Tiago Forte's Blog, page 7

Beyond Perfection: How AI Unleashes Creativity by Lowering Our Standards

Imagine a product manager sitting down with his team on a Monday morning to plan the next week. The main item on the agenda is the decision of whether to create a mobile app for their e-commerce website.

The team quickly gets excited about the idea, imagining all the possibilities it could entail. They propose features like personalized shopping recommendations, integrations with social media platforms, multiple payment options, and in-app notifications about releases of new products.

But our product manager is starting to feel uneasy. 

He has trouble identifying even for himself what the problem is. It all seems too much, too fast. There are too many unspoken assumptions being made and too many sky-high expectations being formed. He knows better than anyone how much all these features are going to cost, and how long they’re going to take, and wants to test some basic assumptions before committing to a full-fledged mobile app. 

He knows he has to say something.

Why Quality Is Sacrosanct But Shouldn’t Be

Our product manager doesn’t dare say “I think we need to do this at lower quality first.” 

Quality is sacrosanct in the modern workplace. You’re never allowed to say you’re going to deliver something at 70% quality, or 50% quality, not to mention 20% quality. The unspoken rule is that you always do “your very best.”

And yet, we never really follow this rule, do we? What percentage of the tasks you complete are executed with maximum effectiveness? How many of the projects you take on reach their full, unmitigated potential? How much of the work you do is the best it could possibly be?

I would argue that that number is close to zero. It has to be, because the closer you get to the mythical 100% quality mark, the more costs skyrocket. It might take you as much time and effort to go from 90% to 95% quality as it took you to go from 0% to 90%. And it might take you that much time again to go from 95% to 99%. And there probably is no such thing as 100% perfection.

In other words, quality is an asymptote when you take costs into account: it can only approach 100%, but never reach it. And the closer you get to that 100% standard, the more costs grow exponentially.

I think we know and understand this tradeoff at an intuitive level. All day long, we make such tradeoffs fluidly:

When sending quick emails to close colleagues you settle for a lower quality level versus an email sent to an important clientWhen giving presentations to the Board of Directors you put a lot more shine and polish into your slides than when running the weekly standupA piece of writing you know will be published nationally in print will receive a lot more editing attention than something going on your personal blog

We also do have ways of communicating to others that this tradeoff is being made. We say things like:

“Let’s make a basic prototype and test it before going to manufacturing.”“Let’s put up a rough landing page to gauge interest before building a full website.”“Let’s shoot a concept video on a smartphone before hiring a production crew.”“Let’s mock up this app feature before putting it into production.”“Let’s do a dry run of the presentation before getting on the Zoom call.”

We have a whole vocabulary of terms and expressions to convey that we are going to do something at a lower quality than we could otherwise achieve, in order to save time, minimize expenses, mitigate risk, or test assumptions.

Notice how each of the terms above communicates some version of “Don’t judge this too harshly or nitpick details – it’s just a rough draft.” This language is meant to set the right expectations so you have permission to experiment with something you don’t know is going to work. This loosens the usual standards and conventions you operate under by asking your audience to consider the big picture rather than obsess over some tiny error.

What all this means is that we are constantly making tradeoffs about how much quality we can “afford” for a given task, document, deliverable, project, or goal. No unit of work can escape this tradeoff – it applies to the shortest email you answer to the grandest goals you have for your life. All we can do is move up or down the quality/cost curve.

But there is something missing from the diagram above: quality is not just a single curve.

Consider the following question: Which is higher quality – a lawn mower or a cold brew coffee? That question makes no sense. We have to compare similar items for quality to even apply. 

Well, how about a Toyota Camry versus a Tesla Model 3? You might jump to say that the Tesla is obviously better. But it depends on the situation. If you’re a first-year college student living in a dorm on a shoestring budget with no access to an electric charger and afraid of break-ins in a new city, then the Camry is better along nearly every dimension.

And that is the word we need to unpack: dimension. The “quality” of a product isn’t just one dial that gets turned up or down. There are multiple dimensions of quality, each of which can be dialed up or down independently. For example, a car can be judged by its:

HorsepowerMaximum rangeAesthetic appealCarrying capacityCost of ownershipAmenities and featuresAnd many other criteria…

Each brand and model of an automobile has a different combination of these dimensions they maximize, minimize, or satisfice on in order to appeal to a target customer. Different kinds of customers value certain dimensions of quality differently, which is why we have a thriving marketplace of numerous automakers, instead of a winner taking all. 

Obvious, right?

Now consider how this idea applies to our digital creations – the websites, reports, slide decks, code bases, and pieces of art and music we produce. Let’s take a piece of writing for example. It might be judged on its quality along the following dimensions:

Density of insightEntertainment valueSpecificity and detailPracticalityStorytellingClarity

There are many other criteria we could use, but let’s take those 6 as a starting point. Once you break down the concept of “quality” this way, you can see that individual pieces of writing aren’t better or worse than each other – they are different, rating higher or lower on each of these dimensions of quality.

A tweet probably beats out an in-depth essay when it comes to density of insight but loses miserably on specificity and detail. A how-to article wins when it comes to practicality, but likely falls short with its storytelling. 

This kind of comparison applies even to highly similar pieces of writing. Imagine two journalistic articles covering the same story, such as an oil spill off the Alaskan coast. They might rate the same on specificity, practicality, and clarity, but if one is told in a more entertaining way, that single superior dimension of quality might differentiate it from the other.

This effect is magnified on the Internet, where even a slight difference in just one dimension of quality can mean the difference between relative obscurity and viral growth. That’s because there are no barriers to what people can access online, which means a huge majority of their attention tends to flow to a tiny percentage of all the things that get posted online each day. 

The Power of Knowing Which Dimensions Matter

For a given digital creation, we have control over which dimensions of quality to invest our time and effort into. It’s not random. 

When working on a piece of writing, for example, you could ask yourself: “Which dimensions of quality are most important for this piece right now?” In most cases, there are only one or two that truly matter, and the others only need to be “good enough” or don’t matter at all. 

For example:

For a “how to” article explaining how to use a piece of software, the quality of the storytelling probably doesn’t matter as much, whereas clarity is paramountFor a thought leadership piece, the level of insight is of utmost importance, whereas the specificity might not matter as muchFor an “elevator pitch” for a new business idea, the length needs to be as short as possible, whereas the practicality might not be important for now

Once you see that the quality of any output is made up of multiple dimensions and that typically only one or two truly matter, you are free to spend most of your time and attention on only those dimensions. And not only are you free to, that is what you must do if you want any chance of standing out.

In contrast, a guaranteed way to get stuck and bogged down is to try to maximize many dimensions at once. That isn’t possible or necessary, since a given piece of writing can really only make one promise: a clearly explained idea, an engaging story, a practical series of tips. Therefore, any effort you spend improving the lower priority dimensions is not only wasted, it might even interfere with and obscure the ones that matter.

This is another way of saying, “Not all aspects of a piece of work matter equally.” By taking opinionated stances about which ones do matter, and pouring all your time and attention into them, you have a chance at “winning” the attention game along a dimension that no one else can match.

The Pitfalls of Defaulting to High Quality

If all this sounds reasonable, why don’t we do it?

I’ve long noticed that most people tend to have a default level of quality that they get stuck on, like a car stuck in a certain gear. It’s like a habit – a sticky set of behaviors and personal standards that are entwined with their identity, and thus difficult to change. 

It’s easy to see why defaulting to a low level of quality would be limiting to one’s career and life – it will be hard to get that job you want, much less keep it, if the output you produce never reaches a high enough level of quality. 

It’s much more difficult to see how being stuck at a high level of quality can be just as limiting. In fact, in my work with high-performers, this is one of the most common limitations keeping them from taking the next step in their careers and businesses. 

Let me explain.

For any given profession or kind of work, there is usually a “standard of quality” that people hold themselves to. For example:

A graphic designer defaulting to a high degree of quality will insist that every graphic asset that leaves their desk be highly polished and ready for printingA writer defaulting to a high level of quality will refuse to send in their draft or manuscript until it perfectly meets their vision for what they want to express to the worldA software engineer will continue refining her code until every line has been thoroughly documented, tested, and validated to the highest standards of quality

Again, notice that each of these cases describes a respectable, admirable professional. Such people are already rare! How unusual is it to encounter any high-quality piece of work anywhere? It is an accomplishment to reach such heights, and relatively few ever will.

But…if you have reached those heights, the very attitudes and skills that got you there are likely now holding you back. Here’s why: not everything can or should be high quality. 

In fact, most things most of the time should not be. Why? Because it’s so damn expensive. If you insist that every. single. piece. of work that leaves your desk (or computer) with your name attached be at the highest level of quality you are capable of achieving, several increasingly severe consequences will start to happen.

First, over time, you’ll produce less and less. 

You won’t have as much time to obsess over every detail and polish every facet as you get older. You may have a spouse and kids and a dog and all the responsibilities those wonderful beings entail. Your metabolism will slow down and your energy levels will go with it. This is just how life works. You won’t have the same boundless energy and vast swaths of free time in the future as you had in your youth.

Second, you’ll be limited to individual contributor positions. 

As long as you identify solely as a craftsperson – as the expert who is always there on the workbench or at the drawing board or in the studio – that’s where you will remain. The privilege of being in those places doing the work you love will slowly turn to resentment as you realize you have no other choice. There is nothing you will grow to hate as much as something you used to love.

Third, you’ll be limited in the scale and impact of what you can create. 

Any significant work of art, culture, engineering, or business requires other people to reach its potential. And not just a few people you personally know – a lot of people in far-flung places, most of whom you will never meet. Even for something as seemingly solitary as writing my book, I can count over two dozen people who were directly involved, and there were probably hundreds more indirectly involved. Working with others is challenging because they will never do it quite as well as you. But you have to learn to live with that if you ever want to manifest a grand vision.

Fourth, you’ll be under-compensated and under-appreciated. 

The world doesn’t pay experts very well. Related to all the points above, as long as you have to control every aspect of your output, you’ll never receive the financial rewards and respect you deserve. You’ll be stuck producing exquisitely crafted but small, limited works of art that someone else will find a way to commercially exploit, likely leaving you with peanuts.

The paradoxical conclusion of all this is that, for the highest-performing professionals at the top of their game, the bottleneck to their growth is in learning to lower their standard of quality.

Why It’s So Hard to Lower Your Standard of Quality

At first glance, it would seem easy to simply not try as hard and stop before you’ve brought something to perfection. But it’s hard for several reasons.

First, as I mentioned previously, our identities are closely tied to the default level of quality we are most comfortable with. 

We know how to reliably reach our favored level of quality. It’s comfortable, predictable, and brings expected rewards. Many of us have built entire identities around the results we produce: we are the “kind of person” who “does great work” and are thus determined to never fall below that standard. Letting go of that standard can feel like letting go of who we are.

Second, delivering at a lower level of quality is not just a matter of stopping when you reach a certain point. It requires you to understand which dimensions of quality can be sacrificed, and which still need to be maximized. 

You might make hundreds of micro-decisions over the course of producing a document or deliverable. For each decision, you have to become more sensitive to which dimensions of quality it is improving, and whether that dimension matters for the current iteration you’re working on. You have to spend more time thinking at a “meta” level, considering questions such as how long each feature is going to take, which risks or other consequences it creates, and which prerequisites depend on which others. 

For a rough-cut concept video, do you really need title screens, precise editing, cinematic background music, and maximum resolution, or can any of those be saved for a later iteration? For the first round of photo proofs, do you really need touch-ups, color grading, and cropping, or does only one of those matter until you gather more information? To answer such questions, you have to get so clear about precisely which assumption you’re currently testing, exactly which information you’re trying to surface, or which hypothesis specifically you’re validating.

Third, working at lower levels of quality surprisingly requires more advanced communication and collaboration skills. 

Other people and stakeholders have to be ready to receive the “quick and dirty” draft you’ve made, which means you need to prepare them in advance. It’s of no use to deliver it in half the time if they aren’t ready and it will just sit around collecting dust. The way you communicate has to change because you have to calibrate the expectations of your collaborators so they consider the big picture instead of zeroing in on some inconsequential detail.

Fourth, you have to get much, much better at receiving feedback. 

This is a whole collection of skills within itself: how to ask for specifically the kind of feedback you need, how to ask follow-up questions to discover what people really think, how to convey which kinds of feedback aren’t helpful, how to decide who to get feedback from and in what form, how to document and structure that feedback so it’s helpful, how to implement what you’ve learned without getting discouraged or losing your vision. 

And fifth, all the points above require greater emotional intelligence and self-awareness. 

Each attitude or skill I’ve mentioned is about embracing change, and even accelerating it, as a means of learning faster. It turns out that in order to learn faster, you have to expose yourself: to people’s opinions of you and your work, to the consequences of mistakes and failures, to the disappointment of a promising new experiment not working out. You’re going to need more emotional fluidity to be able to pivot abruptly from one promising direction you may already be invested in, to another more promising one.

Moving From Quality to Fidelity

All the ideas and observations I’ve offered above point to one glaring need for modern knowledge workers: to replace the concept of “quality” with a more subtle and sophisticated one: fidelity. 

Quality is an industrial-age idea. It comes from a time when society changed slowly, business was about making something strictly uniform, and we could expect to spend our careers in one field or even one company perfecting our craft.

But all of that has changed. At every level, our society and politics and economy and culture are all shifting far faster than ever before, and in more unpredictable ways. Quality is no longer about sticking faithfully to a timeless process passed down through the generations. It depends instead on your ability to maintain situational awareness about your environment and adapt your thinking and behavior to match it. 

The only way to maintain such situational awareness is to constantly test and probe your environment to discover what is happening and why. Such tests have to be low-quality because they have to be fast. 

You can’t spend a year building a mobile e-commerce app, because the e-commerce landscape will look completely different in a year and your hypothesis will be obsolete, even if it was correct! You can’t spend months artfully crafting your take on an emerging trend, because, by the time you publish it, most of the value of taking an early stand on it will be gone.

The word “quality” has a moralistic connotation that implies more of it is always better than less. That’s why we need to let go of it. It’s time to embrace fidelity instead.

