Tiago Forte's Blog, page 39

A Vision for Escola Pura

At the end of every year I perform an “annual review.” It includes a series of exercises and questions designed to close out the previous year and help me plan for the new one.

I decided to do it differently this year. Under the guidance of my friend Ting, I took on a process of looking more deeply into my desires, dreams, and hopes for the future. It was a longer, much more embodied and introspective process than I’m used to. It included “vision quests,” guided meditations, spontaneous artmaking, and sharing our learnings in real time with a small group of people that Ting brought together online. Instead of my usual analytical checklist, laid out in a neat grid in a spreadsheet, I took on a process that was more about discovering the future than planning it.

I started by collecting my favorite photos, music, and videos from the year, reliving memories already half forgotten. I summarized my projects and milestones, including the outcome and what I’d learned from each. I listed my biggest disappointments, trying to just be with my grief over a reality that never came to be, despite my efforts. I started to feel within myself a space full of thoughts and feelings that didn’t have a clear purpose, and yet were as real as the chair I’m sitting in.

A few weeks into this process, I was hired last minute by a client to give a presentation at a company learning event in New Haven, Connecticut. I didn’t relish making a cross-country trip just a week before Christmas, and was a little annoyed at having my “process” interrupted. But a client is a client, and I went.

I gave my talk at a hotel at the edge of the Yale University campus. The following morning, with a few hours to kill before my flight, I decided to walk the grounds. It was 7 in the morning, and freezing, as I walked briskly toward the old part of campus.

Seeing the centuries-old buildings dedicated to learning and scholarship, I started to get in touch with something that had been dormant for a long time: the power of place for learning. Starting in the fifth grade, I went to a different school every year for five years. I continued this trajectory in college, bouncing between two U.S. universities, a community college in California, and two foreign universities, while switching majors at some point in between. These experiences had given me a strong sense of self-reliance, but had also left me without a strong connection to any particular place for my formal education.

In recent years, I’d joined the Silicon Valley bandwagon denouncing traditional educational institutions as archaic and outdated. Even looked forward to their demise. But walking that venerable campus, where so many great thinkers and leaders had been formed, I came face to face with the power of situated learning. I saw what was possible in an immersive environment where everything was designed and optimized for acquiring knowledge.

I visited the main library as it opened. It is designed like a Gothic cathedral, with arched windows and towering columns framing cozy study alcoves. The stained glass windows depict famous scientists and philosophers, instead of saints and apostles.

I strolled through the public collection, my eyes catching on suggestive titles, like clues to hidden worlds. It reminded me of a place that had impacted me deeply: the Laguna Niguel Public Library, where I had spent countless hours as a kid wandering the stacks. So many of the most influential books in my life had jumped out at me from the shelves unexpectedly, catching my eye as I scanned the titles.

This serendipity is what online education is missing, I realized. The random chance, the sense of destiny, and the lucky accidents that come from exploring a space that is full of opportunities, but that you do not fully control. Instead, we are targeted and sorted into carefully designed sales funnels online, each click making it less likely that we’ll encounter anything we don’t already “like.”

I walked down the street to the rare books library, a severe, modernist glass cube suspended in mid-air. In a glass case in the corner was a complete Gutenberg Bible, one of only 21 surviving in the world. Examining its pages, my face pressed up against the glass, I was humbled by the gravity of what this simple bound document had unleashed: modern civilization as we know it. From the most mundane of inventions had sprung unimaginable human potential.

I went back to the hotel, got my bags, and headed to the airport in Hartford for my flight back home. As I sat in the terminal waiting to board, I downloaded Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind. I had seen it on a few different recommended reading lists, but it wasn’t until my recent conversation with Allison Andrade about “ecstatic experiences” that I decided to give it a read.

The book is about psychedelics, with an emphasis on two substances derived from mushrooms – LSD and psilocybin. It is a sweeping tale of their history, culture, politics, usage, and practice, plus a series of the author’s personal experiences. Pollan is extremely well known for his best-selling books on food, plants, and cooking, but this book is an outlier. It documents his journey not only to learn about an interesting new trend, but to indulge his curiosity about what these substances had to offer, and just maybe, to help him find a renewed sense of purpose after a long and dazzling career.

I devoured the book on the flight back to L.A. The mix of history, science, and self-reflection is my kryptonite. I’ve had a handful of experiences with psychedelics, which have been some of the most profound of my life. But I had never studied much of the background of where they came from or how they worked.

I learned that we are currently perched on the edge of a “psychedelic revolution.” After several decades of stigma and prohibition, psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin are making a comeback. Hundreds of studies at prestigious institutions around the world have slowly been confirming their potential as a “miracle drug” for conditions as diverse as PTSD, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, trauma, and existential despair in the face of terminal illnesses. Research from the 1950s and 1960s on thousands of subjects that showed unprecedented rates of effectiveness are being unearthed and replicated. The psychedelic winter is coming to an end.

But what really got me was the history. I read about the Spanish Inquisition, how it sought to suppress and destroy any trace of the indigenous medicinal practices centered on what the Aztecs called teonanácatl, or “flesh of the gods.” The power of these experiences were too great a threat to the religion they sought to spread.

I was deeply moved to learn how a handful of Mexican villages in the far south of the country, so remote that they were unreachable by vehicle, had somehow preserved the tradition for centuries. Generation after generation, they had passed on the knowledge of how to make the “medicine” they knew was so effective in helping people. 

In 1952, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson sampled the magic mushroom in the town of Huautla de Jiménez in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Two years later, he published a fifteen-page account of the “mushrooms that cause strange visions” in Life magazine, marking the moment when news of this new form of consciousness first reached the general public in the United States.

After a couple decades of intensive experimentation showing spectacular results, psychedelics were banned in 1972 because of the fear that they would “corrupt the country’s youth.” From then on, a small underground community of enthusiasts, advocates, doctors, shamans, artists, writers, scientists, and therapists kept it alive. In recent years they have emerged as the leaders of a movement that is gaining force every year.

I was unexpectedly moved to tears by this matter-of-fact history. I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude that all these people, over so many years, had preserved this practice, at such great risk to their careers and even their lives. They had kept the secret alive so that I, someone they would never meet, could have the privilege of swallowing something that opened the doors to a vast inner world of wonder and love inside me.

Cramped in a tiny economy seat in the back of the plane, I felt for perhaps the first time ever that I was a part of history. That I was in the flow of something that extends far before and far after me. Reading about this movement, I saw a place for myself. I saw that I am part of a lineage of healers and truth seekers and teachers who believe in a better future for humanity. And who are willing to give our lives to it even if we will never see it fully realized.

There is something called a “contact high” in which you can feel some of the effects of psychedelics just by being around people who are taking them. I didn’t know it was possible to get a contact high from reading, but I think that’s what happened. As I read account after account of people’s psychedelic experiences, everything started looking brighter and warmer. I felt expansive, connected to everyone around me. Everything seemed imbued with sublime meaning.

As I put the book down and started journaling what I was experiencing, something started to take shape in my mind. Like an electric arc connecting parts of my brain that didn’t normally communicate, I started to see the closest thing to a “vision” I had ever experienced while sober.

I saw a school building, nestled in the Serra da Mantiqueira mountains of Southern Brazil. I knew it was there, because it was surrounded by araucaria trees native to that region. Their tall, slender trunks shot upward, each one topped with a crown of thorny branches arcing upward and outward like a spiky umbrella. It is a region familiar to me, because it was there that my family lived when I was 14 years old, in the most pivotal year of my life.

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It was called Escola Pura, I somehow knew. “Pure School” in English. There we would teach everything they didn’t teach in normal school: productivity, effectiveness, organization, and project management to start. But also yoga, meditation, breathwork, and emotional intelligence. I would share everything I had learned in exclusive, expensive programs in Silicon Valley, like Landmark, Tide Turners, and Vipassana.

