, email us at support@writeofpassage.school.

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.

Second Brain Case Study: UX Designer at Adobe

I recently received this testimonial from Parker, a student in my online course Building a Second Brain. It’s a great example of how someone can overcome longstanding challenges and truly succeed in their personal knowledge management.

Tiago,

I’ve been a virtual student of yours for well over a year now, closely following Praxis since the early days on Medium through the migration, starting with your GTD course, and working my way into all of the BASB content and your BASB live calls (which I could unfortunately only attend part of due to a work trip I was on for the last two weeks of it).

And I’m sure you’ve noticed how frequently I interact with you on Twitter. I’ve even spread your ideas relentlessly among my friends— my roommate, a computer engineer also in the mindset of the future of personalizing technology to improve life workflows, has been brainstorming a note-taking application designed from the ground up to be a second brain, not a note software.

And yet despite all this, I never fully made the commitment to implementing Second Brain practices. I was consuming content constantly, but often not doing much with it. When I was using my notes software, it was a haphazard concoction of resources, notes, projects, and more. I did manage to implement a good daily review system with Things to start off my day from your GTD class, but even then its use wasn’t consistent or reflected across the rest of my digital life.

A few days ago, I finally sat down for a good 6 and a half hours to organize my entire digital life on my personally adapted version of PARA and especially focus on setting up my notes program as a Second Brain.

I went through over 3,000 notes, deleting some, but cleaning up many into better “packets of information” and building a robust tagging architecture in my Bear layout. I did this late into the night and was completely exhausted. But the results are incredible…

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I feel an incredible sense of security that my digital life is captured but freedom that I know exactly where to find thousands of pieces of information, and what search terms to combine to get resources related to the topics I want.

And while I’m sure my day-to-day work will benefit from consistent PARA implementation and a note system that allows me to smash ideas together into new work, what I’m loving most of all so far is the Resources section.

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Creating a curated library of all the ideas that most influenced my life and having it at my fingertips is a kind of liberating feeling I cannot describe. I’ve already made use of Progressive Summarization for a while, and like you said, it creates peaks and valleys of the information that has had the greatest impact on you. And now I get to explore those peaks and valleys and mold them over time.

In a lot of ways I’ve recently come to find digesting information, no matter how much I love the subject at hand, to be a chore. With my Second Brain in place, I find myself blocking off huge chunks of time to work through articles and white papers I’ve saved up, so that I can digest them and synthesize them in my Second Brain into something I can reuse later. I even find myself going back into my favorite books in my library so I can add all the passages I marked up into my Second Brain and keep the best of my library with me at all times, and easily share it with others.

Most importantly, I’m already seeing a creative benefit. The catalyst that made me want to really implement my Second Brain was patterns I kept seeing developing in my work that I couldn’t quite hold onto. I’m a filmmaker and designer currently assigned as an Experience Designer on Premiere Pro at Adobe. My job is to build workflows and interfaces for filmmakers and editors. And I feel that because of my unique position at the intersection of design and film, I had been recognizing an overlap in “Design Thinking” and “Editing Thinking.”

Being in a position at a company like Adobe, I also was paying close attention to successful workflows of other creative apps at our company. I was finally able to bring together all the contributing pieces of these patterns I’ve been seeing then dissect and rebuild them in new contexts to create some truly wild concepts for the future of our product. I’m putting together a presentation scheduled with my managers soon. And this is the type of thing I could never creatively envision, properly research, or effectively communicate without having had access to my most personally influential ideas at my fingertips.

Next steps? I’m building a Siri Shortcut to generate an automatic daily log in Bear that will guide me through my daily review as well as provide a space for daily reflection and tracking of work. I’m also building new assets and templates to improve my workflows at Adobe and share those resources with fellow designers. The new resources will all be in-line with PARA concepts and reflect the “brand” of my Second Brain (Menlo type, same blue color scheme, etc…Hey, visual cues are important in reinforcing a mindset.)

All in all, I feel empowered, and I feel more fiercely creative than I have felt in a long while. So thank you for your lessons and guidance— you’re doing some truly special work.

Cheers,

Parker

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