The word “fidelity” means “faithfulness,” as in “How faithful should this deliverable be to the ultimate version of what it could be?” Sometimes, the answer may be that whatever you’re creating demands the highest levels of fidelity. If you’re at the end of a major project for example, and it’s time to deliver the final product to a client, it’s probably wise to maximize fidelity.

But fidelity is also a morally neutral term, conveying that more is not necessarily better. There is tremendous value in being able to produce rough, early, unfinished, unpolished experiments, especially when speed and adaptability are the top priorities. 

If you’re early in a project, or there are still a lot of unknowns, or you’re trying something new and risky, then working at low fidelity might serve you better. You can save tremendous amounts of time and expense, not to mention avoid huge risks and pitfalls, by creating something rough and ready and then iterating from there.

How can we use this new understanding of fidelity to increase our speed?

By giving ourselves permission to reduce the fidelity of whatever we’re creating. To dial it down to the absolute minimum needed to answer only the next, most important question we’re facing. To focus all our attention only on the next bottleneck, and ignore everything else.

Using AI For Low-Fidelity Prototyping

There is a special place for Artificial Intelligence when it comes to creating low-fidelity prototypes.

In a previous piece, I wrote about my experiments using ChatGPT to summarize books, my conclusion was that there wasn’t much value in the book I was trying to summarize. It didn’t answer any open questions for me, or solve any problems I’m facing.

This might seem like a failed experiment, and it was. But there is a lot of value in failed experiments – they reveal what isn’t true, doesn’t work, or isn’t worth pursuing.

Why was the conclusion I reached so meaningful? Because writing a summary of this book had been on my to-do list for 5 years. It was a “marginal” task that I had some interest and desire in doing, but not enough to actually commit the time and energy needed. Looking at the many tasks I’ve accumulated in my task manager over the years, most of them fall into that category: potentially important enough to keep around, but never urgent enough to actually do.

By using ChatGPT to make a low-fidelity summary that was just good enough for me to get a sense of the book’s contents, I was able to test the assumption that it would be relevant to my needs much more quickly than it would have taken otherwise. In a sense, I was able to create a “rapid prototype” of the summary that wasn’t good enough to publish but was good enough to help me decide whether this task was worth doing at all.

I suspect this may be the greatest impact of AI tools in the short term: allowing us to quickly create low-fidelity, 80/20 prototypes to test assumptions about what we should do next and get an idea of what a final version might look like if we do.

Imagine this scenario: you have the ability with the mere click of a button to have AI complete any task on your to-do list at 50% of the quality that you’d be able to do yourself. You can do so almost instantaneously, without risk or penalty if it goes wrong, and at no cost other than a couple of minutes and an affordable monthly subscription.

Let’s say you run “AI tests” of 50 tasks on your to-do list, revealing that:

20 aren’t worth doing at all15 can be executed completely by AI without your involvement10 need to be restructured and broken into pieces for AI to then complete with your supervision5 require your full and undivided attention

That would be a tremendously powerful breakdown to have at your disposal. It basically represents a plan for how to tackle a broad spectrum of tasks, which would replace a large amount of cognitive effort you would otherwise have to spend yourself. 

Many of the “intermediate” stages of our workflows include this kind of categorization, analysis, chunking, decision-making, and planning of tasks. By replacing these intermediate stages with AI, I think our time and attention will get freed up to spend in two places: the very beginning of our creative process – deciding which information to capture as inputs in the first place – and the very end of our creative process – polishing and refining the final product to perfection as only humans can.

This use case alone might dramatically free up our time since we all spend a fair proportion of our days doing tasks that don’t require our full attention. But there is another, even more interesting and profound way I think we’ll use AI. 

It arises from the fact that there is an inherent amount of uncertainty surrounding much of our work. We don’t know in advance which tasks require 100% quality, 50% quality, or are worth doing at all at any level of quality. Often you don’t understand the nature and potential value of a task until you’re already doing it, as with my example of summarizing a book.

Reducing that uncertainty is another area where I think AI will make a major impact. If you can have it complete a task at 50% quality at virtually no cost, that should be enough to eliminate a lot of uncertainty about whether it’s worth doing and what the best approach is. 

You might ask it to generate a mockup of a webpage you’re considering making, or a batch of test code you’re thinking of writing, or an outline for a course you’re thinking of designing – since this labor is free, there’s no downside in trying it, and only upside if it happens to produce something you can use. 

Once you’ve seen a rough, low-fidelity version produced by AI, and made the decision to green-light the full-fidelity version, you might need to take it from there to bring it to a level where it can be published. But even in that case, you’ve gained a tremendous benefit: you’ve been able to visualize many more (and weirder, more divergent) scenarios and consider more (diverse, unusual) options before committing your precious time and attention to one.

This approach also gets around a lot of the personal baggage and identities that we attach to a certain standard of quality. We won’t be as attached to the work that AI does on our behalf and thus can tolerate a much wider range of fidelity than we would ever accept from ourselves. 

By replacing the loaded term “quality” with the more precise “fidelity,” by focusing all your attention on the aspects of the deliverable you’re working on that matter most, by treating everything you do as a continuous iteration, and by using AI to rapidly test new directions before committing to them, you’ll open up a world of possibilities in which emerging technologies are an ally of your creative vision, not an impediment to it.

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The post Beyond Perfection: How AI Unleashes Creativity by Lowering Our Standards appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Extended Mind: Reimagining the Nature of Intelligence

The conventional approach to intelligence has been to rely only on our own personal mental capabilities. 

We tend to assume that intelligence resides only in our skulls, the same way the computation of a computer is sealed inside its aluminum case.

But in her book The Extended Mind (affiliate link) Annie Murphy Paul argues otherwise: that our mind is more like an eclectic bird’s nest, pieced together out of myriad odds and ends we’ve gathered from our environment.

Her book is a fantastic deep-dive into the latest science behind “extended cognition” – the ability of humans and other animals to extend and amplify their intelligence using their environment. 

She opens with a critique of our society’s longstanding “neurocentric bias”: how in most of our efforts to “improve our thinking,” we focus all our attention on our heads – committing information to memory, exercising our self-discipline, or rooting out cognitive biases. This excessive “cognitive individualism” leads us to repeatedly try to solve problems using only a fraction of the intelligence available to us.

Where does that unutilized intelligence reside? In our bodies, environments, and relationships primarily. These “extra-neural inputs” allow us to transcend the limits of our own biology.

The smarter approach is to learn to reach beyond our brain’s limitations to the vast array of intelligences lying just beyond the walls of our skull.

The Complexity of the World Has Exceeded Our Brain’s Capacity

The modern world has grown extraordinarily complex, far beyond anything our minds evolved to handle. Everyday life revolves around non-intuitive concepts, layer upon layer of abstractions, with reality mediated by countless concepts and symbols.

We were not born to understand the intricacies of engineering or calculus. We did not evolve to master the global financial markets or the complexity of climate change. We have more information coming at us than ever, but that information is ever more specialized and abstract.

Succeeding in such a world requires a range of mental abilities: focused attention, expansive memory, plentiful bandwidth, sustained motivation, logical rigor, and the ability to learn new skills quickly. Sometimes we display those abilities, but as the world accelerates, increasingly we can’t keep up.

With every additional terabyte of data swelling humanity’s store of available knowledge, our native human abilities fall further behind. We need a new way of expanding our intelligence and keeping up with the pace of change.

The Extended Perspective – Going Beyond the Limits of Our Brains

In 1995, two British philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, published a scientific paper that would go on to revolutionize our understanding of cognition. It was called “The Extended Mind,” and it proposed a radical hypothesis: that our mind doesn’t end at the limits of our skull, but instead naturally “extends” into our surroundings.

In this view, experts are not those who maximize their own brains, but those who have learned how to leverage extra-neural resources to accomplish the task at hand. They have discovered how to offload and externalize information from their own brains, and then dynamically interact with those external manifestations of knowledge in ways that are impossible using only neurons.

Intelligence is thus an act of continuous assembly and reassembly of resources external to the brain.

Clark and Chalmers’ viewpoint was initially ridiculed in many circles. But in the following years scientific discoveries on three different fronts confirmed many of their ideas: embodied cognition (which explores the role of the body in our thinking); situated cognition (which examines the influence of our environment on thinking); and distributed cognition (how groups of people can draw on their collective intelligence).

Paul places each of these frontiers under the unified umbrella of extended cognition, and dedicates her book to exploring them.

Embodied Cognition – Thinking with the Body

Whereas language is discrete and linear, gesture is impressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things look and feel that speaks directly to the intuition of others. 

One study found that subjects were 33% more likely to recall a point from a presentation if it was accompanied by a gesture. And that memory effect grew more pronounced as time passed, increasing to 50% just 30 minutes after watching the talk. 

Instructional videos that include gesture significantly enhance learning – viewers direct their gaze more efficiently, pay more attention to essential information, and more readily transfer what they learn to new situations. There are benefits to the speaker as well – making gestures causes them to speak more fluently and articulately, make fewer mistakes, and present information in a more logical and intelligible way.

By learning to recognize the bodily sensations that indicate our body “knows” something, we can tap into subconscious sources of knowledge. Engaging in physical activities or movement as we communicate can help us uncover new insights, ideas, and perspectives that our conscious minds might have otherwise missed.

Situated Cognition – Thinking with Space

When people occupy spaces that they consider their own, the research says, they experience themselves as more confident and capable. And they not only feel that way, they actually perform more productively, efficiently, and with more focus and less distractibility.

Barbara Tversky, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College in New York, observes that “We are far better and more experienced at spatial thinking than at abstract thinking.” By offloading our ideas onto our environment, “…spatial thinking can substitute for and scaffold abstract thought.”

Something as simple as writing down a phone number to better remember it is a powerful way of quickly offloading information from our brains and freeing up mental bandwidth. This effect is especially powerful when it comes to creative work: artists, architects, and designers report that they often “discover” elements in their own work that they didn’t “put there.” 

By writing or sketching something down, we are carrying on a conversation between our hand, our eye, and our mind out of which can emerge something greater than the sum of those parts.

The use of visual artifacts such as charts, diagrams, maps, models, and photos has also been shown to make people gesture more, in reference to those artifacts. Thus the use of our body (described above) and the use of space go hand in hand.

Distributed Cognition – Thinking with Others

Kevin Laland, a professor of biology at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, once hosted a competition pitting computer bots against each other in a battle royale tournament.

A hundred contestants from around the world faced off, with their bots programmed to pursue one of three different strategies: invent original ideas, engage in trial and error, or copy others.

To his surprise, one strategy was a clear winner across the board: copying others. The winning bot exclusively copied the winning moves of others, and never innovated on its own. By comparison, another bot that relied completely on innovation finished 95th out of 100.

Their conclusion was that imitation is often one of the most efficient and effective learning strategies. By waiting for others to try out new approaches and discover whether they work, you can reap most of the rewards of innovation without incurring most of the costs. Imitators are free to borrow from multiple sources, giving them a wider variety of tools to work with. And they can avoid mistakes by purposefully steering clear of strategies that others have found do not work.

Studies from the business world indicate that the costs for an imitator are typically 25% to 40% lower than those of an innovator, while still allowing them to reap most of the rewards.

Engaging in effective imitation is like receiving a direct download of experience from someone else’s brain. But despite its reputation as a lazy shortcut, imitation is not easy. It requires deeply understanding a solution and adapting it to a new set of circumstances. Ironically, imitating well demands a high degree of creativity. The Internet has ushered in a “golden age of imitation” in which it has become far easier than ever before to imitate quickly and widely from the vast array of knowledge we have access to online.

A 2019 study published by the National Academy of Sciences tracked the intellectual advancement of several hundred grad students in the sciences over four years. It studied how they developed crucial skills such as generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data. To their surprise, these skills were closely related to the students’ engagement with their peers in the lab, and not so much with the guidance they received from faculty mentors.

Our brains evolved to think with people – to teach them, listen to them, argue with them, and exchange stories with them. This is the argument of the “social encoding advantage,” which says that the brain stores social information differently than it stores information that is non-social, causing us to remember it better.

So many of our experiences in school and at work treat thinking as the solitary manipulation of symbols inside our heads. We are asked to produce facts without a person to receive them. We make arguments without another person to debate. We are asked to learn without someone to teach, when research shows that we learn far better when we are preparing to teach someone.

The power of collaborative thinking is apparent in science, where fewer than 10% of journal articles in science and technology are authored by just one person. Nearly 70% of US patent applications now list more than one inventor, a number that has been steadily increasing for over 40 years.

The same is true in business. Brian Uzzi, a professor of management at Northwestern University, says: “[My research] suggests that the process of knowledge creation has fundamentally changed…almost everything that human beings do today, in terms of generation of value, is no longer done by individuals. It’s done by teams.”

The Value of Knowing What We Know

The idea of “extending” one’s mind may bring to mind images of radical hyperintelligence the likes of which humanity has never seen. But extended cognition is also about surfacing the knowledge we already have inside.

A series of studies has shown that experts are unable to fully articulate most of what they do and know. One study asked expert trauma surgeons to describe how they insert a shunt into the femoral artery – they neglected to cite nearly 70% of the actions they typically performed. 

Another study found that experimental psychologists omitted an average of 75% of the steps they took when designing experiments. And a study of expert computer programmers found they enumerated fewer than 50% of the tasks they carried out to debug a program.

By externalizing our knowledge, we not only free up our bandwidth and get smarter, we uncover the true value of the knowledge we already possess.

How Cognitive Extension Works In The Brain

Some of the most fascinating research presented by Paul in my opinion is about how the brain changes in response to the tools we use.

She cites a study indicating that when we grasp a tool, our “body schema” – our sense of our body’s shape, size, and position – expands to encompass the new tool. It is as if, from the perspective of our brain at least, that tool has now become an extension of our arm.

The more reliably these “mental extensions” – or tools – are available, the more deeply they become integrated into our thinking. 