The students would be young people – from teens to 20s and 30s – who wanted to make an impact. On their own lives, on their families, on their communities, on their country, and on the world. They would come from the favelas and the bairros nobres, from the country and the cities, from the North and the South, from the coast and the interior, from the privileged and from the disadvantaged, from creative fields and from government, from business and from non-profits. We would equip them with the very best the world of self-development had to offer: the tools, the skills, the methods, and the wisdom necessary to excel, to make things happen, and to realize their goals, but also to heal, to contribute, and to inspire.

The school will be in a physical location, but it will be born digital. Technology skills – including coding, design, marketing, media production, and many others – will be part of every class. Technology is modern alchemy, and our students will be taught to wield it from the start.

The school itself will live with one foot on the ground, and one in the cloud. Class content will be available online in a flipped classroom; discussions and collaborations will seamlessly move between online and offline spaces; classes will incorporate tangible projects that are shared online with the world; instructors will conduct classes remotely when they need to, as they pursue their work across the globe. The dichotomy between “online” and “offline” education will be completely collapsed, just as it has collapsed in the real world.

Escola Pura will train a new generation of Brazilian leaders, equipping them with every practical superpower mankind has to offer, in service of whichever cause they care about. Eventually, we will invite others from different countries to see what we’ve done. We will license it, or franchise it, or sell it, or open source it, or just give it away. We will bring back Brazilians from abroad who have lost hope in their country. And then send them out again as ambassadors of light and hope.

That is all I know. It doesn’t seem right to say I “thought of it.” It’s more like I received it, fully formed. It was shocking to discover this plan already in my mind, like a perfect memory, except of something that hasn’t happened yet.

At the same time, this idea is me through and through. It’s not so much a metaphysical destiny as the sum of my life experiences.

My experience at Yale was an influence. I had to let go of my dismissal of physical places and institutions as essential for learning.

The Peace Corps was an influence. I saw that I could have a big impact in a short period of time, teaching young people how to define goals, make plans, and use their skills to serve their communities. I saw how little it takes to set a young person on a completely different trajectory.

GTD was an influence. I had to see that it was possible to teach people a framework that helped them be more responsible, organized, and effective. I needed to see that integrity could be taught.

My work with MESA was an influence. I had to see with my own eyes what it looked like for a Brazilian company to do work at a global standard. To come up with something new and revolutionary completely from Brazilian roots. I had to let go of my Brazilian cynicism about Brazil.

My experiences with coaching were an influence. I needed to see that there were forms of instruction far more powerful than mere content. To understand that true breakthroughs happen only when we are witnessed by another human being.

My experiences in Brazil and other parts of Latin America were obviously an influence. There is a saudade buried deep in my heart, for a homeland that I was not born in but always long for. It was planted there as my mother sang me to sleep with Portuguese lullabies; during long afternoons in my grandmother’s kitchen in São Paulo; at jubilant after school soccer games in Campos do Jordão where we lived when I was 14; and later in college as I partied the weekends away at universities in Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro. What I long for most of all is for Brazil to thrive. To reach the potential that always seems just out of reach. Brazil gave me everything it had to offer, and then sent me overseas to a country where I would have more opportunity and security. And it feels like it’s time to come home and give back.

The world badly needs what Brazil has to offer. Their resilience and courage in the face of adversity. Their creativity and adaptability under the most difficult conditions. But also their joy and their optimism over what they do have. Their social bonds and community life that can survive anything. It is an incredibly rich culture that the world has only begun to appreciate beyond the postcard images. Brazilians could be the leaders of a new world. They could teach us a new way of being in connection with our hearts, our bodies, our spirits, and the Earth

But Brazil also needs help. It is a dark time of deepening poverty and entrenched corruption. A new political regime proudly declares its racism, sexism, homophobia, climate denial, and opposition to indigenous and civil rights. And a majority of the voting population agrees that such measures are necessary for order and progress. It seems like everyone with a way out of the country is getting out. The minds and hearts that the country needs are fleeing for better opportunities elsewhere.

I have no idea what path Escola Pura will take. Maybe it will be a small-scale experiment to validate a model for others to use. Perhaps it will start online to build an audience, and only later find a geographic home. Maybe we will start a pilot inside existing schools using government funds, or build a network of private schools independent of any institutions. For now it is just a web address – escolapura.com – that redirects to this post.

What I do know is that this path will take many years, will require resources and skills far beyond what I can supply myself, and will draw on a vast number of people whom I haven’t met yet. It might not happen within my lifetime, and probably won’t ultimately look like what I’m envisioning. But I am ready: to let go, to push through, to expand beyond my beliefs about what is possible, so that Escola Pura and what it represents has even a small chance of becoming real.

It is the most meaningful idea I have ever conceived of. If this isn’t a life purpose, then I don’t know what is.

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Commonplace Books: Creative Note-Taking Through History

One of the clearest predecessors to the modern practice of Personal Knowledge Management are “commonplace books” – centralized, personally curated, and continuously maintained collections of information from various sources that rose to popularity during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution in Europe.

These books helped educated people cope with the “information explosion” unleashed by the printing press and industrialization. They were highly idiosyncratic, personalized texts used to make sense of a new world of intercontinental trade, long distance communication, and mass media. Commonplace books could contain recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas, notes from sermons, and remedies for common maladies, among many other things.

Their keepers would transcribe interesting or inspirational passages from their reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations, ideas, anecdotes, observations and other information they came across. The purpose of the book could range from personal recollection and reflection, to source material for writing, speaking, politics, or business.

Origins of the Commonplace

The word “commonplace” can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where a speaker in law courts or political meetings would keep an assortment of arguments in a “common place” for easy reference. The Romans called them locus communis, which means “a theme or argument of general application,” such as a statement of proverbial wisdom.

For many centuries, great thinkers and intellectuals maintained ongoing records of their work. Shakespeare had something like a commonplace in mind when he wrote in Sonnett lXXVII:

Look, what thy memory cannot contain Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find Those children nurs’d, delivered from thy brain, To take a new acquaintance of thy mind…

But the commonplace book would only come into its own during the European Enlightenment, when an exploding volume of printed media collided with changing political and societal norms. The commonplace book provided a private place for people to work out their thoughts and ideas about the dramatic changes taking place around them.

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Introducing RandomNote Web

I’m very proud to present version 3.0 of RandomNote Web, a free web app we created to help people serendipitously resurface and rediscover their Evernote notes, with the goal of improving their learning and creative output.

Visit RandomNote Web

Version 3.0 was generously created by Chris Galtenberg, Callum Flack, and Ben Mosior, originally as part of the online course Building a Second Brain. It has proven so incredibly useful, we’ve decided to open it up for free to the world.

Imagine if you could push a button, and immediately be given an idea.

Not just any idea. A useful idea, that you yourself chose to save at some point in the past.

In recent years, books like Antifragile, Seeing Like a State, and Incomplete Nature have opened our eyes to the power of randomness as a means to creating more resilience, strength, and creativity in our lives.

Yet if you look at how most people behave, they seem to constantly be trying to remove randomness from their lives. They make to do lists, organize their files, and schedule their calendar all with the goal of making things more predictable and certain.

But there is something being lost as we impose more and more order on our information: serendipity. The greatest breakthroughs usually come from connections that are unexpected, unusual, and unorthodox. When we impose too much order on our ideas, it is these very connections that slip through the cracks.

We created RandomNote to purposefully inject some randomness back into your workflow. To remind you of notes you took the time to create and save, but have probably forgotten even exist. By systematically resurfacing knowledge from the past without requiring any extra effort, RandomNote helps you draw from the sum total of your accumulated life experience, not just what you can remember in the moment.

Here’s how it works:

Every time you visit this web address (https://evernote-random.glitch.me), you will be shown a randomly selected note drawn from your Evernote account
By default it draws from all your notes, but you can also choose to draw from a specific notebook (or from a certain set of notebooks if you follow my PARA organizational system)
If you want to edit, move, or tag the note that appears, you can open it in your browser OR in the Evernote app on your computer with one click

Bookmark the web address above for easy access,  or even better, watch the video below to learn how to set RandomNote Web as the “default tab” in the Chrome browser – every time you open a new tab, instead of being shown a blank screen, you will have the opportunity to review a note at a glance.

If you review just 3 notes per day (out of the dozens of tabs you create), you’ll review more than 1,000 notes over the course of a year! That is 1,000 opportunities to reuse, remix, remember, or revive a piece of knowledge that you deemed worthy of keeping, using nothing but the brief moments while you type in a search term or wait for a page to load.

I believe this simple little web app has revolutionized my learning and creativity over the past year. I’m constantly being reminded of serendipitous connections – a quote I read in an article that I can now use in a blog post I’m writing, an interesting statistic that helps me make sense of a marketing trend; a stock photo that is somehow a perfect fit for a slide presentation I’m working on.

If creativity is the ability to see unexpected connections, then RandomNote Web turbocharges that process using the power of technology. There is no reason to wait around for serendipity to happen to you. By constantly putting in front of you the best of what you’ve read and learned, you are drastically multiplying the chances that “luck” will find you.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the field of personal knowledge management, including how to create effective digital notes in the first place, check out my online course Building a Second Brain.

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.

RandomNote Web 3.0

I’m very proud to present version 3.0 of RandomNote Web, a free web app we created to help people serendipitously resurface and rediscover their Evernote notes, with the goal of improving their learning and creative output.

Visit RandomNote Web

Version 3.0 was generously created by Chris Galtenberg, Callum Flack, and Ben Mosior, originally as part of the online course Building a Second Brain. It has proven so incredibly useful, we’ve decided to open it up for free to the world.

Imagine if you could push a button, and immediately be given an idea?

Not just any idea. A useful idea, that you yourself chose to save at some point in the past.

In recent years, books like Antifragile, Seeing Like a State, and Incomplete Nature have opened our eyes to the power of randomness as a means to creating more resilience, strength, and creativity in our lives.

Yet if you look at how most people behave, they seem to constantly be trying to remove randomness from their lives. They make to do lists, organize their files, and schedule their calendar all with the goal of making things more predictable and certain.

But there is something being lost as we impose more and more order on our information: serendipity. The greatest breakthroughs usually come from connections that are unexpected, unusual, and unorthodox. When we impose too much order on our ideas, it is these very connections that slip through the cracks.

We created RandomNote to purposefully inject some randomness back into your workflow. To remind you of notes you took the time to create and save, but have probably forgotten even exist. By systematically resurfacing knowledge from the past without requiring any extra effort, RandomNote helps you draw from the sum total of your accumulated life experience, not just what you can remember in the moment.

Here’s how it works:

Every time you visit this web address (https://evernote-random.glitch.me), you will be shown a randomly selected note drawn from your Evernote account
By default it draws from all your notes, but you can also choose to draw from a specific notebook (or from a certain set of notebooks if you follow my PARA organizational system)
If you want to edit, move, or tag the note that appears, you can open it in your browser OR in the Evernote app on your computer with one click

Bookmark the web address above for easy access,  or even better, watch the video below to learn how to set RandomNote Web as the “default tab” in the Chrome browser – every time you open a new tab, instead of being shown a blank screen, you will have the opportunity to review a note at a glance.

If you review just 3 notes per day (out of the dozens of tabs you create), you’ll review more than 1,000 notes over the course of a year! That is 1,000 opportunities to reuse, remix, remember, or revive a piece of knowledge that you deemed worthy of keeping, using nothing but the brief moments while you type in a search term or wait for a page to load.

I believe this simple little web app has revolutionized my learning and creativity over the past year. I’m constantly being reminded of serendipitous connections – a quote I read in an article that I can now use in a blog post I’m writing, an interesting statistic that helps me make sense of a marketing trend; a stock photo that is somehow a perfect fit for a slide presentation I’m working on.

If creativity is the ability to see unexpected connections, then RandomNote Web turbocharges that process using the power of technology. There is no reason to wait around for serendipity to happen to you. By constantly putting in front of you the best of what you’ve read and learned, you are drastically multiplying the chances that “luck” will find you.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the field of personal knowledge management, including how to create effective digital notes in the first place, check out my online course Building a Second Brain.

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.

The Power of DWYSYWD (Doing What You Said You Would Do)

Learning productivity is a journey. We have a good map of the territory, in the form of the Digital Productivity Pyramid. Often, when we embark on this journey – learning digital fluency, task management (GTD), personal knowledge management (BASB) and beyond – our motivation is primarily one of utility. We want to stop procrastinating, to get more things done, to excel at our work, and have a vibrant, flourishing career. GTD and BASB will absolutely help you meet those goals.

While on this journey, however, we start to realize that GTD and BASB can serve another purpose: sheer pleasure. We accomplish what we set out to do, and check items off our list of actions and goals; a sense of achievement, fulfillment, and satisfaction arises. We add notes to our collection of knowledge related to our projects, responsibilities, and interests, summarizing them and organizing them; it grows over time into a vast web of meaning, like creating a museum tailored exclusively to our interests. Through action and learning, a sense of pleasure, joy, and wonder arises.

When productivity is both useful and fun for us, it can become a way for us to cultivate virtue¹. These two primary methodologies, GTD and BASB, each have their own virtues, integrity and creativity that are cultivated with practice.

Getting things done and completing tasks more broadly allows us to cultivate reliability, integrity, and honesty. Integrity can be summarized in the following maxim: Do What You Said You Would Do (DWYSYWD, dwizzywood). There is a simple, cause-and-effect relationship between doing what we said we would do, being perceived as trustworthy, and how likely we are to succeed at what we set out to do.

If you don’t DWYSYWD, others will trust you less, and you will trust yourself less. When difficult things arise, you will be less confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be less likely to succeed. If you DWYSYWD, others will trust you more, and you will trust yourself more. When difficult things arise, you will be more confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be more likely to succeed.

When we realize the importance of this relationship, it becomes paramount that we follow it more and more closely. We become afraid² of not doing what we said we would do, and consider how we can make it more likely that we do what we said we would do. When we are presented with doing something, we consider how likely it is that we can actually do it, before we commit to it. And we assiduously track what we have committed ourselves to doing, so that we can ensure we do it.

GTD is an invaluable tool for DWYSYWD and building integrity. GTD ensures that you actually do what you said you would do. It breaks one word – do – into five steps: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.

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By keeping track of what you’ve said you would do (capture), processing the relevant materials as actionable or reference (clarify), sorting the output into to do-lists and other storage systems (organize), regularly looking over and reviewing what you’ve agreed to (reflect), you can be prepared to actually do what you said you would do (engage). With a solid GTD system in place, integrity becomes increasingly feasible and consistent.

With GTD, you say to yourself what you want to do, and it stares at you until you do it. You can quantifiably track whether you’re doing what you said you would do, or not. You get more things done, and it’s easier to prioritize what builds up on your task list. You track and learn how you spend your time and energy.

Without GTD, people usually don’t track or know what they’re committed to, so their sense of cause and effect is subtle and cloudy. With GTD, this becomes quite clear. You also develop a felt sense of integrity – noticing how you feel when you DWYSYWD, and when you don’t. You see that you feel good, proud, and accomplished when you DWYSYWD, and there’s a sense of suffering, guilt, and fatigue that comes with not doing what you said you would do. You also become more careful about what you put on your task list, knowing that you are making or breaking a commitment to yourself.

When we implement and use a reference system with BASB, we also have the opportunity to cultivate a specific set of virtues: creativity, flexibility, and adaptability.