Although the research so far has been done mainly on physical tools, I believe much the same findings apply to software tools. Think about how naturally and unthinkingly we perform a Google search to fill in a missing piece of information, or reach for our smartphone to text a friend.

If our mental map of the limits of our body can be so easily extended using tools, what happens when those tools extend almost infinitely through the Internet, around the world, and into the minds of countless people we’ve never met? 

Intelligence Is a Fluid Interaction Between Us And Our Environment

My main takeaway from The Extended Mind was a redefinition of intelligence.

Intelligence, according to the extended perspective, is not a stable property of the solid lump of gray matter encased in our skull. It is a “fluid transaction” between brains, bodies, spaces, relationships, and tools, all interacting together to leverage each medium’s unique capabilities.

With this in mind, Paul identifies a largely underappreciated aspect of education: the ability to orchestrate mental extensions skillfully. Instead of memorizing more, we should be taught to offload information, to externalize it to a medium that is best suited to it while freeing us to focus elsewhere.

Paul suggests that “Whenever possible, we should endeavor to transform information into an artifact, to make data into something real – and then proceed to interact with it, labeling it, mapping it, feeling it, tweaking it, showing it to others.”

When we consider the brain’s many shortcomings – its short attention span, difficulty focusing, porous memory – this presents an alternative path: to go around them. We shouldn’t try to “fix” an organ that has worked the same way for countless millennia. 

Instead, we should embrace the way our brains naturally work and begin to use the tools in our environment to unlock the full potential of our intelligence.

Software as the Ultimate Cognitive Extension

Paul addresses the use of technology only in passing in her book, but I think software actually incorporates each of the three kinds of externalized thinking she covers. 

Software (and the hardware it runs on) sometimes functions as an extension of our body, such as when we wear a smart watch or use gesture-based interfaces, thus tapping into many of the benefits of embodied cognition.

In other situations, software is more like an environment – a digital environment, of course – but I don’t think our minds make such a clear distinction, especially as virtual and augmented reality becomes ever higher fidelity. To the extent we inhabit the virtual spaces that software creates, and move within them, we are activating our situated cognition.

In many ways, it is the third form of intelligence identified by Paul that has long been the final frontier of technology: social intelligence. Homo sapiens survived the predators of the African savannah and even beat out stronger species of rival hominids through our ability to band together and share our skills and knowledge.

As Artificial Intelligence proliferates, we are beginning to relate to software as we relate to people. Conversing with AI-based chatbots draws on many of our social conventions and natural ways of communicating with other beings. Making conversations central to our relationship with technology gives that relationship some of the same fluidity and vibrancy we previously reserved for other humans.

Of the many ways we have extended our minds using technology for countless millennia, I believe we are on the cusp of creating a true “extended mind,” instantiating our memories, knowledge, and even intuition in ever more intelligent machines that surround us on all sides. 

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The post The Extended Mind: Reimagining the Nature of Intelligence appeared first on Forte Labs.

How to Summarize Books Using ChatGPT: 7 Experiments in AI Distillation

I recently sat down to attempt something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create a high-quality book summary.

As I wrote in my Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books, writing book summaries is one of the very best ways I’ve found to absorb an author’s ideas deeply into my own thinking, while also creating notes I can use as “knowledge building blocks” to reference and reuse far into the future.

That said, summarizing books “manually” is incredibly time-consuming, often taking 10-20 hours in addition to the 5-10 hours it took to read the book in the first place. If AI is going to take over any job from me, I would want it to be this one.

In this article, I’ll describe my attempts to use ChatGPT, OpenAI’s leading AI chat platform, to create book summaries that fulfill my learning needs in a small fraction of the time and effort otherwise required. 

Experiment #1: Asking for a complete summary

My first attempt was straightforward: I simply asked ChatGPT (the most advanced version, based on the latest GPT-4 model) to write a summary of the book Slack by Tom DeMarco (affiliate link).

I chose this book very purposefully to give ChatGPT the best possible chance of writing a good summary:

It has sold reasonably well, ensuring there is enough material written about it onlineIt long predates the September 2021 cutoff of ChatGPT’s training data, having been released in 2002I read the ebook and saved excerpts in my Second Brain, which means I can compare the ChatGPT summary with my own notesIt’s been more than 5 years since I read it and I’ve forgotten virtually all the main ideas, which should allow me to evaluate ChatGPT’s summaries more objectively

Here’s what it came up with:

(Note: I’ve included a number of ChatGPT prompts and responses in this article, but it can be a bit tedious to read multiple summaries of the same book so feel free to skip the text boxes unless you want to see the detailed responses)

Prompt: 

Please write a summary of the book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, by Tom DeMarco

ChatGPT:

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, written by Tom DeMarco, is a thought-provoking book that challenges conventional management practices and the widely held belief that efficiency is the ultimate goal of an organization. DeMarco argues that a relentless pursuit of efficiency can lead to burnout, disengagement, and ultimately, decreased productivity.

The book introduces the concept of “slack,” which is the time and resources set aside for employees to reflect, learn, and innovate. DeMarco emphasizes the importance of slack in fostering creativity, growth, and adaptability. He presents several case studies and examples that demonstrate the benefits of incorporating slack into the workplace, including higher employee morale, improved decision-making, and increased problem-solving abilities.

DeMarco also critiques traditional management practices, such as overloading employees with work, cutting staff, and constantly pushing for efficiency, which he contends can lead to burnout and decreased performance. Instead, he advocates for a more balanced approach, where managers focus on nurturing their employees’ talents, providing opportunities for professional development, and maintaining open communication channels.

Throughout the book, DeMarco provides practical suggestions for creating a work environment that encourages slack, including flexible schedules, encouraging collaboration, and fostering a culture of trust and autonomy. He emphasizes that by embracing slack, organizations can become more adaptable, innovative, and ultimately, more successful in the long run.

In summary, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency is a thought-provoking exploration of the importance of slack in modern organizations. By challenging traditional management practices and advocating for a more balanced approach, Tom DeMarco provides valuable insights for managers and leaders looking to create a more adaptable, innovative, and successful work environment.

Putting on my editor’s hat for a moment, this summary is solidly mediocre. It follows a standard format and style that you might expect to read in any book review. Here are 3 specific negative aspects:

Overuses clichés: It uses a number of clichés that don’t really communicate anything, such as “thought-provoking” and “balanced approach”Boring, conventional language: I remember that much of the value of the book was in restating commonly known truths in new and surprising ways, yet ChatGPT used conventional, rather boring language throughout (such as “relentless pursuit of efficiency,” “improved decision-making,” and others)Lack of specifics: There’s also an unfortunate lack of detail, with ChatGPT’s summary hinting at “several case studies and examples” without mentioning any

Now switching to my writer’s hat: interestingly, even this mediocre result set off a few lightbulbs for me.

First, it made me realize that what I mean when I say “book summary” is very different from what most people would expect.

When I summarize a book, I’m not trying to distill its contents into the shortest possible form. In fact, my book summary blog posts tend to be thousands of words long in their own right! My summarization process is about zeroing in on only the ideas and arguments that are most unusual, surprising, counterintuitive, or directly applicable to my own life and work, and then elaborating on those points.

In a sense, my book summaries are original essays with my own interpretation of ideas, which just happen to draw on a single book as raw material. I’m not trying to write a “fair and balanced” summary that gives equal coverage to all chapters. In fact I’m trying to do the opposite: to see how far I can extrapolate from the author’s writing and bias their ideas in favor of my own needs and goals. 

This means that often, I’ll spend a lot of time on a few ideas that the author mentioned only in passing, while leaving out other ideas completely even if the author gave them major emphasis. In other words, what I consider important is not necessarily what the author thinks is important. They’ve done some valuable research, but I choose which conclusions to draw from that research and how to apply them.

Second, seeing ChatGPT’s first attempt made me realize that the primary way I wanted to apply the ideas in DeMarco’s book was to individuals, not organizations. I hadn’t even remembered that his book was mostly about teams and organizations. All I care about is how the same concepts could apply equally well to individual professionals.

That realization reminded me of why I wanted to summarize this book in the first place: I find myself in a season of life when I can’t optimize my time anymore. With two kids in tow and a household to maintain, I necessarily have lots of “slack time.” I remembered reading this book and wanted to revisit it to see how I could make peace with that fact, and maybe even use it to my advantage.

These initial insights and realizations give me a lot of fuel for the next iteration of my prompt, in which I’ll give ChatGPT a lot more direction to see if it can produce the kind of summary I’m looking for.

Experiment #2: Providing guidelines and instructions

Prompt:

You are a highly opinionated, controversial writer of how-to content. Please rewrite the summary above through the lens of personal productivity and individual psychology, minimizing mentions of teams and organizations and instead applying the book’s concepts and principles to individual knowledge workers.

In particular, describe how a new parent with two kids at home and many responsibilities might be able to use the lessons from this book to make peace with their new lifestyle, and even turn that seeming disadvantage into new opportunities for creativity, fulfillment, and pleasure. Be as specific and concrete as possible.

Don’t use any common clichés from business writing; come up with inventive, colorful, surprising ways of describing things. Include as much detail as possible, citing key sources, research findings, examples, and case studies to support key arguments. Don’t try to include equal coverage of all the main ideas in the book; emphasize what is most unusual, surprising, or contrary to common expectations of how people and companies think.

ChatGPT:

Slack: The Untold Key to Unlocking Your Inner Genius While Juggling Diapers

Throw out those self-help books preaching productivity and hyper-efficiency! Tom DeMarco’s magnum opus, Slack, tears down the façade of total efficiency and unearths the secret sauce to personal productivity: a smorgasbord of reflection, learning, and innovation. So, strap yourself in and prepare to savor the juicy morsels of wisdom that will revolutionize your life, even as a new parent buried under a mountain of responsibilities.

Picture this: your house is a war zone, riddled with the debris of countless diaper changes and the symphony of wailing children. Amidst the chaos, you discover that inefficiency is not the enemy. In fact, it’s the key to unlocking a treasure trove of creativity and fulfillment. Embracing the art of slacking isn’t just for the corporate world; it’s a philosophy that transcends cubicles and spills into the realm of personal growth. 

In one groundbreaking study, researchers found that those who embraced periods of slack in their daily routines were more likely to experience a surge of creative insights and develop innovative solutions to complex problems. The takeaway? Let your mind wander as you cradle your offspring, for it is in these seemingly idle moments that the seeds of genius are sown. 

To transform your life as a new parent, you must first declare a truce with inefficiency. The ceaseless pursuit of productivity will only smother your creativity and leave you gasping for inspiration. Instead, as DeMarco suggests, indulge in the “slacker’s siesta,” a deliberate interlude for rest and reflection. During these breaks, you might find yourself daydreaming about a bold new business idea or devising a foolproof strategy to conquer Mount Laundry. 

Next, take a page from DeMarco’s book and embrace the power of “serendipitous collisions.” These unplanned encounters, whether with neighbors, friends, or fellow parents, can spark a wildfire of creativity and ingenuity. So, attend that playdate or join that local parent support group; you never know what brilliant ideas might emerge from the crucible of shared experiences.

Finally, in a world that often demands the impossible, shed the weight of unrealistic expectations. Instead of lamenting your perceived shortcomings as a parent, celebrate your newfound mastery of the “effortless multitask.” Relish the pleasure of nurturing your children while simultaneously honing your skills as an innovative thinker.

Slack isn’t just another management book; it’s a clarion call for a seismic shift in our approach to life. By casting aside the oppressive chains of productivity and embracing the sweet nectar of inefficiency, you too can navigate the tumultuous seas of parenthood and emerge as a creative powerhouse, brimming with inspiration and purpose. So go ahead, slack away, and unlock your inner genius—one diaper change at a time.

Putting on my editor’s hat again…this is really bad. I’d say it’s actually worse than the first one in a few ways:

Pandering, patronizing language: Often found in parenting books, this kind of language tries to make parenting sound “cool” but comes across as annoying (“symphony of wailing children”)More clichés: It replaced the clichés of business writing with the clichés of self-help, which are even worse (“emerge as a creative powerhouse, brimming with inspiration and purpose”)Generic examples: The examples it cites are incredibly generic and unhelpful (“the power of ‘serendipitous collisions’”)

Oh boy. I’m going to make two changes and try again:

I’m going to replace the style of “writer of how-to content” (which is where the self-help clichés are coming from) with “software engineer” (since that is where a lot of the interesting language in the book comes from)I’ll remove the reference to kids and parenting, since I’m mostly interested in applying these ideas to my work life, not my household (notice the further refinement in my own understanding of what I’m trying to achieve) Experiment #3: Removing references to self-help and parenting

Here we go (changed parts are underlined):

Prompt:

You are a highly opinionated, controversial software engineer who uses precise terminology from engineering and scientific disciplines. Please rewrite the original summary at the start of this conversation through the lens of personal productivity, individual psychology, and technology-focused knowledge work. Minimize mentions of teams and organizations and instead apply the book’s concepts and principles to how individual knowledge workers manage their time and energy.

Don’t use any common clichés from business writing; come up with inventive, colorful, surprising ways of describing things. Include as much detail as possible, citing key sources, research findings, examples, and case studies to support key arguments. Don’t try to include equal coverage of all the main ideas in the book; emphasize what is most unusual, surprising, or contrary to common expectations of how people and companies think. Be as specific and concrete as possible.

ChatGPT:

Slack: Hacking the Matrix of Knowledge Work with the Chaos Theory of Personal Productivity

In Slack, Tom DeMarco demolishes the flawed algorithm of the “efficiency cult” and ushers in a new paradigm of personal productivity for knowledge workers, inspired by the principles of chaos theory. The book challenges the status quo, offering a disruptive blueprint for harnessing the power of inefficiency, akin to the butterfly effect, to unleash a storm of creativity and innovation.

DeMarco’s concept of “slack” is the antithesis of the traditional notion of productivity, which revolves around rigid time management, prioritization, and linear workflows. Instead, slack represents the whitespace in our workdays, the unallocated buffer zones in our mental RAM, where serendipitous sparks can ignite and give birth to breakthrough ideas.