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BASB provides a system, structure, and occasion for creativity to emerge naturally. Our notes and files form a “network of ideas” – ideas that may not have anything in common other than our interest in them. This can provide the raw material for new projects, approaches, and ideas; the basis for completely unanticipated, novel, synthetic approaches to problems we’re facing.

Past learnings are resurfaced years later for similar projects. An article on a historical political movement can impact how you structure a project at your day job. A poem you read in a college course might change how you approach a problem in your side project, in new settings and contexts.

As creativity emerges more and more consistently, we learn to live, think, and act in ways that allow more and more creativity. Creativity feeds on itself, creating a perpetual flywheel that improves our results not just at one company or in the workplace, but across the many areas and epochs of our life.

As our creativity arises with increasing frequency and depth, a related set of virtues arises: flexibility, adaptability, curiosity, and humility.

We see that there are many perspectives on every issue, and gain the ability to see others’ perspectives, and to move between them fluidly. We become curious navigators of the sea of myriad perspectives, exploring from the small raft that is our own library of experiences, knowledge, and wisdom.

As we sail, we feel a broad, open hope, a sense of curiosity; but we also see how small we are, an invisible dot on an infinite ocean. Pierre Bayard points out that “the act of picking up and opening a book masks the counter-gesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”

For every book we pick up, for every skill we master, for every discipline we explore, for every quest we begin, there is another we do not. We see that there is more that we don’t know than that we do know, both as individuals (i.e., experts in one or more domains) and as humans more broadly (i.e., one species in a vast universe). With our curiosity and flexibility, comes a deep humility.

For some, this humility may be painful at first, but we can find some peace in knowing that it is the cure to many of our problems. Many humans, on discovering or creating something new, err tragically, becoming overconfident, brash, and arrogant, thinking that because they know one small thing, they know everything.

Take, for example, the quiet but giant leap between science and scientism, characterized by Alan Wallace in The Taboo of Subjectivity. Science is “a discipline of inquiry entailing rigorous observation and experimentation, followed by a rational, often quantitative, analysis; and its theories characteristically make predictions that can be put to the empirical test, in which they may turn out to be wrong, and the theory is thereby invalidated.” Its ideals are objectivity, skepticism, and pragmatism. Scientism is “the doctrine that science knows or will soon know all the answers and has been said to judge disbelief in its own assertion as a sign of ignorance or stupidity.” Science as a useful discipline is transformed into a religious dogma.

As explorers of the realm of knowledge, equipped with the cutting-edge tools BASB provides us,  we can instead take the attitude of Charlie Munger, to avoid “intense ideologies”:

“I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.’”

At first, we might seek to develop our skills in digital productivity for pleasures or gains, for a promotion or idle pleasure. And there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But as we do that, it becomes increasingly possible to use productivity systems and second brains for another, higher purpose: the development of virtue and moral character. GTD and sound task management cultivate honesty and integrity; BASB and reference systems can help us to cultivate a humble creativity. And, perhaps most importantly: in this pursuit, we see that the cultivation of our virtues can be fun and playful.

¹ In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue.

² In Buddhism, moral shame and fear are considered virtues, wholesome states. These are regret about past actions, and fear that we will do something harmful in the future. This is separate from an unwholesome sense of worry.

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The Virtues of Digital Productivity: Creativity, Flexibility, and Adaptability

Learning productivity is a journey. We have a good map of the territory, in the form of the Digital Productivity Pyramid. Often, when we embark on this journey – learning digital fluency, task management (GTD), personal knowledge management (BASB) and beyond – our motivation is primarily one of utility. We want to stop procrastinating, to get more things done, to excel at our work, and have a vibrant, flourishing career. GTD and BASB will absolutely help you meet those goals.

While on this journey, however, we start to realize that GTD and BASB can serve another purpose: sheer pleasure. We accomplish what we set out to do, and check items off our list of actions and goals; a sense of achievement, fulfillment, and satisfaction arises. We add notes to our collection of knowledge related to our projects, responsibilities, and interests, summarizing them and organizing them; it grows over time into a vast web of meaning, like creating a museum tailored exclusively to our interests. Through action and learning, a sense of pleasure, joy, and wonder arises.

When productivity is both useful and fun for us, it can become a way for us to cultivate virtue¹. These two primary methodologies, GTD and BASB, each have their own virtues, integrity and creativity that are cultivated with practice.

Getting things done and completing tasks more broadly allows us to cultivate reliability, integrity, and honesty. Integrity can be summarized in the following maxim: Do What You Said You Would Do (DWYSYWD, dwizzywood). There is a simple, cause-and-effect relationship between doing what we said we would do, being perceived as trustworthy, and how likely we are to succeed at what we set out to do.

If you don’t DWYSYWD, others will trust you less, and you will trust yourself less. When difficult things arise, you will be less confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be less likely to succeed. If you DWYSYWD, others will trust you more, and you will trust yourself more. When difficult things arise, you will be more confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be more likely to succeed.

When we realize the importance of this relationship, it becomes paramount that we follow it more and more closely. We become afraid² of not doing what we said we would do, and consider how we can make it more likely that we do what we said we would do. When we are presented with doing something, we consider how likely it is that we can actually do it, before we commit to it. And we assiduously track what we have committed ourselves to doing, so that we can ensure we do it.

GTD is an invaluable tool for DWYSYWD and building integrity. GTD ensures that you actually do what you said you would do. It breaks one word – do – into five steps: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.

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By keeping track of what you’ve said you would do (capture), processing the relevant materials as actionable or reference (clarify), sorting the output into to do-lists and other storage systems (organize), regularly looking over and reviewing what you’ve agreed to (reflect), you can be prepared to actually do what you said you would do (engage). With a solid GTD system in place, integrity becomes increasingly feasible and consistent.

With GTD, you say to yourself what you want to do, and it stares at you until you do it. You can quantifiably track whether you’re doing what you said you would do, or not. You get more things done, and it’s easier to prioritize what builds up on your task list. You track and learn how you spend your time and energy.

Without GTD, people usually don’t track or know what they’re committed to, so their sense of cause and effect is subtle and cloudy. With GTD, this becomes quite clear. You also develop a felt sense of integrity – noticing how you feel when you DWYSYWD, and when you don’t. You see that you feel good, proud, and accomplished when you DWYSYWD, and there’s a sense of suffering, guilt, and fatigue that comes with not doing what you said you would do. You also become more careful about what you put on your task list, knowing that you are making or breaking a commitment to yourself.

When we implement and use a reference system with BASB, we also have the opportunity to cultivate a specific set of virtues: creativity, flexibility, and adaptability.

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BASB provides a system, structure, and occasion for creativity to emerge naturally. Our notes and files form a “network of ideas” – ideas that may not have anything in common other than our interest in them. This can provide the raw material for new projects, approaches, and ideas; the basis for completely unanticipated, novel, synthetic approaches to problems we’re facing.

Past learnings are resurfaced years later for similar projects. An article on a historical political movement can impact how you structure a project at your day job. A poem you read in a college course might change how you approach a problem in your side project, in new settings and contexts.

As creativity emerges more and more consistently, we learn to live, think, and act in ways that allow more and more creativity. Creativity feeds on itself, creating a perpetual flywheel that improves our results not just at one company or in the workplace, but across the many areas and epochs of our life.

As our creativity arises with increasing frequency and depth, a related set of virtues arises: flexibility, adaptability, curiosity, and humility.

We see that there are many perspectives on every issue, and gain the ability to see others’ perspectives, and to move between them fluidly. We become curious navigators of the sea of myriad perspectives, exploring from the small raft that is our own library of experiences, knowledge, and wisdom.

As we sail, we feel a broad, open hope, a sense of curiosity; but we also see how small we are, an invisible dot on an infinite ocean. Pierre Bayard points out that “the act of picking up and opening a book masks the counter-gesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”

For every book we pick up, for every skill we master, for every discipline we explore, for every quest we begin, there is another we do not. We see that there is more that we don’t know than that we do know, both as individuals (i.e., experts in one or more domains) and as humans more broadly (i.e., one species in a vast universe). With our curiosity and flexibility, comes a deep humility.