To apply DeMarco’s principles to knowledge work, one must first defragment their cognitive hard drive. Engaging in mind-wandering activities, such as going for a walk or indulging in a power nap, can catalyze the process of synaptic reorganization and increase the probability of generating novel insights. In a seminal study, scientists discovered that participants who embraced mental slack exhibited heightened creative problem-solving abilities and cognitive flexibility, akin to overclocking the brain’s processing power.

Next, embrace the stochastic nature of inspiration. DeMarco highlights the importance of unplanned interactions and unexpected connections, akin to a random walk algorithm, in fostering innovative ideas. For knowledge workers, this could involve participating in online forums, attending webinars, or engaging with peers on social media platforms. These seemingly aimless encounters can serve as the initial conditions for triggering a cascade of creative thoughts and out-of-the-box solutions.

Furthermore, DeMarco posits that the pursuit of hyper-efficiency can lead to cognitive burnout and diminished performance. To counteract this, knowledge workers should experiment with polyphasic sleep patterns, designed to optimize mental alertness and increase REM sleep, thereby enhancing memory consolidation and creative synthesis. By adopting a more flexible approach to time management, individuals can optimize their mental bandwidth and reduce the likelihood of cognitive overload.

In summary, Slack rewrites the source code of personal productivity by leveraging the principles of chaos theory and emphasizing the value of inefficiency for knowledge workers. By embracing mental slack, engaging in random interactions, and adopting flexible time management strategies, individuals can tap into their inner wellspring of creativity and innovation. So, unplug from the matrix of efficiency and embark on a thrilling journey through the chaotic landscape of personal productivity.

That’s actually a bit better! It’s mostly just replacing the clichés of business and self-help writing with the clichés of technology writing, and I suppose tech language just happens to appeal to me more personally.

A few other things I noticed:

Hallucinations: This summary makes several references to chaos theory, but the book doesn’t mention chaos anywhere! This is a complete hallucination, likely as a result of ChatGPT conflating “inefficiency” with “engineering.” Then it mentions the “butterfly effect,” which the book doesn’t mention either. So it’s building on its first hallucination with further ones!Bad advice: ChatGPT’s summary recommends experimenting with “polyphasic sleep patterns” as a way to apply the book’s ideas, but DeMarco makes no mention of this. Another hallucination, and I’d guess one that runs exactly counter to the book’s main arguments.Good synonyms: It did come up with a few good synonyms for “slack”: whitespace, unallocated buffer zones in our mental RAM, and synaptic reorganization

At this point, I’m wondering which kinds of sources ChatGPT has access to in writing its summaries. To improve my instructions, I need to know what material it has to work with.

Experiment #4: Exploring ChatGPT’s training data

One of the advantages of a conversation-based tool is you can simply ask it!

Prompt:

Can you please tell me what sources you are drawing on for the responses above?

ChatGPT: 

As an AI language model, I have been trained on a diverse range of text sources, including books, articles, websites, and research papers, up to September 2021. For the responses above, I drew upon my knowledge of Tom DeMarco’s book “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency” as well as my general understanding of management, productivity, and psychology. 

However, some elements in the responses, such as specific studies, examples, and analogies, were used creatively to enhance the narrative and make it more engaging. While these elements may not be directly attributable to specific sources, they are inspired by my knowledge of productivity, creativity, and neuroscience research. 

Please note that as an AI language model, I am unable to access real-time or up-to-date information. My knowledge is limited to the training data available up until September 2021.

Aha! So the hallucinations were a result of “specific studies, examples, and analogies” being “used creatively to enhance the narrative and make it more engaging.” It does mention that it drew upon “my knowledge of the book” but I wanted to know if it actually has access to the full contents of the book.

Prompt:

Do you have access to the full text of the book Slack, by Tom DeMarco? If not, which sources are you drawing on related to that book?

ChatGPT:

As an AI language model, I do not have direct access to the full text of Tom DeMarco’s book “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency.” However, I have been trained on a wide variety of texts, which may include summaries, reviews, and discussions of the book.

My knowledge of “Slack” is based on this indirect information, and I synthesize the key points and ideas from the book in my responses. This means that my understanding of the book may not be as comprehensive as if I had direct access to the full text, but I can still provide an overview and discussion of its main concepts and principles.

Ok, so it does not have access to the book’s contents, which explains why it has trouble citing specifics. Instead, it is relying on “summaries, reviews, and discussions” of the book to create an “indirect” summary. This explains a lot about the limitations of its output – it’s essentially writing a “summary of summaries,” trying to guess at the contents of the original book through the medium of other people’s writing about it.

This leads me to the next experiment: feeding ChatGPT my own notes with excerpts from the book as part of the prompt.

Experiment #5: Providing my excerpts from the book

At this point, I’ve spent an hour reading very generic summaries of DeMarco’s ideas, and am honestly second guessing whether his book contains anything interesting at all. Maybe it’s not possible to generate the kind of summary I’m looking for because the book isn’t relevant to my needs in the first place.

I purposefully avoided reviewing my notes on the book up until this point to make my evaluations of ChatGPT’s output as neutral as possible, but now it’s time to dive in and see what it’s been missing.

I started by asking ChatGPT how many words I could fit in its “context window” – the word limit of how much text I can provide in my prompts. It estimated about 1,000 to 1,200 words. I wanted to keep this in mind as I summarized my own notes using my typical process, known as Progressive Summarization (basically an advanced form of highlighting). 

Slack contains about 46,000 words, and my saved excerpts totaled 6,867 words, which meant I had saved about 15% of the original text as excerpts in my notes. I would need to select no more than 17% of that 15% (or about 2.5% of the entire book) to be able to feed into ChatGPT’s context window.

After progressively summarizing my excerpts, I moved each of the highlighted passages into a separate document, which you can see below:

This new document totaled 1,618 words – slightly too big for ChatGPT to absorb in its entirety, but close enough! I copied and pasted the entire text of this document, with no structure or additional context added, into a new ChatGPT conversation (to avoid the bias of our previous discussion) and here was the result:

Prompt:

Please write an in-depth summary of the book Slack by Tom DeMarco, drawing on the excerpts from the book below:

[Pasted my excerpts from book]

ChatGPT:

In his book, “Slack,” Tom DeMarco addresses the efficiency-flexibility quandary faced by modern organizations. He argues that as organizations become more efficient, they lose their ability to change. This is problematic because adaptability is essential for survival in today’s rapidly changing business environment.

DeMarco proposes that the concept of “slack” can help organizations become more adaptable. Slack refers to the time when reinvention occurs, when workers are not 100% occupied with operational tasks. The author notes that organizations he admires do not show a strong sense of hurry, which allows them the flexibility to change and grow.

In modern organizations, work is often divided among knowledge workers who are constantly shifting between tasks. This task-switching leads to inefficiencies, with a significant amount of productive effort being lost. DeMarco believes that maintaining some slack can lead to more focused and efficient work.

Slack can also be seen as a form of investment that brings several benefits, including increased flexibility, better employee retention, and the capacity to invest in new initiatives. By viewing slack as an investment rather than a waste, organizations can foster an environment that allows continuous change and adaptation.

However, DeMarco also discusses the negative effects of stress on organizations, which can lead to demotivation, burnout, and loss of key personnel. He argues that when stress is the problem, slack is the solution, as it allows employees to maintain focus and reduce the risk of burnout.

The book also touches on the importance of vision in guiding organizational change. Without a clear vision, flexibility becomes an abstraction, and the organization may resist all change. A strong vision helps employees understand the necessity of abandoning their mastery of the familiar and embracing new skills and approaches.

Additionally, DeMarco emphasizes the importance of fostering a safe environment for employees to learn and adapt to new changes. This includes avoiding behaviors such as mockery, sarcasm, and public humiliation, which can be detrimental to the process of change.

Risk management is another crucial aspect of adaptability. DeMarco argues that organizations must be willing to take on risks in order to succeed in the current business climate. By identifying and canceling risk-free projects, organizations can allocate resources and time to transformational initiatives.

In conclusion, Tom DeMarco’s “Slack” highlights the importance of maintaining flexibility and adaptability in modern organizations. By valuing and investing in slack, organizations can foster an environment that supports continuous change and growth, ultimately leading to long-term success.

This is far better than anything we’ve seen so far, since it actually includes key points and opinionated stances from the book. A big leap forward!

Experiment #6: Combining my excerpts with guidelines

Now I’ll combine these excerpts with the instructions and guidelines I had come up with previously (asking it to apply the content primarily to individual productivity, to avoid clichés, and to use colorful and specific language).

Here is what it came up with:

Prompt:

Please rewrite the summary above through the lens of personal productivity, individual psychology, and technology-focused knowledge work. Minimize mentions of teams and organizations and instead apply the book’s concepts and principles to how individual knowledge workers manage their time and energy.

Don’t use any common clichés from business writing. Include as much detail as possible, citing key sources, research findings, examples, and case studies to support key arguments. Don’t try to include equal coverage of all the main ideas in the book; emphasize what is most unusual, surprising, or contrary to common expectations of how most people and companies think. Be as specific and concrete as possible.

ChatGPT:

In “Slack,” Tom DeMarco presents a compelling argument for the importance of cultivating slack in one’s personal life, particularly for individual knowledge workers managing their time and energy. By applying the book’s concepts and principles to the domain of personal productivity, we can challenge conventional wisdom and explore the surprising benefits of incorporating slack into our daily routines.

DeMarco contends that the efficiency-flexibility quandary, often observed in organizations, can also manifest in individuals’ lives. As we strive for maximum efficiency, we risk becoming inflexible and less adaptable to change. By embracing slack, or periods of downtime, we allow ourselves the mental space for reinvention, learning, and personal growth.

Modern knowledge workers often find themselves multitasking and switching between tasks, leading to significant inefficiencies. DeMarco’s research suggests that task-switching can result in a direct loss of productive effort of more than an hour per day. By introducing slack into our schedules, we can minimize task-switching and enhance our focus on individual tasks.

Embracing slack as an investment in personal productivity can yield multiple benefits. These include increased flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, improved work-life balance, and the capacity to explore new ideas and opportunities. By viewing slack as an investment rather than a waste, individuals can foster a mindset that supports continuous personal growth.

One surprising aspect of DeMarco’s work is the emphasis on the importance of vision in guiding personal change. Without a clear vision for our lives, flexibility becomes an abstraction, and we may resist change, even when it could be beneficial. A strong personal vision helps us understand the necessity of abandoning our mastery of the familiar and embracing new skills, approaches, and ways of thinking.

Another counterintuitive insight from DeMarco’s work relates to the management of stress and pressure. Many individuals believe that working under pressure can enhance productivity. However, DeMarco argues that stress can lead to demotivation, burnout, and decreased effectiveness. By incorporating slack into our routines, we can manage stress levels and maintain focus, ultimately leading to greater personal productivity.

Finally, DeMarco’s discussion on risk management is equally relevant to individuals. As knowledge workers, we must be willing to take on risks and explore new opportunities. By identifying and eliminating activities that do not contribute to our personal growth or align with our vision, we can allocate time and resources to transformational initiatives.

In conclusion, Tom DeMarco’s “Slack” offers valuable insights for individual knowledge workers seeking to improve their personal productivity and adaptability. By embracing the concept of slack and challenging conventional wisdom, we can cultivate an environment that supports continuous personal growth and long-term success.

A few observations on what it’s still lacking:

Incorrect attribution: ChatGPT successfully applied Slack’s ideas to individual productivity, but incorrectly attributed those interpretations to the author himself; since it doesn’t know what’s in the book, it can’t distinguish between the source text and its own interpretation.Lack of connecting reasoning between points: Since my excerpts were taken from completely different parts of the book, with thousands of words of “connective tissue” between them missing, ChatGPT can’t really provide that context on its own. For example, it merely says that “By introducing slack into our schedules, we can minimize task-switching…” without explaining why that is.Lack of original explanation and understanding: Pretty much all the original, interesting observations (“viewing slack as an investment rather than a waste”) were taken verbatim from my excerpts, which of course were taken verbatim from the book. ChatGPT isn’t adding explanation, only rearranging and modifying how they’re presented in prose form.Missing subtle distinctions: Such as DeMarco’s use of the word “risk” not in the sense of “danger,” but as “risk of missing the schedule.” However, without the full context of the book, it’s likely a human would have missed this as well.

By far my strongest critique of this summary, however, is that it’s still terribly bland and boring. It sounds like the author is arguing in favor of “taking a break and relaxing sometimes,” which is about the most cliché piece of advice imaginable. Do we really need to be convinced that “too much stress may lead to burnout”?

But since I have access to the “raw material” of my excerpts, I know that DeMarco is actually making a number of highly original and bold claims. Or at least framing common wisdom in new and surprising ways. Somehow most of the energy and inventiveness of the original writing has been lost, even when many of the best excerpts were supplied in the prompt.

Experiment #7: Providing my own outline of the book

I wanted to try one final experiment combining everything I’d learned: to give ChatGPT a helping hand by telling it what I thought were the book’s most important claims. 

I reorganized my excerpts into an outline, with 7 of the most important points as headlines and supporting excerpts indented under each of them (you can view it here). I also removed any excerpts that weren’t related to these 7 key takeaways, which conveniently reduced the word count from 1,618 words to only 641 words.

I created a new chat window to eliminate any previous context and gave ChatGPT the previous prompt along with my outline. Its initial response was also in outline form, and after asking it to turn its outline into prose, here was the result:

ChatGPT:

Slack, as described by Tom DeMarco, is the degree of freedom required to effect change. It is the time when reinvention and learning happen, away from the operational business. It is an investment in personal growth and adaptability, rather than being seen as waste. In a world where constant change is the norm, incorporating slack into daily routines and schedules is essential for personal growth, adaptability, and success.

The efficiency-flexibility quandary states that increased efficiency often leads to a decrease in flexibility. This phenomenon, first noted by geneticist R.A. Fisher, can be applied to knowledge workers who focus on being as efficient as possible, potentially sacrificing their ability to change and adapt to new situations. Slack comes to the rescue by providing space for flexibility and adaptability.