For some, this humility may be painful at first, but we can find some peace in knowing that it is the cure to many of our problems. Many humans, on discovering or creating something new, err tragically, becoming overconfident, brash, and arrogant, thinking that because they know one small thing, they know everything.

Take, for example, the quiet but giant leap between science and scientism, characterized by Alan Wallace in The Taboo of Subjectivity. Science is “a discipline of inquiry entailing rigorous observation and experimentation, followed by a rational, often quantitative, analysis; and its theories characteristically make predictions that can be put to the empirical test, in which they may turn out to be wrong, and the theory is thereby invalidated.” Its ideals are objectivity, skepticism, and pragmatism. Scientism is “the doctrine that science knows or will soon know all the answers and has been said to judge disbelief in its own assertion as a sign of ignorance or stupidity.” Science as a useful discipline is transformed into a religious dogma.

As explorers of the realm of knowledge, equipped with the cutting-edge tools BASB provides us,  we can instead take the attitude of Charlie Munger, to avoid “intense ideologies”:

“I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.’”

At first, we might seek to develop our skills in digital productivity for pleasures or gains, for a promotion or idle pleasure. And there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But as we do that, it becomes increasingly possible to use productivity systems and second brains for another, higher purpose: the development of virtue and moral character. GTD and sound task management cultivate honesty and integrity; BASB and reference systems can help us to cultivate a humble creativity. And, perhaps most importantly: in this pursuit, we see that the cultivation of our virtues can be fun and playful.

¹ In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue.

² In Buddhism, moral shame and fear are considered virtues, wholesome states. These are regret about past actions, and fear that we will do something harmful in the future. This is separate from an unwholesome sense of worry.

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: How a GTD Master Trainer Uses PARA

This video walkthrough is by Mohammed Ali Vakil, Co-Founder of Calm Achiever, the official GTD franchise in India.

Mohammed is a certified GTD Master Trainer who has taught thousands of people and organizations how to implement productivity methods and new ways of thinking about their work and lives.

In this video, he walks through how he has adapted the PARA organizational system to support his goals and values, including:

How to integrate BASB with classic GTD terminology and concepts


How to integrate a “someday/maybe” notebook into PARA


How a trained productivity trainer has adapted PARA to fit how his mind works


How he turned the “Resources” stack into a taxonomy of tags (by Project, Topic, Entity, and Doc Type)  for more flexible categorization

You can read his writing at https://medium.com/@vakils

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.

A Complete Guide to Tagging for Personal Knowledge Management

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)  is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily life, whether from personal experience, from books and articles, or from our work, and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher quality work. I teach people how to master PKM in my online course Building a Second Brain.

By collecting our knowledge in a centralized place outside of our own heads, we can create an engine of creative output – a “second brain” – to advance a career, build a business, or pursue a passion. By making this knowledge digital, we can reap the benefits of searchability, backups, syncing between devices, sharing with others, and more.

But there’s one aspect of personal knowledge management I haven’t fully addressed, which is tags. In the past, I criticized tags harshly as being too taxing, overly complicated, and low value for the effort required. I advised people not to use tags to manage their knowledge, favoring notebooks or folders instead.

But I’ve changed my mind since then. Over several years of observations, findings, and experiments, I’ve come to believe that tags could be the missing link in making our knowledge collections truly adaptable – able to reorient and reconfigure themselves on the fly to enable any goal we wish to pursue.

Let me tell you what I believe is required to unlock the immense potential of tagging for personal knowledge management.

Hierarchies vs. networks

There are two kinds of basic structures that permeate reality: hierarchies and networks.

We currently live in a “network age,” as the internet and digital technology have given people the ability to connect and collaborate directly with each other across the world. Organizational charts are flattening, social movements rise and fall without central direction, and borders of all kinds are becoming more porous as the internet flows across them.

Our infatuation with networks has led to a widely held belief that the era of hierarchies is over. That we now live in a golden age of individual self-expression and autonomy, uniquely enabled by networks. In this view, hierarchies are inherently restrictive, oppressive tools of control that we should abolish whenever possible, and networks are inherently open, democratic tools of personal liberation.

The history of information revolutions tells quite a different story. Networked information is not an exclusively modern invention, and hierarchies are not necessarily doomed. The tension and the balance between them has existed for millennia. Today we’re witnessing only the latest chapter in this history.

Definitions

But first, let’s settle on definitions.

A hierarchy is a system of nested groups. A standard organizational chart is a hierarchy, with employees grouped into business units and departments reporting to a centralized authority. Other kinds of hierarchies include government bureaucracies, biological taxonomies, and a system of menus in a software program. Hierarchies are inherently “top-down,” in that they are designed to enable centralized control from a single, privileged position.

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A network, by contrast, has no “correct” orientation, and thus no bottom and no top. Each individual, or “node,” in a network functions autonomously, negotiating its own relationships and coalescing into groups. Examples of networks include a flock of birds, the World Wide Web, and the social ties in a neighborhood. Networks are inherently “bottom-up,” in that the structure emerges organically from small interactions without direction from a central authority.

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These two structures are not mutually exclusive – in fact, they coexist everywhere. A company might have a formal organizational chart that is hierarchical, but at the same time, it is permeated by a network of “influence relationships” between employees that don’t respect official boundaries.

There is a network in the hierarchy.

Even the internet, the most prototypical example of a pure network, requires hierarchies to function. The servers that send us data are organized hierarchically, as are the packets of data they send. The web browsers that allow us to view webpages are designed hierarchically, as are the menus we navigate to find what we’re looking for.

There is a hierarchy in the network.

Hierarchies and networks are constantly giving rise to each other

Not only do networks and hierarchies peacefully coexist, they are constantly giving rise to each other. They are like symbiotic organisms, each one balancing and complementing the other.

One theory of the origins of life on Earth envisions the first multicellular life forms as self-organizing networks of simpler, single-cell organisms. First coming together to exchange byproducts and for mutual protection, over time a hierarchy emerged: a complex nervous system. These complex organisms in turn coalesced into even higher-order social networks, which provided even more survival benefits.

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has long been praised for its crowdsourced, populist approach to gathering knowledge. But in recent years, Wikipedia’s rapid growth has forced it to develop a series of hierarchical control systems, such as a governance body and approval process. Networks can self-organize and spawn novel ideas and connections, but a hierarchy is required to give it form and structure to survive in the long term.

As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid write in The Social Life of Information, “While it’s clear that self-organization is extraordinarily productive, so too is formal organization. Indeed, the two perform an intricate (and dynamic) balancing act, each compensating for the other’s failings. Self-organization overcomes formal organizing’s rigidity. Formal organization keeps at bay self-organization’s tendency to self-destruct.”

Hierarchies are effective for large-scale, slow-moving efforts in relatively predictable environments. They enable centralized direction and tight synchronization between many moving parts. In times of command and control warfare, mass producing a standardized product, or managing a vast bureaucracy, only a hierarchy will work.

Networks are good in small-scale, quickly changing situations in unpredictable environments.  They favor adaptability, flexibility, and individual autonomy. In times of guerrilla warfare, revolutionary innovation, or open-ended creativity, networks are indispensable.

Hierarchies and networks balance each other

Throughout history, every time we reach the limits of one form, the other emerges as a counter-balance.

Francis Bacon’s scientific method, first introduced in the 17th century, was a bottom-up, networked approach to building scientific understanding. Scientists were expected to reach their own conclusions and then verify each others’ work directly through scholarly networks. This approach contrasted with the tradition of receiving knowledge from hierarchical authorities like the church and state without questioning.