However, the absence of slack creates a dangerous delusion that being constantly busy is equivalent to being effective. In reality, this lack of slack leads to a fragmented state where knowledge workers are unable to focus on a single task and end up constantly switching between activities. Research shows that each task-switch imposes a direct penalty of over twenty minutes of lost concentration, resulting in a loss of productive effort of more than an hour per day.

By incorporating slack into one’s life, individuals can enjoy several benefits. These include flexibility for ongoing growth and change, better retention of personal motivation and well-being, and a capacity to invest in personal development. On the other hand, a lack of slack can lead to stress, demotivation, and an increased risk of burnout.

To create slack, it is important to reduce the focus on quantity and embrace uncertainty. Risk-taking is essential for growth and transformation, so it is crucial to pursue projects with inherent risks rather than those deemed risk-free. By stopping nontransformational work and dedicating resources and time to transformational activities, individuals can adapt, learn, and grow in a constantly changing world.

Now we’re starting to get somewhere. ChatGPT is turning the excerpts I supplied it with into a rapid drumbeat of bold claims, each one related to and building on the one before. There are fewer clichés and qualifications, making the line of reasoning stronger. 

It still misses some things, such as including the key detail that “This phenomenon…[was] first noted by geneticist R.A. Fisher” without including the giraffe example that makes that detail relevant. Even though the conclusion includes tantalizingly interesting and counterintuitive points (such as the importance of rejecting projects that are free of risk, because they won’t be transformational enough) it still veers off into cliché again in its attempt to reach a nice, neat conclusion.

And of course, by this point I’ve already done most of the work of summarization that I was trying to avoid in the first place! Getting to the outline is the hardest part, because it involves making a long series of difficult decisions about what to include and in what order, which is an incredibly taxing mental activity for us humans. I’ve arrived at a decent summary that is perhaps 50% as good as one I could have created myself, while saving perhaps only 20-30% of the total effort needed to get there.

Four conclusions from this experiment

First, I concluded that supplying ChatGPT with the best excerpts from one’s reading greatly improves the summary it can provide, especially when those excerpts are organized into an outline that provides a particular point of view.

The main challenge is distilling the excerpts enough to fit within the context window (though upcoming improvements to ChatGPT include a vastly larger window that will fit more than 15 times as much text).

Second, you can’t instruct ChatGPT to come up with “surprising” or “counterintuitive” ways of explaining things, because those qualities depend on sensitivity to a cultural zeitgeist made up of millions of people’s joint expectations, plus access to a wealth of details to put a fine point on its assertions. Instead of being surprising, it will merely use words like “surprising” and “counterintuitive” in its otherwise boring description.

Third, ChatGPT is always tending toward cliché, which by definition is the “aggregate average” of the greatest number of writers on which it was trained. You have to constantly come up with inventive ways of getting it off that well-worn path. 

Fourth, I conclude that reading books is still worthwhile, even in an age of Artificial Intelligence. Besides the personal enrichment from the experience of reading, there are key details, subtle distinctions, and gestalts of meaning that come from reading and notetaking that can’t (yet) be reproduced by even the latest language models. 

In fact, it seems that having a personal collection of excerpts from one’s reading, whether written down by hand or synchronized with a notetaking app using a service like Readwise, is an even greater asset than before. The decisions you make about which excerpts are worth saving constitute a unique interpretation of a book’s ideas that isn’t shared by anyone else on the planet.

In a world of infinite, instantaneous summarization, the one with the most unique data to summarize wins.

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

The post How to Summarize Books Using ChatGPT: 7 Experiments in AI Distillation appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Project Management of a Bestselling Book

One of the most common questions I’ve received since the release of Building a Second Brain has been how I used my own Second Brain to write it.

There is absolutely no way I could have done this without my Second Brain. I honestly cannot imagine how anyone undertakes an endeavor of this magnitude without some kind of external content management system to depend on.

In a future installment, I’ll talk about how I wrote the actual manuscript, but first, there is something even more fundamental to address: project management.

My approach was to reduce everything down to a project: an outcome I was trying to achieve, along with a deadline attached. Every key milestone I had to reach on the way to publication had an associated project to make sure I got there. This was the only way I could make tangible progress each day while also continuing to run my business and live my life in the meantime.

Looking at the 3.5-year timeline of this endeavor, I can identify at least 9 different projects I started and completed:

Finding an agentFinding an editorWriting the proposalFinalizing the contract for the offer I acceptedWriting the manuscript (can’t forget this one!)Hiring and working with a promotional agencyHiring and working with a project manager for the book launchWorking with a designer to create a visual brand identity for BASBRunning the pre-order and promotion campaign

Here is a timeline of how each of these projects played out from 2019 to 2022.

Usually, when we think of someone writing a book, we imagine them putting down one word after another until the whole thing is complete. But I believe the project management aspect is just as important: setting goals, chunking them into projects, laying out timelines, sequencing tasks, etc.

I estimate that as much as half of the total effort that went into this book wasn’t the actual writing of words, but everything else that had to happen to deliver those words to readers. 

Here’s an example of my project folder for just one of those project – writing the book proposal – which made use of 34 notes. 

In this folder, I saved everything (and I mean everything) that might possibly come in handy for writing a book proposal.

Here are 10 concrete examples with screenshots:

1. Advice and guidance on what to include in a book proposal

I read a lot of articles and “how-to” guides on how to successfully write and sell a proposal. For the best ones, I saved excerpts and then used my Progressive Summarization technique to make the most critical points clearly visible.

2. Feedback and initial impressions on the proposal from outside reviewers

My agent sent an early draft of my proposal to several outside readers, and their feedback was very helpful in changing direction while I was still able to do so. Here you see one of those pieces of feedback that I’ve marked up for further action.

3. Questions about sample proposals my editor shared with me

My editor shared a number of examples of successful proposals with me, which served as powerful models for my own. For each of them, I noted down followup questions to ask her to make sure I was learning the right lessons.

4. A list of existing blog posts of mine I could incorporate material from

Probably the single most helpful element in writing the manuscript was drawing on my existing writing. Instead of having to somehow read, absorb, organize, and incorporate hundreds of different original sources into each chapter, I only had to incorporate several existing blog posts. In a way, most of the writing had already been done – I just needed to piece it together in a new form.

5. Goals and a schedule for working with my editor in person

Sometimes, a project can spin out of another project. In working with my editor on the proposal, we realized we needed to spend a few days together in person to hit a deadline. I flew to New York City to do that, but that created an entire project of its own: flight details, hotel reservations, notes from past phone calls, and the work plan you see below to guide our efforts.

6. Quick braindumps of random “shower thoughts”

During the months of most intensive writing, I was so immersed in the content of BASB that it began to take over most of my thoughts. I would dream about it during the night and daydream about it during the day. I made sure to jot down as many of these “shower thoughts” as I could so I didn’t lose them.

7. Results of polls I ran on Twitter to make decisions

My writing was a constant feedback loop between myself and others. Besides a few solo writing retreats (which I’ll describe later), there was hardly ever a day I didn’t solicit or receive feedback from my team, my friends or family, or followers or subscribers. Here’s an example of how I used a Twitter poll to decide which term to use for “capture.”

8. Feedback and comments from my editor

Zoom calls with my editor were the “check-in points” I used to keep myself accountable. In each one, she gave me a long list of comments, suggestions, edits, and ideas to consider, all of which I kept track of in my notes.

9. Notes from phone calls with interested publishers

Once we finally got the proposal finished and sent out to publishers, we had a handful of phone calls from those who were already interested in making an offer or just wanted to know more. These details would become important later when I decided which offer to accept.

10. Mementos of meaningful moments

There were so many little moments along the way that were surprising, touching, beautiful, or otherwise meaningful. So many little experiences I wanted to keep a memory of and remember, just as in life. Here is one example, of the official announcement of my book deal in Publisher’s Marketplace as the “deal of the day.”

One of the most challenging aspects of large-scale creative endeavors is that you have to play multiple roles at once. In most cases, at minimum, you have to be both the “talent” creating the original work and the “manager” keeping track of all the details and moving the project forward.

I found that by outsourcing the job of remembering to my Second Brain, I freed up bandwidth in my first brain to do what only it could do: generate a unique creative expression from the depths of my soul. 

We might not think a boring concept like “project management” has a place in something as inspiring and whimsical as creativity until we realize what good project management enables: freedom, peace of mind, and ultimately the confidence that we can make our voice heard knowing that every detail has been aligned in our favor.

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

The post The Project Management of a Bestselling Book appeared first on Forte Labs.

Part 2: The Project Management of a Bestselling Book

One of the most common questions I’ve received since the release of Building a Second Brain has been how I used my own Second Brain to write it.

There is absolutely no way I could have done this without my Second Brain. I honestly cannot imagine how anyone undertakes an endeavor of this magnitude without some kind of external content management system to depend on.

In a future installment, I’ll talk about how I wrote the actual manuscript, but first, there is something even more fundamental to address: project management.

My approach was to reduce everything down to a project: an outcome I was trying to achieve, along with a deadline attached. Every key milestone I had to reach on the way to publication had an associated project to make sure I got there. This was the only way I could make tangible progress each day while also continuing to run my business and live my life in the meantime.

Looking at the 3.5-year timeline of this endeavor, I can identify at least 9 different projects I started and completed:

Finding an agentFinding an editorWriting the proposalFinalizing the contract for the offer I acceptedWriting the manuscript (can’t forget this one!)Hiring and working with a promotional agencyHiring and working with a project manager for the book launchWorking with a designer to create a visual brand identity for BASBRunning the pre-order and promotion campaign

Here is a timeline of how each of these projects played out from 2019 to 2022.

Usually, when we think of someone writing a book, we imagine them putting down one word after another until the whole thing is complete. But I believe the project management aspect is just as important: setting goals, chunking them into projects, laying out timelines, sequencing tasks, etc.

I estimate that as much as half of the total effort that went into this book wasn’t the actual writing of words, but everything else that had to happen to deliver those words to readers. 

Here’s an example of my project folder for just one of those project – writing the book proposal – which made use of 34 notes. 

In this folder, I saved everything (and I mean everything) that might possibly come in handy for writing a book proposal.

Here are 10 concrete examples with screenshots:

1. Advice and guidance on what to include in a book proposal

I read a lot of articles and “how-to” guides on how to successfully write and sell a proposal. For the best ones, I saved excerpts and then used my Progressive Summarization technique to make the most critical points clearly visible.

2. Feedback and initial impressions on the proposal from outside reviewers

My agent sent an early draft of my proposal to several outside readers, and their feedback was very helpful in changing direction while I was still able to do so. Here you see one of those pieces of feedback that I’ve marked up for further action.

3. Questions about sample proposals my editor shared with me

My editor shared a number of examples of successful proposals with me, which served as powerful models for my own. For each of them, I noted down followup questions to ask her to make sure I was learning the right lessons.

4. A list of existing blog posts of mine I could incorporate material from

Probably the single most helpful element in writing the manuscript was drawing on my existing writing. Instead of having to somehow read, absorb, organize, and incorporate hundreds of different original sources into each chapter, I only had to incorporate several existing blog posts. In a way, most of the writing had already been done – I just needed to piece it together in a new form.

5. Goals and a schedule for working with my editor in person

Sometimes, a project can spin out of another project. In working with my editor on the proposal, we realized we needed to spend a few days together in person to hit a deadline. I flew to New York City to do that, but that created an entire project of its own: flight details, hotel reservations, notes from past phone calls, and the work plan you see below to guide our efforts.

6. Quick braindumps of random “shower thoughts”

During the months of most intensive writing, I was so immersed in the content of BASB that it began to take over most of my thoughts. I would dream about it during the night and daydream about it during the day. I made sure to jot down as many of these “shower thoughts” as I could so I didn’t lose them.

7. Results of polls I ran on Twitter to make decisions

My writing was a constant feedback loop between myself and others. Besides a few solo writing retreats (which I’ll describe later), there was hardly ever a day I didn’t solicit or receive feedback from my team, my friends or family, or followers or subscribers. Here’s an example of how I used a Twitter poll to decide which term to use for “capture.”

8. Feedback and comments from my editor

Zoom calls with my editor were the “check-in points” I used to keep myself accountable. In each one, she gave me a long list of comments, suggestions, edits, and ideas to consider, all of which I kept track of in my notes.

9. Notes from phone calls with interested publishers

Once we finally got the proposal finished and sent out to publishers, we had a handful of phone calls from those who were already interested in making an offer or just wanted to know more. These details would become important later when I decided which offer to accept.

10. Mementos of meaningful moments

There were so many little moments along the way that were surprising, touching, beautiful, or otherwise meaningful. So many little experiences I wanted to keep a memory of and remember, just as in life. Here is one example, of the official announcement of my book deal in Publisher’s Marketplace as the “deal of the day.”

One of the most challenging aspects of large-scale creative endeavors is that you have to play multiple roles at once. In most cases, at minimum, you have to be both the “talent” creating the original work and the “manager” keeping track of all the details and moving the project forward.

I found that by outsourcing the job of remembering to my Second Brain, I freed up bandwidth in my first brain to do what only it could do: generate a unique creative expression from the depths of my soul. 

We might not think a boring concept like “project management” has a place in something as inspiring and whimsical as creativity until we realize what good project management enables: freedom, peace of mind, and ultimately the confidence that we can make our voice heard knowing that every detail has been aligned in our favor.

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

The post Part 2: The Project Management of a Bestselling Book appeared first on Forte Labs.

Building a Second Brain: The Definitive Introductory Guide

This is an introduction to Building a Second Brain, the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

How many brilliant ideas have you had and forgotten? How many insights have you failed to take action on? How much useful advice have you slowly forgotten as the years have passed?

We feel a constant pressure to be learning, improving ourselves, and making progress. We spend countless hours every year reading, listening, and watching informational content. And yet, where has all that valuable knowledge gone? Where is it when we need it? 

Our brains just aren’t capable of remembering all these details since they can only store a few thoughts at any one time. Fundamentally, our brains are for having ideas, not storing them.