In the 18th century, the encyclopedia movement promoted most famously by Denis Diderot moved in the opposite direction. So much knowledge was being produced from so many sources that people sought a top-down categorization to make sense of it all. Thus the modern encyclopedia was born.

In modern times we face a similar dilemma. The explosion of digital information on the internet has overwhelmed every tool we have for classifying and categorizing it. Only a bottom-up, automated tool is capable of making sense of so much data. Google’s PageRank algorithm made it possible to assign importance and meaning to a webpage not through human judgment, but by analyzing keywords and hyperlinks. It is a bottom-up, algorithmic approach to making meaning out of the network.

Hierarchies are resilient

Despite the popularity of networks in the Information Age, the hierarchy persists as a simple, consistent way to organize knowledge.

Numerous studies (Bergman et al. 2008; Fitchett and Cockburn 2015; Teevan et al. 2004) have found that people strongly prefer to navigate their file systems manually, scanning for the file they’re looking for, as opposed to searching. Manual navigation gives people a concrete structure to navigate, with folders and labels giving them visual feedback and control in incremental steps (Jones and Dumais 1986).

Searching relies on declarative memory – remembering and entering the precise contents of a file – which is a higher-level brain function that consumes a lot of energy. Manual navigation, on the other hand, relies on procedural memory (Barreau 1995) – specifying partial information, recognizing clues and context, and receiving feedback (Teevan et al. 2004; Jones 2013). This kind of memory uses “older” parts of the brain that developed to navigate spatial environments, and thus comes to us more naturally.

In other words, it’s clear that hierarchies aren’t going away, even as our search tools become ever more sophisticated.

But the weakness of hierarchical systems is that knowledge remains siloed from other ideas that could spark interesting connections. Adding a network to our file systems can help us preserve the benefits of hierarchy, while infusing it with cross-connections and associations.

This is the true purpose of tagging in the modern digital age. Not to replace the hierarchy, but to complement it. Tags allow us to create alternative pathways that tunnel through the walls of our siloed folders, while leaving them just as we left them.

The intelligent use of space – tags as virtual spaces

Thinking of tags as “tunnels” through our knowledge connection allows us to make use of our rich understanding of humans’ relationship to physical space. Tunnels have a beginning and an end, a top and a bottom. We are comfortable navigating tunnels.

By adding a label to a collection of related notes, you can more easily think of them as a coherent group. They occupy a “space” in your notes (and in your mind) that makes them easier to examine, connect, share, and refer to. In this way, tags act like real spatial organization, without having to move anything from one place to another.

In his classic paper The Intelligent Use of Space, David Kirsh described three basic ways in which physical space can be utilized:

To simplify perception: such as putting the washed mushrooms on the right of the chopping board and the unwashed ones on the left
To simplify choice: such as laying out cooking ingredients in the order you will need them
To simplify thinking: such as repeatedly reordering the Scrabble pieces so as to prompt new ideas for words

These are the same capabilities that tags provide: they help us to perceive, to choose, and to think about novel groupings of data on the fly. But crucially, to do these things to facilitate action, not just abstract thought.

Tagging notes across different notebooks allows us to perceive cross-disciplinary themes and patterns that defy simple categorization. Tagging all the notes we want to review for a project could make our choices easier, by creating a boundary around the information we’ll consider before taking action. And tagging notes according to which stage of a project they are best suited for can improve our thinking by allowing us to focus on only the most relevant information for the given moment.

In his book Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark describes “simple labeling” (or tags) as a kind of “augmented reality trick.”  With the simple act of assigning labels to things, we invite the brain’s pattern recognition ability to identify their similarities and thereby predict what other items would fit the label too. We are essentially tuning the informational environment of our notes to highlight or suppress the features most relevant to the task at hand. Our mind shapes the environment, and then the environment shapes our mind.

By thinking of tags as virtual spaces that we can create on the fly, we recruit our intuitive sense of spatial navigation to make sense of complex, abstract topics. We are able to create more concrete conceptual structures, and use our procedural memory to navigate them. 

The next question is, “What do we want to use these spaces for?”

Information mapping – tagging for the knowledge lifecycle

As useful as it is to think of tags as “virtual spaces,” this still leaves us with overwhelming complexity. Conceptual spaces are vast, ever-changing, and complex. The failure of every attempt throughout history to create a “universal taxonomy” for all human knowledge is a testament to how incredibly difficult (or impossible) this task is.

I believe that what is needed for tagging to fulfill its potential while remaining feasible is to change its function: from labeling the “conceptual meaning” of bits of knowledge (which is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and fragile), to tracking its lifecycle.

What is a “knowledge lifecycle”?

It is the series of stages that knowledge moves through on its way to becoming a finished product. The stages vary based on what exactly that finished product is, but can include:

Identifying knowledge
Capturing knowledge
Verifying knowledge
Interpreting knowledge
Organizing knowledge
Categorizing knowledge
Disseminating knowledge
Combining knowledge
Creating knowledge
Using knowledge
Re-evaluating knowledge

The key feature of these stages is that there are relatively few of them, and they change slowly. The products of creativity are constantly evolving and in flux, but the creative process is ancient and unchanging. By tagging according to the stages of this process, we can facilitate creativity without having to constantly redesign our organizational systems.

This idea is anything but new. In 1969, Robert Horn first published a paper outlining “information mapping” as a new approach to creating technical reference books. It was a system of principles for identifying, categorizing, and interrelating information to make learning easier in complex, information-rich environments. It was first applied to the military and to computer instruction, and has since been applied to dozens of other fields and scenarios.

At the heart of information mapping is a project lifecycle methodology. It assumes that the overarching goal of knowledge collection is to put it to use in real projects. But there is not one fixed, predetermined use. The same chunk of knowledge might be used in different ways at different times. For example:

Initial learning
Relearning or review
Reference
Briefing and browsing
Updating with changes
Using as job aids (preparing checklists, menus, or protocols)

All these activities may use the same bits of knowledge, but in different ways and at different levels of detail. A training manual has to be able to adapt and reorganize itself according to the needs of different kinds of readers, instead of offering a “one size fits all” version. Horn’s solution to this challenge was “information blocks” – organizing knowledge into standardized “chunks” that could be mixed and matched to suit a specific need.

Information blocks replaced paragraphs as the fundamental unit of meaning and presentation. Unstructured information was “clustered” into information blocks with clear labels, which were linked together and further refined in the writing process.

Horn and his collaborators identified 40 types of information blocks that could be categorized as one of seven types:

Procedure
Process
Concept
Structure
Classification
Principle
Fact

These types were standardized across all kinds of topics and projects. Research by Horn and others indicated that about 80% of virtually any subject matter could be classified using this system. It was found that by chunking a body of information in this way early on in a project, there were tremendous benefits at every subsequent stage.

Information mapping was, on the surface, designed to make writers’ jobs easier, specifying standardized ways of gathering and presenting the right information for a given document. But it also made the readers’ job easier. With each information block labeled according to its type and purpose, readers were able to scan a block and quickly understand its content and structure. This allowed them to customize the learning process: they could read from beginning to end if it was their first pass, or go directly to the block most relevant to their needs if they were already familiar with the subject. The labels made it easier to manage the intermediate stages of what they were reading, increasing reader’s confidence in their ability to understand and make use of the text.

Information mapping was an important step toward “Just-in-Time Learning.” Instead of giving readers a massive text and expecting them to hold it all in their mind until some future, unspecified date, information was structured so that it could be retrieved quickly and efficiently just as it was needed.

What can information mapping teach us about tagging? Decades of research in this field have shown that the best use for labels is as an output mechanism, not an input mechanism. Horn’s breakthrough was distinguishing two very different functions of information – learning and reference – and recognizing that we needed to enable flexible, dynamic ways of re-organizing blocks of information to suit these different needs.

By labeling our notes when they are being used, instead of when they are created, we move the work of tagging as close as possible to the problem it is meant to solve. And by making that work conditional on the execution of a project, we ensure that every bit of effort spent in tagging is put to use.