Building a Second Brain is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It provides a clear, actionable path to creating a “Second Brain” – an external, centralized, digital repository for the things you learn and the resources from which they come. A Second Brain ultimately expands our memory and our intellect using modern tools of technology.

Being effective in the world today requires managing many different kinds of information – emails, text messages, messaging apps, online articles, books, podcasts, webinars, meeting notes, and many others.

All of these kinds of content have value, but trying to remember all of it is overwhelming and impractical. By consolidating ideas from these sources, you’ll develop a valuable body of work to advance your projects and goals. You’ll have an ongoing record of personal discoveries, lessons learned, and actionable insights for any situation.

We are already doing most of the work required to consume this content. We spend a significant portion of our careers creating snippets of text, outlines, photos, videos, sketches, diagrams, webpages, notes, or documents. Yet, without a little extra care to preserve these valuable resources, our precious knowledge remains siloed and scattered across dozens of different locations. We fail to build a collection of knowledge that both appreciates in value and can be reused again and again.

By offloading our thinking onto a Second brain, we free our biological brain to imagine, create, and simply be present. We can move through life confident that we will remember everything that matters, instead of floundering through our days struggling to keep track of every detail.

Your Second Brain will serve as an extension of your mind, not only protecting you from the ravages of forgetfulness but also amplifying your efforts as you take on creative challenges.

The Building a Second Brain Methodology will teach you how to:

Reduce stress and “information overload” by curating and managing your personal information streamCreate a digital environment that promotes clarity and peace of mindUnlock the full value of the wealth of learning resources all around you, such as online courses, webinars, books, articles, forums, and podcastsFind anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within secondsSpend less time looking for things and more time doing the best, most creative work you are capable ofCultivate a collection of valuable knowledge and insights over time without having to follow rigid, time-consuming rulesConsistently move your projects and goals to completion by organizing and accessing your knowledge in a results-oriented wayTurn work “off” and relax, knowing you have a trusted system keeping track of all the details

So, how do you build your Second Brain? 

To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple four-step method called CODE, which stands for Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express.

These are the steps not only to build your Second Brain but also to work with it going forward. 

CODE is a proven process for consistently turning the information you consume into creative output and concrete results. And it’s based on timeless principles that humans throughout history have used to create anything imaginable. 

The four steps of CODE are flexible and agnostic for any profession, role, or career and for whatever notetaking methods and platforms you prefer. You’re probably already doing them already in some form, whether you realize it or not.

Let me introduce you to each step, starting with Capture.

 

Capture only the most important information

The first step in building a Second Brain is “capturing” the ideas and insights you think are worth saving. Ask yourself:

What are the recurring themes and questions that I always seem to return to in my work and life?What insightful, high-value, impactful information do I already have access to that could be valuable?Which knowledge do I want to interconnect, mix and match, and periodically resurface to stimulate future thinking on these subjects?

Most of the time we tend to capture information haphazardly – we email ourselves a quick note, brainstorm some ideas in a Word document, or take notes on books we read – but then don’t do anything with it. 

We are already consuming or producing this information, we just need to keep it in a single, centralized place, such as a digital notetaking app like Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Notion, Apple Notes, Obsidian or others. These apps facilitate capturing small “snippets” of text as well as hyperlinks, images, webpages, screenshots, PDFs, and other attachments, all of which are saved permanently and synced across all your devices.

By keeping a diverse collection of information in one centralized place, it is now free to intermix and intermingle, helping us see unexpected connections and patterns in our thinking. This also gives us one place to look when we need creative raw material, supporting research, or a shot of inspiration.

The following three guidelines will help you capture only the most relevant and useful information in your Second Brain.

Think like a curator

The second we pick up our mobile device or sit down in front of our computer, we become immersed in the flow of juicy information we are presented with. 

Much of this information is useful and interesting – articles written by experts that could make us more productive, tips on exercise and nutrition, or fascinating stories from around the world. But unless we make conscious, strategic decisions about what we consume, we’ll always be at the mercy of what others want us to see.

Too often, we just passively react to the information that’s been shoved in front of us by other people and algorithms. 

How do you escape this reactivity loop?

Instead of immediately consuming what’s in front of you, save it so you can revisit it later (at a time that’s reserved for consumption).

Read-later apps such as Readwise’s Reader, Instapaper, or Pocket are designed for this particular purpose.  As you begin to collect content, you’ll be able to choose which sources to consume in a deliberate way.

Keep only what resonates

The word “capturing” often brings to mind an analytical way of thinking. But analysis is time-consuming and tiring. In deciding which passages, images, theories, or quotes to keep, don’t make it a highly intellectual, analytical decision.

Instead, your rule of thumb should be to save anything that “resonates” with you on an intuitive level. 

This is often because it connects to something you care about, wonder about, or find inherently intriguing. By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us at a deeper level, we improve not only our ability to see opportunities, but also our understanding of ourselves and how we work.

Utilize capture tools

When you dive into the world of digital notetaking, you’ll soon come across an array of specialized “capture tools,” designed to make capturing content in digital form easy and even fun.

The most common options include:

Ebook apps: Export your highlights or annotations from the books you’ve readRead later apps: Save content you find online for later consumption and export your highlights into your notetaking appBasic notes apps: Capture snippets of text on the fly with these preinstalled apps on your mobile deviceSocial media apps: “Favorite” content and export it to your notetaking appAudio/voice transcription apps: Create text transcripts from spoken wordsWeb clipper apps: Save parts of web pages (often included as a built-in feature of notetaking apps)

While some of these tools are free, others charge a small fee. Some work silently in the background (for example, automatically syncing your ebook highlights with your notes app), and others require some manual effort (such as taking photos of paper notebooks to save them digitally). 

In any case, the act of capturing takes seconds—to hit share, export, or save—and voilà, you’ve preserved the best parts of whatever you’re consuming in your Second Brain.

Since the software landscape is constantly changing, we’ve created a Resource Guide with updated recommendations of the best capture tools, both free and paid, and for a variety of devices and operating systems.

Organize for actionability

As you begin to collect notes on ideas that resonate with you, you will eventually feel the need to organize them.

It can be tempting to try to create a perfect hierarchy of folders from the get-go, with the aim of capturing every possible note you might ever come across. However, this approach is not only time-consuming, but it also diverts your attention from what interests you now, requiring too much effort.

Most people tend to organize information by subject, similar to the Dewey decimal system used in libraries. For example, books might be classified under broad subject categories such as “Architecture,” “Business,” “History,” or “Geology.”

When it comes to digital notes, simpler and more flexible organization methods are preferable. Our priorities and goals can change quickly, so we should avoid organizing methods that are overly rigid and prescriptive. 

The best way to organize your notes is to focus on your active projects. When you encounter new information, think about how it can help you move forward something you’re currently working on.

Surprisingly, focussing on taking action, will also help you combat information overwhelm. There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which makes it easier to ignore everything else.

Organizing for action can provide a great sense of clarity because you know that everything you’re keeping has a purpose and aligns with your goals and priorities. Instead of being a hindrance to your productivity, organizing becomes a tool to enhance it.

The following three guidelines will help you organize the information in your Second Brain effectively.

Adopt the PARA Method

After more than a decade of personal experimentation, teaching thousands of students, and coaching world-class professionals, I’ve developed a way to organize information by actionability. 

It’s called PARA – a simple, comprehensive, yet extremely flexible system for organizing any type of digital information across any platform.

Rest assured, adopting this approach will not only bring a sense of order to your life but also equip you with valuable tools to manage the flow of information and accomplish any goal you set for yourself.

The PARA Method is grounded in a fundamental observation: that all the information in your life can be categorized into only four categories.

Projects: short-term efforts (in your work or personal life) that you take on with a certain goal in mindAreas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the futureArchive: Inactive items from the other 3 categories

It might be hard to accept that a sophisticated and contemporary human existence like yours can be reduced to just four categories. It may seem like you have more to manage than could possibly fit into such a basic system.

However, that is precisely the objective. If your organizational system is as intricate as your life, then the effort required to maintain it will deprive you of the time and energy necessary to actually live your life.

The system you use to manage information must be so effortless that it liberates your focus rather than constraining it. Your system must provide you with time, not consume it.

Start with a clean slate 

I found that the number one roadblock to implementing PARA or any other organizational system is that most people think they have to sort ALL their existing notes and files into it. 

I couldn’t think of a more boring, demotivating task. It would take you hours if not days! 

And the result? You’ll probably feel just as overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information you now have to manage as before. 

Here’s what I recommend instead (it will take you less than 60 seconds to do): 

Move all existing files to a folder titled Archive with today’s date. 

Consider this folder a “time capsule” that preserves everything you had going on until this precise moment. Now, it separates what was saved prior to today’s date from what you’ll save from this point on.

That’s it! Your digital workspace is now completely clean so you can start over. 

The best thing is that you’re not deleting anything. Whenever you need a file, you can always pull it out of your Archive folder. But my guess is that you won’t need as many old notes as you think you do. 

Ask three questions

Now that you’re starting from a clean slate, how do you “process” any new items into the appropriate PARA folders?

Ask yourself the following three questions to consider in which project, area, or resource a given piece of information will be most relevant and useful. 

What project would this be useful? If none: Which area will this be useful for?If none: Which resource does this belong to?If none, it’s probably best to archive this information or not save it at all. 

With some practice, this decision will only take you a few seconds.

I prefer to do this “filing” in one batch about once a week. I pull up my “Inbox” – a separate folder as a temporary holding area where new items accumulate until I have time to put them in their proper place – and process 10-20 items in just a few minutes. 

Don’t overthink where you’re going to put a certain piece of information within PARA. Remember that you can almost certainly find anything again using a simple search. 

Distill down to the essence

Once you start collecting valuable knowledge in a centralized place, you’ll naturally start to notice patterns and connections. An article you read on gardening will give you an insight into online marketing. An offhand comment by a client will give you the idea of creating a webpage with client testimonials. A business card you saved from a conference will remind you to follow up and propose a collaboration.

You can greatly facilitate and speed up this process by distilling your notes into actionable, bite-sized summaries. 

It would be near impossible to review your 10 pages of notes on a book you read last year in the midst of a chaotic workday, for example. But if you had just the main points of that book in a 3-point summary, you could quickly remind yourself of what it contains and potentially apply it to something you’re working on.

The following three guidelines will help you summarize and distill your notes into actionable, useful tools for execution.

Design notes for your future self

A powerful mindset for interacting with our notes is to “design notes with your future self in mind.” 

Think of notetaking as time travel. You’re sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.

So the challenge is: “How do I make what I’m consuming right now easily discoverable for my future self?”

Every time you create a note or make an edit, you can make it just a little easier to find and make use of next time.

This can include:

Defining key terms in case we forget what they meanInserting placeholders when we leave off so we know where to pick back upAdding links to related websites, files, or emails that we’re likely to forget over time

By constantly saving packets of knowledge in a format that our future self can easily consume, we follow a “pay it forward” strategy that we get to benefit from in the future!

Summarize progressively, at different levels of detail

A common problem with notes is that they are too long and dense. You can’t afford the time it would take to review and remind yourself of everything they contain. Executive summaries can help, but often it is a challenge to identify what exactly the main point is in the first place.

Progressive Summarization is a technique that relies on summarizing a note in multiple stages over time. 

You save only the best excerpts from whatever you’re reading, and then create a summary of those excerpts, and then a summary of that summary, distilling the essence of the content at each stage. These “layers” are like a digital map that can be zoomed in or out to any level of detail you need.

Progressive Summarization allows you to read the note in different ways for different purposes: in depth if you want to glean every detail, or at a high level if you just need the main takeaway. This allows you to review a note’s contents in seconds to decide if it’s useful for the task at hand.

Distill opportunistically, a little bit at a time

It can be tempting to spend a lot of time creating highly structured, perfect notes. The problem is, you often have no idea which sources will end up being valuable until much later. 

Instead of investing a lot of effort upfront, distill your notes opportunistically, in small bits over time

Your rule of thumb should be: add value to a note every time you touch it. This could include adding an informative title the first time you come across a note, highlighting the most important points the next time you see it, and adding a link to a related note sometime later. 

By spreading out the heavy work of distilling your notes over time, you not only save time and effort but ensure that the most frequently used (and thus most valuable) notes surface organically, like a ski slope where the most popular routes naturally end up with deeper grooves.

Express your unique ideas and experiences

All of this capturing, organizing, and distilling has one ultimate purpose: creating tangible results in the real world. Whether we want to lose weight, get a promotion at work, start a side business, or contribute to a cause we believe in, the true purpose of learning is to turn our knowledge into effective action.

With a substantial reserve of supporting material in your Second Brain, you never need to sit down to an empty page and try to “think of something smart.” All creativity stands on the shoulders of giants, and you have the benefit of already having the best ideas of those giants documented in your notes!

What should you create? 

It depends on your skills, interests, and personality. If you are analytical, you could draw on a group of articles you’ve read about Big Data to write a blog post summarizing where you think machine learning is headed next. If you like to perform, you could borrow ideas from your notes on YouTube cooking videos you’ve enjoyed to make one of your own. If you are campaigning for investment in your local park, you could distill the minutes from past city council meetings into a speaking agenda for your public comments at the next one.

With a Second Brain at your disposal, you always have something to inspire you, remind you, support you, or guide you as you engage in the projects and interests that are important to you. You can draw on the sum total of your life experience and learning, not just whatever you can think of in the moment.

The following three guidelines will help you create more, better, and more meaningful creative output for whatever purpose you decide is important.

Don’t just consume information passively – put it to use

A common challenge for people who love to learn is that they constantly force-feed themselves more and more information, but never actually put it to use. 

The goals and the experiences that would enrich their lives get endlessly postponed, waiting for the “right” bit of knowledge they supposedly need before getting started.

But information only becomes knowledge – something personal, embodied, grounded – when we put it to use. That’s why we should shift as much of our effort as possible from consuming information, to creating new things. The things we create – whether they are writing pieces, websites, photographs, videos, or live performances – embody and express the knowledge we’ve gained from personal experience. 

Think of your Second Brain not as a warehouse where you simply store your most valuable ideas, but as a factory that helps you turn those ideas into concrete results.

We all need to be part of bringing to life something good, true, or beautiful. Creating things is not only deeply fulfilling, it can also bring us unexpected opportunities, introduce us to new friends or collaborators, and have a positive impact on others – by inspiring them, entertaining them, or informing them.

Create smaller, reusable units of work

Once you start to curate a collection of valuable knowledge in external form, a very different way of working becomes not only possible, but necessary.

You will begin to think of your projects as made up of discrete parts. 

I call them Intermediate Packets, which can include any kind of content we’ve already mentioned: a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call, for example.

Instead of trying to sit down and move the entire project forward all at once, which is like trying to roll a giant boulder uphill, a more effective approach is to end each work session – whether it is 15 minutes or 3 hours – by completing just one Intermediate Packet. 

This allows you to work in smaller increments, making use of any available span of time, while getting lots of feedback and taking frequent breaks. 

Not only does this result in higher quality output, it fuels the motivation and the inspiration that we need to do our best work. These Intermediate Packets can then be saved to your Second Brain, and re-used the next time you have a similar need.

Share your work with the world

There are many benefits all along the process of building a Second Brain: less stress, better focus, more insights, and enhanced productivity. But the real payoff comes at the end, when you create something out of the knowledge you’ve collected and share it with the world.

It can be tempting to wait until everything is “ready,” until you have all the information you think you need, and all the sources have been double-checked and reviewed. But as you continually curate and save pieces of content, review and summarize them, create a series of Intermediate Packets, and then recycle them back into your Second Brain, you’ll start to realize that there is no such thing as a finished product.

Everything is in flux, everything is a work in progress, and everything you put out there has an implicit “version 1.0” attached to it. 

This can be tremendously empowering – since nothing is ever final, there is no need to wait to get started. You can publish a simple website now, and slowly add additional pages as you have time. You can publish a draft blog post now, and make revisions later after you’ve received feedback. You could even self-publish an ebook on the Kindle store, and any future updates to the manuscript will be wirelessly synced to everyone who purchased the book.

By consistently sharing your work with others – whether that is your family, friends, colleagues, or externally on social media – all sorts of benefits will start to materialize. 

You’ll connect with new collaborators who you never would have imagined would find your work compelling. You’ll attract clients or customers, in some cases even when you weren’t seeking them. Others will reflect back to you their reactions and comments and appreciation (and occasionally criticism). You’ll find that you are part of a community that shares your interests and values. 

Accomplishing anything meaningful or important requires working with others, and the incredible power of the internet now allows us to find each other no matter how obscure or strange our interests.

 

The power of having a Second Brain

Each note in your Second Brain is a record of something you’ve experienced in your life – whether that is from reading a book, having an interesting conversation, or completing a project at work. 

With all your most valuable ideas at your fingertips at all times, you never need to struggle and strain to remember everything you’ve learned.

As your Second Brain gains momentum over weeks and months, you will start to become different. You will no longer think about things in isolation, but as part of a network of ideas in which everything affects everything else. You’ll realize that something you learned at work about effective communication also applies to your family vacation debate. A random fact you read in an airplane magazine will somehow end up being useful in a blog post you’re writing. A lesson from Ancient Greek history you picked up from a podcast on your morning commute will help you deal with a crisis at the office. 

You will start to think in terms of the systems and principles that you’ve gleaned through your summarizing and reviewing, and see them everywhere. Your mind will start to work differently, learning to depend on this external tool to draw on resources, references, and research far beyond what it can remember on its own. You will start to conceive of “your work” as an integrated whole that you can actually point to, shape, and navigate in a direction of your choosing. You’ll be more objective and unattached, because if any single idea doesn’t work out, you know you have a huge trove of others ready to go.

Over time, you will start to recognize that everything you are learning and experiencing makes sense. You can see, mapped in the notes you are cultivating, the underlying structure of your life. Why you do things, what you really want, what’s really important and what isn’t. 

Your Second Brain becomes like a mirror, reflecting back to you who you think you are, who you want to be, and who you could become. Because you know how to capture and make use of anything, every experience you have becomes an opportunity to learn and grow.

As this self-understanding dawns, you will look around at the notes you’ve collected, and you will realize that you already have everything you need to get started. You will start combining the ideas together, forming new perspectives, new theories, and new strategies. Ideas about society, about art, about psychology, about spirituality, about technology will start intermixing and spawning ideas you’ve never consciously considered. You’ll be shocked, in fact, at the elegance and power of what pops out of your notes.

This epiphany won’t just exist in your head. People can tell. They’ll start to notice that you can draw on an unusually large body of knowledge at a moment’s notice. They will admire your amazing memory, but what they don’t know is that you never try to remember anything. They’ll admire your incredible self-discipline and dedication at developing ideas over time, not knowing that you’ve created a system in which insights and connections emerge organically. They’ll be impressed by your ability to produce so much creative output, but in reality, you never lock yourself in a room to “crank out” some work. You just let your projects simmer until they’re ready.

Building a Second Brain is an integrated set of behaviors for turning incoming information into completed creative projects. 

Instead of endlessly optimizing yourself, trying to become a productivity machine that never deviates from the plan, it has you optimize an external system that is more reliable than you will ever be. This frees you to imagine, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you come alive here and now in the moment.

 

Your next steps

Here are three ways to start building your Second Brain: 

Get the BASB Book: Learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.Join BASB Foundation: Build your Second Brain on your own time and at your own pace with our self-paced course.Join the next BASB live cohort: Build your fully functional Second Brain with the momentum, accountability, and support of our team and like-minded Second Brainers.

The beautiful visuals in this blog post were created by Andrew Nalband, founder of Thunk Notes.

The post Building a Second Brain: The Definitive Introductory Guide appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Making of a Bestseller: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at the Creation of Building a Second Brain

It has now been 10 months since my first published book Building a Second Brain was released in June 2022. And over 4 years since I kicked off the project in January 2019.

The book has been an astounding success by any measure. Here are some of the milestones I’m most proud of:

Wall Street Journal bestseller, Amazon Editor’s Choice selection, Financial Times book of the month, and Fast Company top summer pick#165 ranking across all Amazon booksFeatured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Billboard, goop, USA Today, Big Think, Next Big Idea Club, GQ, Psychology Today, TIME, Bookriot, Business Insider, Yahoo!, CNBC, KTLA morning news, KATU-TV PortlandTop-viewed Google TalkGoodreads Choice Award and Audie Award nomineeForeign publishing deals in 20+ countries and languagesOver 100,000 copies sold in the first 9 months

Only 0.4% of the 42,000 books published every year in the U.S. sell 100,000 copies. That amounts to only a couple hundred books each year, most of which are fiction or perennial classics that have been around for a long time. This means that there are precious few spots available each year for a new nonfiction book to break through, and I’m incredibly grateful and proud that we’ve done it.

In this series, I’ll do a deep-dive on everything I’ve learned about how to make a big idea and a book successful, including my most surprising lessons and mistakes. It will be a retrospective on all the ideas and plans I originally shared in my Ultimate Guide to Traditional Book Publishing, including my most important takeaways for anyone taking on a creative endeavor of this magnitude.

Part 1: Was traditional publishing worth it?

One of the most common questions I’ve been asked since I first announced my book deal in April 2020 was whether I thought working with a traditional “Big 5” publisher was worth it. 

After considering the 4 main pathways to publishing, I decided to go this route because the main thing I was seeking was the enhanced credibility and mainstream exposure that a published book can uniquely provide.

Four years later after deciding to go that route, I want to start by revisiting my hypothesis that doing so would give me 6 major benefits:

Credibility and authority that comes with a big name publisherAccess to expertise on what sells and what readers look forAccess to the networks of editors, agents, and publishersSpeaking opportunities at major organizationsUnique and interesting experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be possibleBestseller list appearances and other awards and recognition

Let’s take a look at how each of those have played out.

​​Credibility and authority that comes with a big name publisher

I’ve been invited to speak at major events like the World Domination Summit, received exposure to incredible audiences via Google Talks, and addressed the World Bank mostly, I believe, because of the credibility and authority that comes with a publisher’s imprint. If anything, I underestimated how powerful it has been, and it’s only just beginning.

Access to expertise on what sells and what readers look for

By working with a publisher, I had the opportunity to work closely with three experienced publishing veterans: my editor Janet Goldstein, agent Lisa DiMona, and publisher Stephanie Hitchcock. Together, they dramatically reshaped the most fundamental framing and presentation of the Second Brain concept in a way I never could have done on my own. Again, I underestimated the impact this would have on the ultimate form of the book.

Access to the networks of editors, agents, and publishers

This is probably the benefit I’ve seen the least of. I’ve been booked on a few media outlets that I probably wouldn’t have had access to, such as TV morning news programs, but other than that, most of the people I’ve met have been through my own network. Although having the imprimatur of the publisher behind me definitely helps even with my own personal outreach.

Speaking opportunities at major organizations

My speaking career has seen a significant, though not major, boost. Before the book came out I had done numerous free talks, and perhaps one or two paid ones. Since it was released, I’ve booked three paid speaking gigs, though none of them at the full rate I want to charge. As I gain more experience and a track record, I’ll be raising my rates to reflect that.

Unique and interesting experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be possible

I’ve been able to meet some of my personal heroes like Chris Guillebeau, Daniel Pink, and Ramit Sethi. I’ve been invited to fascinating events like a Netflix show launch party and seen my book appear in bookstores from Bali to Dubai to the southern tip of New Zealand. I’ve even had distant relatives send me photos of themselves posing next to it all over the world. All these things are so much fun!

Bestseller list appearances and other awards and recognition

My book has received a very gratifying amount of recognition, including being nominated for the  Goodreads Choice Award and Audie audiobook award, and being named a Financial Times book of the year and Fast Company top summer pick. This is valuable mostly because of the doors it opens to decision-makers and leaders.

What Hasn’t Happened: Business Growth

The main outcome that hasn’t happened much at all, though it does not appear in the list above, is business growth. I think I just assumed that selling tens of thousands of copies would somehow automatically lead to growth in the sales of our courses, but if anything, sales have declined.

It’s hard to untangle that deceleration from the broader slowdown in online education post-COVID, but I’d say that there’s some anecdotal evidence that the book has cannibalized sales of our course. I’ve received many comments that the book was so good, people didn’t feel the need for further training!

In retrospect, this cannibalization makes sense: I distilled every single one of the best ideas from our course and put it into the book, holding nothing back. All the aura and mystique that you previously had to join the course to get access to is now available for the price of a fast-food meal.

To adapt to this, we’ve been hard at work changing the program we offer to build on and extend the contents of the book, instead of merely repeating it. I continue to believe that the Second Brain universe is infinitely subtle and interesting, with plentiful opportunities to go deeper.

To summarize, I absolutely believe going with a traditional publisher was worth it, and the benefits I’m receiving are just getting started. There is simply no more effective way to launch a big new idea onto the world stage than using the global publishing industry as a platform. 

In part 2, I’ll share a deep dive into the financial picture of the book, including how much we’ve made and spent on the project in total.

The post The Making of a Bestseller: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at the Creation of Building a Second Brain appeared first on Forte Labs.

Our 2023 Goals at Forte Labs

Here are our company goals for 2023, which we’re sharing for accountability and collaboration.

Company

Our goal is to reach gross revenue of $3 million in 2023. This sales volume would give us healthy margins, allow us to compensate our people well, and make major investments for the future.

YouTube

2022 was our first serious investment in YouTube, and this year, we’re going to continue growing our channel while also connecting it more closely with the rest of the business.

Grow our channel to 300,000 subscribers

After the meteoric growth we saw last year, from 20,000 to 140,000 subscribers, we’re once again setting a lofty target to double our following to 300,000. 

We’re going to do that while continuing to optimize for monetization via our products and services so people can go deeper on the ideas they’re introduced to on our channel.

Launch our YouTube Partner Program with 6–8 videos

In 2023 we’ll begin partnering with select, premium brands to create custom YouTube videos that introduce our subscribers to their products. 

We’ll work exclusively with sponsored partners who are the absolute best fit: willing to fund dedicated videos (not 90-second inserts) where we conduct detailed product walkthroughs with Tiago, for products we’d happily cover anyway (if we had infinite time and resources)

Ideally, these will be true long-term partnerships, not just short-term user acquisition. We’ve booked our first 3 partnerships and are looking for 3-5 more.

If you’re a good fit for that kind of partnership, reach out at hello@fortelabs.com, and let’s talk!

Publish new videos

We are planning over 30 videos on Second Brains and digital productivity, including dedicated videos on the following topics:

Tiago’s Second Brain Tour – a guided look behind the scenes of my own personal Second Brain systemA deep dive series into PARA, my ultimate organizational system for digital informationA “trailer” for my book Building a Second Brain to make the key ideas easy to understand and shareCollaborations with a wide variety of thought leaders and content creators on how they use digital notesMarketing/Content

2022 was focused almost completely on audience growth, and this year we’re switching our focus to growing revenue.

Measure & increase the conversion rate of our funnel

We’re going to be putting more attention into metrics this year, regularly tracking net new subscribers to our email list, the conversion rate from email subscribers to our portfolio of products, and revenue from other sources besides courses, with the goal of diversifying our business.

Launch newsletter sponsorships

For the first time ever, we’re beginning to partner with select sponsors for our weekly email newsletter, which reaches over 100,000 people each week with consistent 50%+ open rates. 

If you have a brand you’d like to share with our audience, please get in touch here!

Kick off our affiliate marketing program

We’ve begun officially recommending the tools, apps, and online platforms we use to run our business and manage our company Second Brain, which you can find here.

For those who complete our flagship program Building a Second Brain, we are also now recommending the courses and programs of other online educators we trust and believe in to help them continue their learning journey.

Launch a premium offering

We don’t yet know exactly what this will look like, but we’re seeing a lot of demand from entrepreneurs, creators, executives, and business owners for a premium offering that allows them to work with us more closely and intensively.

We’ll explore the absolute best ways we can serve these leaders this year.