How to use tags effectively for personal knowledge management

Building on that foundation, these are my four recommendations for how to use tags effectively in personal knowledge management.

#1 Tag notes according to the actions taken or deliverables created with them

My first recommendation is to change the function of tags from trying to describe broad themes like “psychology” and “investing” to tracking the use or function of a piece of information. This could include tagging the note:

By action – What actions have you taken (or will you take) with this note?
By deliverable – What have you used (or will you use) this note to deliver?
By stage of your knowledge lifecycle – Which stage is this note currently in (or does it best belong to)?

Tags should answer the question “Is this relevant to my current need?” just enough to make the next action clear. Don’t let your ideas get bogged down in layers of categories and classifications. Speed them through your creative process and out into the real world.

Here are a few examples of tags that have been applied according to the use or function of a chunk of knowledge:

Tags for [reviewed] and [added], for tracking which notes have been reviewed for a deliverable, and which have been incorporated into it
Tags that designate the kind of information a note contains, such as [content], [admin], and [meeting notes]
Tags that track the status of notes through a workflow, such as [inactive], [active], [next], and [completed]

Here is an example of notes collected over the course of a year related to my online course Building a Second Brain. In the right-hand column you can see a few different kinds of tags that I use to segment this stream of notes into distinct types:

[reviewed] means that I’ve looked it over and considered it for use in the course; [added] means I’ve incorporated it into the course in some way
[admin] designates notes that don’t contain subject matter content, but are used for planning or technical information
[PARA,] [PS], and [JITPM] refer to the three main parts of the course, allowing me to only consider notes for one at a time
[basb] designates notes that I’d like to consider for the book I’m writing on the same topic; this allows me to “extract” a subset of notes for a different project, without removing them from this notebook

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Notice that these tags don’t tell me what each note contains, or try to label them with every possible association. All they do is facilitate their incorporation into a concrete project, which is my online course. Because there are so few tags needed, I can use a few different kinds of tags at once without cluttering the notebook.

I can perform a search for one of these tags, and click this button to show only results from this notebook:

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I am shown only notes with the [admin] tag within this notebook:

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This use of tags is reminiscent of the “kanban” cards in Toyota’s just-in-time manufacturing system. Instead of long, complex forms detailing every part in a bin, a simple card reveals at a glance the most important things: what it is and where it goes.

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Why did Toyota create such a system of cards? Why couldn’t each part simply be placed on the assembly line in the correct order?

In post-war Japan, there were not enough factories and not enough demand to justify dedicating an entire line to one model of car, as was done in the U.S. with Ford’s Model T. The small batches of different kinds of cars that the market demanded required them to create networks of production, with different lines overlapping and sharing the same machines. One of the uses of kanban cards was to track an item through the factory regardless of which machines it passed through, in what order, and at what speed. Each item was “tagged” with its current state, so there was never any doubt as to how it should be handled

This is much the same situation we face today as knowledge workers. We rarely have enough demand for a single activity to dedicate ourselves solely to it, but instead work on an ever-changing mix of different projects and activities that wax and wane unpredictably. And these activities use the same scarce resources – our intellect, time, energy, and skills.

We should use tags in the same way that Toyota used kanban cards: to create intertwined networks in which the right “part” (or note) can be pulled from our “inventory” (or knowledge collection) at just the right moment. I should be able to capture a note today while reading a book on financial planning, and know that it will show up when I need an insight into that subject, whether that is next week, next month, or next year. The tags should remember exactly where I left off, so I don’t have to.

With tags, we have the opportunity to network our knowledge. But these networks shouldn’t be merely conceptual. They should be networks of production, pushing our ideas through our creative process and into the hands of people who can benefit from them.

This approach to tagging addresses each of the pitfalls of tagging I identified in Tagging is Broken:

Tags should be easy to remember: since there is a limited number of actions you take with your notes, you have only a small number of options to remember
Tags should be easy to decide on: it is usually easier to decide how a note is going to be used, rather than what it means or what it’s about
Tags should be concrete: tagging according to actions and deliverables is far more concrete than theoretical categories
Tags should enable the right behaviors: in this case, using tags to manage the stages of a workflow enables the productive use of knowledge, instead of mere cataloguing
Tags should be forgiving: by maintaining tags as a supplement to a hierarchical organizational system, we reap most of their benefits without having to adhere to them perfectly

#2 Add structure slowly, in stages and only as needed, using accumulated material to guide you in what structures are needed

It is very tempting when organizing knowledge to decide on one kind of structure upfront, and then stick to it no matter what. Although there are benefits to consistency, when it comes to personal knowledge management, the most important priority is that it suits your day to day needs. Even the perfect organizational system, if you stop using it, is not perfect.

One of the most valuable features of digital information is that it is highly malleable. It can change form almost instantaneously, with nothing more than a few clicks or taps. We can take advantage of this malleability by adding structure incrementally, in small steps, as our knowledge of a subject accumulates and our needs change.

For example, if I become interested in learning Spanish for a vacation, I might save some useful Spanish words I learn to my “Travel” notebook. No structure is needed at this point, because everything I know about the topic is contained in one note.

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But let’s say that I have such a good trip, I decide I want to explore the possibility of moving to Mexico. I start collecting notes with travel gear, blog posts explaining how to rent an apartment, options for cell phone plans, visa application forms, and guides on which credit cards to apply for, among other things. That original “Spanish vocab” note is now just one among many notes. The usage of that knowledge has changed. At this point, it makes sense to create a new notebook called “Move to Mexico” (a “project” according to my PARA methodology) and move these notes into it.

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After a few months of research, I may have gathered several dozen notes, and the notebook might be starting to get too cluttered to find what I’m looking for. At this point I can easily “segment” the notebook by tagging notes according to broad types like [apartment], [language], [logistics], [financial], [gear], [research], [writing], etc. I suggest using a small number of types so you can see your options at a glance just by looking at the Tags column.

Clicking the “Tags” header at the top of the right-hand column will sort the notes according to type, which allows you to see related notes in one place while keeping them in the same notebook:

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Let’s say a few months pass, and now I’m actually living and working in Mexico City. At this point, a single notebook no longer covers the many facets of life in a new city. I’ll need to create several new notebooks, including projects like “Find gym” and “Activate cell phone service,” areas of responsibility such as “Apartment,” and resources like “Mexican food” and “Spanish language.”

It wouldn’t make sense to have created all these notebooks upfront, when I had so little to store in them. It is effortless, once the relevant categories have revealed themselves, to move notes into these new notebooks (right click > Move notes to…):

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With this approach, I’m only adding as much structure as is needed for a given stage of my learning journey. This helps ensure that I’m spending most of my time engaging with the content, instead of maintaining a complex organizational system. You would think that adding the structure later is more difficult, but in fact it is easier: instead of trying to guess which categories will be needed, I can look at what I’ve already collected and pick the categories that perfectly suit it.

How do you know which divisions or categories to use? Again, instead of trying to guess that upfront, start with the laziest approach: simply collect whatever seems interesting on a given topic. When the time comes, and only when the time comes, look at what you’ve already captured organically and look for patterns. The best time to do this is when starting a project that might draw on these notes, because often the divisions will come from the project itself.

For example, let’s say you’re hired by a company to improve their hiring process. You might have dozens or even hundreds of notes related to hiring if that is a service you provide. But the way the project is organized will often tell you what parts or stages are most relevant. Perhaps the contract is split between “Résumé collection” and “Interviewing.” By reviewing your notes retrospectively and tagging them with these two labels, you can very quickly re-orient your notes related to hiring along these lines. Using an organizational scheme that matches the structure of the project will make that project much easier to execute.