Keep our audience growth rate stable

Growing our audience won’t be our main focus this year, but with our content flywheel spinning, we are seeking a consistent growth rate across all our main channels this year.

Operations/Education

We merged our Operations and Education teams recently after realizing that every program we offer relies strongly on effective operations. 

The new combined team will be prioritizing training effective facilitators for our courses, with the goal of increasing retention rates and growing revenue by keeping members engaged, satisfied, and committed to the community.

Maintain the BASB Membership Community

Graduates of our online course can now join an ongoing membership community which we call the BASB Membership. As part of the Membership, we offer consistent content updates, host learning events, and offer exclusive access to other resources for course alumni only.

Train new BASB facilitators

We will develop and document a standardized process for onboarding, managing, and offboarding new facilitators for BASB cohorts this year, with the goal of giving our students the best training suited to their needs, choice of platform, and professional background.

If any of these goals overlap with yours and you see a way we could work together, please reach out to us at hello@fortelabs.com.

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

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100,000 Copies Sold: My Long-Term Goals for the Building a Second Brain Book

We recently crossed the astounding milestone of 100,000 copies sold of my book Building a Second Brain!

That’s just in the US and UK, and over the next few months, it will go on sale in 20+ other countries and languages around the world.

I have to be honest: every goal that I ever imagined for this book has been fulfilled. I feel a little dumbfounded and very much in awe that we’ve reached the limits of my imagination just 10 months after its release. 

I sat down recently to brainstorm a list of 20 “ridiculous” new goals for the next chapter of the book’s life. I have no idea how many of these might come to pass, and many of them are honestly purely vanity goals, but they are meaningful to me nonetheless.

Hosting a 1,000-attendee conference in LA or Long BeachHaving a scientific paper published on my work in a major academic journalReceiving an invitation to guest lecture at Harvard, Stanford, or another Ivy League universityRunning pilots to teach BASB in 100 K-12 schoolsReaching 1 million copies sold within 5 yearsAppearing on the New York Times bestseller listSeeing a Times Square billboard advertising the bookHaving a feature-length film made on BASB with a wide theatrical releaseBeing name-dropped in a chart-topping rap or pop songAppearing on an episode of the Hidden Brain podcastCollaborating on an exhibition at a major museum on the “history of thinking tools”Creating a board game for children to learn the principles behind BASBLanding a Tim Ferriss podcast interviewBeing thanked onstage at a music or film award ceremonyLanding an Oprah interviewSpeaking in front of a stadium or arena-sized audienceRunning a Super Bowl adDoing a Mr. Beast collab on YouTubeSigning a Netflix production deal to produce a BASB documentary, movie, or limited seriesPhoto of the book being read in space or on Mars by astronauts

If you know of any way to make any of these happen, please let me know!

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

The post 100,000 Copies Sold: My Long-Term Goals for the Building a Second Brain Book appeared first on Forte Labs.

Team Knowledge Management: How to Use PARA in Your Organization

Our digital world is constantly colliding and overlapping with the digital worlds of others. 

No one is an island, and that is especially true in our hyperconnected age where information can be so easily shared and intermixed. I’ve long advocated for individuals to create a personal system of knowledge management to help them skillfully navigate this world of information abundance – which I call their “Second Brain.”

One of the most common questions people have as they begin implementing what I teach is how they can share it with others. Whether by teaching their colleagues how to organize their own private thoughts and ideas, or creating a shared platform where everyone they work with can collectively document the knowledge they use.

Knowledge is meant to be shared, so this is a natural direction to move in once you start to experience the power of organizing your digital world.

It all begins with PARA – the cornerstone of my book Building a Second Brain and the starting point for organizing digital information of any kind. PARA is a system and a methodology for making knowledge stored in digital form far more accessible and useful, and it applies just as well to teams and companies as to individuals.

I’ve consulted with many organizations on how to implement PARA, from multi-billion dollar international financial institutions like the World Bank, to leading biotech firms like Genentech, to innovative startups like Sunrun. 

We all operate in a knowledge-based economy, and thus the ability to document what your people know and help them access that knowledge when it’s needed is a crucial capability for any organization. I would say it’s even essential for survival.

A Bottom-Up Approach to Knowledge Management

PARA is part of a discipline called “Knowledge management,” or KM for short.

KM is an extensive field with many research studies, academic journals, and conferences stretching back decades. Its purpose is to find ways for people to effectively share their knowledge with each other to advance the organization’s goals.

Let me give you my controversial take on Knowledge Management as it is usually practiced: it’s often used by management as a tool for top-down control. 

A wiki or knowledge base is created one day out of the blue, and staff are told to “share their knowledge” by inputting what they know. On the surface, this seems like a perfectly reasonable proposition. We are hired to contribute our knowledge to our employer, right? But in practice, there are multiple problems with this “top-down” approach to knowledge management.

First, it takes a lot of time and effort to articulate one’s knowledge in a form that can be easily understood by others. And typically, staff aren’t being evaluated or compensated for this effort, which means it is essentially a distraction from the outcomes they are being evaluated on. 

Second, there are risks to sharing one’s knowledge so openly. You don’t know how it will be interpreted, where it will end up, or whether you will be properly credited. It might even be taken out of context and used against you.

Finally, there is always the fear lurking in the back of people’s minds that by sharing their hard-won knowledge, they are making themselves obsolete. If your most valuable knowledge can be fully documented and made searchable, why should they keep you around?

All of this leads to my conclusion that modern organizations need to take a “bottom-up” approach to knowledge management instead of a top-down one. It can’t be about “extracting” knowledge from their people; it has to be about empowering them to do their absolute best work.

The following recommendations are centered on the needs and goals of the individual. It’s not that the organization isn’t important – it’s that the organization only benefits when staff embraces and feels inspired by the approach to knowledge sharing they’ve been asked to follow.

I’ll summarize my years of consulting experience into 5 concrete recommendations for how to practice knowledge management effectively within teams.

Here are my 5 recommendations at a glance:

Get clear on your organization’s flavor of PARATrain people in how to use PARAKeep only shared projects on shared platformsDefault to informality whenever possibleEncourage a culture of writing​​1. Get Clear on Your Organization’s Flavor of PARA

My first recommendation is to define what PARA looks like and how it works for your team specifically.

Even if you’ve decided you’re going to follow my advice to the letter, there is always a “flavor” of PARA that makes sense for your culture. This can include decisions such as:

What is our definition of a “project,” “area of responsibility,” “resource” and “archive”?What needs to happen when we kick off a new project for it to be considered “active”?What needs to happen when a project gets completed, put on hold, or canceled (for it to be considered “inactive”)?Who is responsible for maintaining the standard for each shared area of responsibility?What are the officially supported platforms on which PARA will be used?What are the strict rules, softer “rules of thumb,” dos and don’ts, and cultural norms that govern how people will use PARA?Who will be the “PARA Champion” who oversees its implementation and makes sure the guidelines are being followed?

I suggest summarizing these decisions in a one-page “PARA Guide” for your team where everyone can reference it. 

2. Train People in How to Use PARA

I recommend viewing the implementation of PARA in your team as primarily a training challenge, not an organizational or technical challenge. 

The fact that it takes me thousands of words to explain what PARA is and how it works should be a clue that even with such a dead simple method, people still need to learn it. They have to change their mindset, let go of limiting beliefs, observe and practice new behaviors, and then integrate all of that into their day-to-day work habits.

The first and biggest pitfall I see managers succumb to is the idea that they can implement PARA without teaching their people anything. That they can “install” it on their shared cloud storage drive like a piece of software and people will somehow magically know how to use it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I promise you: you will need to train your people not just in how PARA works, but how it works in your team. The document you created previously with all the norms and rules of PARA will serve as a reference, but you will also need to make presentations, conduct training, and facilitate discussions with your staff around what that looks like.

PARA is really a set of common behaviors that everyone on your team will need to adopt: a shared set of assumptions, conventions, and policies that govern how people create files and folders, where they put them and why, and in what circumstances they should retitle, move, or archive them.

3. Keep Only Shared Projects on Shared Platforms

A tendency I often see is for teams to want to centralize all digital assets of their team in a single, all-encompassing place. The thinking goes: if all this digital content is potentially valuable, shouldn’t everyone have access to it?

The answer is no. You absolutely do not want everyone to have access to everything. Here’s why: for a piece of information to be understandable and usable by a wide variety of people, it has to be highly formal and structured, which takes a lot of time and effort. And you shouldn’t spend that time and effort without very good reason.

For example, if you have some notes on a book you’re reading, meant only for your personal use, those notes can exist in a very informal, casual, free-form state. You don’t need to define your terms, don’t need to add headings or sections, don’t need an outline or table of contents, and can add highlights and annotations without much context at all. In other words, you can depend on the fact that the person making the notes and the one retrieving them are the same person – you.

However, if you want to share those book notes with even one other person, suddenly the whole situation changes. There is a chasm that separates any two minds. You have no idea what the other person knows, remembers, or understands. You now have to add a considerable amount of context and structure to make sure they have a shot at understanding what your notes contain. Now expand that to dozens or hundreds of others, and the effort needed to make that knowledge intelligible explodes. 

Adding context and creating structure – including steps like defining your terms, making your assumptions explicit, or bridging the logic from one point to another, among many others – are cognitively expensive. And every minute you spend adding formality and structure to a document is a minute you’re not spending moving your team’s projects and goals forward. There is always a tradeoff.

I recommend advising your staff to keep all their notes, files, and documents in their own individual PARA folders by default. That way they can remain informal and messy until the moment more formality is needed. 

Only when a project or area becomes collaborative, with multiple people involved, should it be moved to shared Projects or Areas folders. If you think about the totality of all the work the entire team takes on, most of it will be at the individual level. Thus only a minority of the organization’s overall workload should reside in the shared PARA system.

4. Default to Informality Whenever Possible

I previously said that it takes a lot more context and structure – in other words, a lot more formality – to make content intelligible for a wider audience. However, even in the case where that’s necessary, you should still default to the minimum level of formality you can get away with.

I often see organizations default to a high level of formality in all their communication. For example, a complex feedback form with 12 required fields, a memo template that reads like a government decree, or a company wiki with 10 levels of hierarchy requiring you to find the exact place something belongs.

Defaulting to overly elaborate information-sharing is a constant temptation inside organizations because it feels like the right thing to do. It feels responsible to make precise workflows, comprehensive questionnaires, and elaborate rules to ensure people do things “right.” No one gets in trouble for being too rigorous or too precise in the documentation they create.

Yet what few seem to realize is that every bit of formality carries a hidden cost. It extracts a toll on people’s time and energy that will inevitably show up in the form of frustration, discouragement, and a sense of defeat. 

When you force people to follow elaborate rules whose purpose they don’t understand, you are robbing them of the enthusiasm and excitement they need to do their most creative, inspired work. No one will complain, but under the surface, their morale will suffer.

It doesn’t have to be that way. One of the most powerful but also unusual cultural norms I’ve noticed within companies is the expectation that informality is not only okay, it’s preferred. I believe this is one of the secret weapons of tech startups – the beanbag chairs and ping-pong tables don’t make a difference by themselves, but they imply a culture where it’s okay to be yourself. That attitude of informality then carries over into how people plan, strategize, communicate, and collaborate, which is a much more natural and effective way to work!

Formality is needed only in very specific, limited circumstances. For example, when doing randomized controlled trials for a drug you’re developing, or when drawing up blueprints for a new bridge, or when handling toxic chemicals. Beyond this kind of dangerous or high-risk situation, informality should rule. 

As important as informality is, it depends completely on clear, transparent communication. In the absence of clear communication, overly bureaucratic processes will be created to pull the necessary information out of people, leading back to a top-down approach.

That’s why the fifth and final element is the lynchpin of effective Knowledge Management within organizations.

5. Encourage a Culture of Writing

One thing you’ll quickly discover when it comes to Knowledge Management is that it is essentially a form of communication. 

A document, note, or other digital asset is a message being communicated through time. When it comes to team knowledge management, the quality of that communication becomes even more important, since you don’t know who exactly will be receiving it on the other end.

What determines the quality of a piece of communication? Well, it turns out it’s the same things that determine the quality of a piece of writing, for example:

Is it interesting and attention-grabbing? (Does it make people want to read it?)Is it precise and clear? (Can people easily understand what it’s trying to say?)Is it empathetic? (Is the writer seeing things from the reader’s point of view?)Does it help people solve a problem? (Is it useful and effective, or merely interesting?)Does it inspire people to take action? (Does it make it easy for people to apply it?)

It turns out that effective knowledge management within an organization essentially boils down to how well people write down what they know, and share or otherwise express it in a form that other people benefit from.

The skills learned through writing also translate to other kinds of “knowledge” that aren’t in textual form: images, graphs, photos, GIFs, diagrams, slides, etc. also need to be intelligible and useful to future receivers.

Writing is the individual skill most relevant to Knowledge Management, and the fact that most people don’t write particularly well or often indicates why KM is also lacking in most organizations. To put it simply: the only way to share knowledge effectively is to create a culture of writing within your team. 

Here are some ideas for how to do that:

Senior leadership can set an example by regularly sharing their most important ideas and decisions in writingStaff at all levels can be encouraged to take the time to express their thinking in writing, and rewarded when they doFeedback and coaching to direct reports can include direction to develop their ideas in writingMemos and other writing can be requested, circulated, and referred to in meetings and phone calls as central items for discussionMeetings can begin with “reading time” to emphasize that the context for discussions is best absorbed in document formUse a standard term for an internal piece of writing (such as memo, proposal, one-pager, article, or thesis doc)Decide on a standard template (such as a Google Doc or Notion page), default length (such as 1,000 words or 2 pages), and method of sharing (such as email or Slack) these internal documents

The more encouragement and feedback, incentives and rewards, and practical tools and templates you can provide to your people, the likelier they are to sit down and compose their ideas in written form, and thus the more likely that knowledge will spread and make an impact.

By successfully creating a culture of writing within your team, not only will knowledge be shared far more fluidly and effectively, you will also be creating a healthier psychological environment where people believe in their ideas and are invited to find their voice and speak powerfully.

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