I’m constantly surprised at how clearly divisions appear, as long as I’m starting with a batch of real notes. If I try to theorize about the correct tags before I’ve actually collected anything, it’s always off the mark. The magic of digital information is that it is easy and frictionless to make such retrospective changes. This kind of backward-looking reorganization also allows us to jump into new topics much faster: instead of spending my precious energy getting set up when I’m excited about something, I plunge directly into the heart of the subject, capturing whatever seems interesting and trusting that I can sort it out later.

There is another benefit to this method: it is perfectly okay to not tag a note at all. So long as  you’re not using tags as your primary organizational system, there is no chance that a note left untagged will completely fall through the cracks. It will always be right there in the notebook where you left it. This avoids the frustrating experience of trying to force yourself to think of a tag for a note, even when nothing comes to mind, because otherwise it will be lost completely.

The lesson here is to not create structure before it’s needed. By adding just enough structure, at just the right moment, the work required to maintain it will always feel like a welcome relief, instead of a heavy burden.

#3 Tag notes according to their internal, external, and social context, and status

In their book The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff, from which all the studies in this article are drawn, Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker identify the four attributes of a piece of information that can be used to describe its “context.”

Internal context includes the thoughts, feelings, associations, concerns, and considerations you have about a note
External context includes the other items that you are dealing with while interacting with a note, such as other notes, documents, folders, or apps
Social context refers to other people who are related to the note, such as project collaborators, the person who recommended the source, or who it was shared with
Current status refers to any actions taken with the note, or any deliverables it was used in

These attributes are universal in that they apply to any kind of note from any source, yet are also easy to apply. They don’t try to describe the content of the note; only its context. These aren’t abstract labels requiring intensive thinking. They are simple questions that can be answered by looking around at what you’re doing. They can be added incrementally and as needed. They will enable you to more easily return to the state of mind you were in the last time you interacted with a note, using contextual clues that our minds are made to understand.

Here is an Evernote note template that can be used to add these four kinds of context at the top of any note, including a short video I created on how to save the note as a template to your account.

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#4 Develop customized, profession-specific taxonomies

The history of organizing information is largely concerned with “taxonomies” – hierarchical systems for categorizing information in one all-encompassing model.

Passionate debates about which is the “correct” taxonomy go back millennia. Aristotle believed that knowledge could be classified according to its substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, & passion. Francis Bacon categorized all human knowledge into memory (i.e. history), reason (i.e. philosophy), and imagination (i.e. fine arts). The 20th century Indian librarian Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan argued that any document could be defined according to its personality, matter, energy, space, and time.

The goal has always been to create a single, completely comprehensive ordering of knowledge that any future idea can be placed into. But over many hundreds of years, as our knowledge has exploded in size and complexity, the possibility of a universal taxonomy has faded. It is now quite clear that any such taxonomy will either be too broad to be useful, or too narrow to be universal. The dream of a universal taxonomy is dead.

But for specific fields and professions, it is clear that taxonomies have tremendous value. Biology would be a hopeless tangle of overlapping specialties without the Linnaean taxonomy. Chemistry would be futile without the periodic table. Trends in art would be impossible to make sense of without schools and periods. As long as you can rely on a “controlled vocabulary” of agreed upon terms, it makes a lot of sense to put everything into a category.

A student in one of my courses explained his system for writing scripts (emphasis mine):

“If you know what the constituent parts are of your particular art form, you can collect “snippets” of evocative ideas for any one of them in a single notebook and use tags to label them. So, for example, I have a “Film Ideas” folder where I store ideas and then tag them with one of the following labels:

C = description of Characters who could be used in a story.
L = interesting and visual Location.
O= curious or evocative Object.
S = loaded or revealing Situation.
A = unusual or revealing Act.
T = any Theme that intrigues you or that you see embodied in life

Then I can see all of these notes side by side and if any particular combination of elements sticks out to me, I have the beginnings of a story idea.”

Such a taxonomy can be even more specific than your field or profession, since you are the same person recording and retrieving this knowledge. They can be “personomies,” or personal tag vocabularies, containing the terms that you use to refer to the parts of your work. This personomy is something you will have to develop yourself, but your profession or industry is a good place to start.

The scalability of tagging

In my experience, it is only necessary to use tags when your collection becomes formidable. After nearly 10 years of note-taking and more than 8,000 notes created, I am just starting to seriously run up against the limits of a no-tagging system.

This finding has been echoed in the research. In the 1960s and 1970s, IBM conducted a series of experiments with their new Storage and Information Retrieval System (STAIRS), one of the first systems in which the computer could search the entire text of documents. They found that search accuracy could run as high as 75 to 80%. They happily proclaimed the “death of meta-data.” Why spend time and money having humans index documents when the computer could just search everything?

But there was a fatal flaw in the experiments. They used small collections containing only a few hundred documents. It was assumed that these results would apply equally well to large collections, as long as they had enough computer power. But it was a language problem, not a computer problem.

In the 1980s, researchers David C. Blair and M.E. Maron tested a full-text litigation support system containing about 40,000 documents with 350,000 pages of text. The lawyers depended on this system to retrieve all the documents that might help them win their cases. But Blair and Maron showed that recall averaged only about 20%. The system was retrieving only about 1 in every 5 relevant documents! And this was with trained researchers.

The trouble is that language has numerous, often vague, overlapping mappings to ideas. As David Blair recounts from a real example, a system with 1,000 documents contained 100 that contain the word “computer,” with the word being used 10 different ways. But in a system with 100,000 documents, 7,100 contained the word, and it was used in 84 different ways. The number of possible meanings and interpretations explodes almost as fast as the information itself.

This is where tags come in. They can provide the essential missing piece of data that computers still cannot determine: what a note is about. As long as you follow the recommendations in this article – using tags to track where a chunk of knowledge is in the knowledge lifecycle, adding structure and tags slowly and incrementally, and adding contextual data to notes – you can create paths of action for your future self to follow, without being burdened by rigid bureaucracy.

In the context of personal knowledge management, we need both hierarchies and networks. Notebooks allow us to gather a batch of related material in one place, and look for patterns and associations between the things we’ve collected. Tags add a network to this hierarchy – a distribution network for more efficiently exporting our ideas into the external world.

Ambient findability

“Ambient findability” is a term coined by information architect Peter Morville in a book of the same name. It describes the practice of creating environments where relevant information can be found and used, whether that is a library or a smartphone. When an item is “findable,” it means that it is easy to discover and locate.

The key skill in navigating such an environment is wayfinding, which refers to “the series of things people know and do in order to get from one place to another, inside or outside.” It is a skill we developed to navigate physical environments that we’ve since adapted to virtual environments. But the virtual worlds we’ve created lack the natural landmarks we rely on in the natural world. They lack trees, rivers, seashores, and paths. In the digital world, we have to create them ourselves, out of words.

But the way we’ve used tags in the past comes from a different era. Morville recounts his memories of “online searching” at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and Library Studies, in the ancient epoch of 1993:

“We searched through databases via dumb terminals connected to the Dialog company’s mainframe. Results were output to a dot matrix printer. And Dialog charged by the minute. This made searching quite stressful. Mistakes were costly in time and money. So, we’d spend an hour or more in the library beforehand, consulting printed thesauri for descriptors, considering how to combine Boolean operators most efficiently, and plotting our overall search strategy. A computer’s time was more precious than a human’s, so we sweated every keyword .”

Elaborate, precise tagging systems made sense at that time, when every operation cost money. But the challenge today is not to conserve computer power, but to spend it. Instead of wasting hours of precious human time with laborious tagging just to make a computer’s job easier, we should generously spend the computer’s power to make our job easier.

Thanks to Andrew Brož, Chris Harris, Sachin Rekhi, and Jessica Malnik for their feedback and contributions

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The Official Second Brain Note Template

Presenting the first ever official note template for use with my Building A Second Brain online course and methodology! Click below to download the template to your own Evernote account:

View note template

Here is a quick 2-minute demo video showing how to make use of the template:

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