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by
Tiago Forte
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January 13 - January 14, 2023
Express: Show Your Work All the previous steps—capturing, organizing, and distilling—are geared toward one ultimate purpose: sharing your own ideas, your own...
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It’s so easy to endlessly delay and postpone the experiences that would so enrich our lives. We think we’re not ready. We fear we’re not prepared. We cannot stand the thought that there is one little piece of information we’re missing that, if we had it, would make all the difference. I’m here to tell you that that is no way to live your life. Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use.
This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.V We all naturally have a desire to create—to bring to life something good, true, or beautiful.9 It’s a part of our essential nature. Creating new things is not only one of the most deeply fulfilling things we can do, it can also have a positive impact on others—by inspiring, entertaining, or educating them.
evaluate, share, teach, record, post, and lobbyVI—are synonyms for the act of expression. They all draw on outside sources for raw material, they all involve a practical process of refinement over time, and they all end up making an impact on someone or something that matters to you. Information is always in flux, and it is always a work in progress. Since nothing is ever truly final, there is no need to wait to get started.
Capture—Keep What Resonates
Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message
A Second Brain gives us a way to filter the information stream and curate only the very best ideas we encounter in a private, trusted place. Think of it as planting your own “knowledge garden” where you are free to cultivate your ideas and develop your own thinking away from the deafening noise of other people’s opinions. A garden is only as good as its seeds, so we want to start by seeding our knowledge garden with only the most interesting, insightful, useful ideas we can find.
even the world’s most successful and prolific creatives need support systems to pursue their craft. It’s not a matter of having enough raw talent. Talent needs to be channeled and developed in order to become something more than a momentary spark.
Creating a Knowledge Bank: How to Generate Compounding Interest from Your Thoughts
What kinds of information are worth preserving when we don’t know exactly how we’ll be putting it to use? Our world changes much faster than in previous eras, and most of us don’t have a single creative medium we work in. How can we decide what to save when we have no idea what the future holds?
In the digital world we live in, knowledge most often shows up as “content”—snippets of text, screenshots, bookmarked articles, podcasts, or other kinds of media. This includes the content you gather from outside sources but also the content you create as you compose emails, draw up project plans, brainstorm ideas, and journal your own thoughts. These aren’t just random artifacts with no value—they are “knowledge assets” that crystallize what you know in concrete form.
Knowledge capture is about mining the richness of the reading you’re already doing and the life you’re already living.
A knowledge asset is anything that can be used in the future to solve a problem,
save time, illuminate a concept, or learn from past experience.
The meaning of a thought, insight, or memory often isn’t immediately clear. We need to write them down, revisit them, and view them from a different perspective in order to digest what they mean to us. It is exceedingly difficult to do that within the confines of our heads. We need an external medium in which to see our ideas from another vantage point, and writing things down is the most effective and convenient one ever invented.
Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he could make a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleled brilliance. Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?”
The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in.
It starts with realizing that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you. When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.
The biggest pitfall I see people falling into once they begin capturing digital notes is saving too much. If you try to save every piece of material you come across, you run the risk of inundating your future self with tons of irrelevant information.
Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?
Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?
It costs nothing to keep these “offcuts” around, and surprisingly often they end up being the crucial missing piece in a future project. Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future.
Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?
your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos. Like the age-old practice of journaling or keeping a diary, we can use notetaking to document our lives and better understand how we became who we are.
Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?
We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.”6 That isn’t what a Second Brain is for.
definition for “information”: that which surprises you.7 If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.
Our ability to capture ideas from anywhere takes us in a different direction: By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions. By playing with ideas—bending and stretching and remixing them—we become less attached to the way they were originally presented and can borrow certain aspects or elements to use in our own work.
Ultimately, Capture What Resonates
As you consume a piece of content, listen for an internal feeling of being moved or surprised by the idea you’re taking in. This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.”
Perhaps the most immediate benefit of capturing content outside our heads is that we escape what I call the “reactivity loop”—the hamster wheel of urgency, outrage, and sensationalism that characterizes so much of the Internet. The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means. You need to set it aside and gain some objectivity.
What would capturing ideas look like if it was easy?
Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’re already having. It’s about squeezing more juice out of the fruit of life, savoring every moment to the fullest by paying closer attention to the details.
Organize—Save for Actionability
No one questions the importance of having physical spaces that make us feel calm and centered, but when it comes to your digital workspace, it’s likely you’ve spent little time, if any, arranging that space to enhance your productivity or creativity. As knowledge workers we spend many hours every day within digital environments—our computers, smartphones, and the web. Unless you take control of those virtual spaces and shape them to support the kinds of thinking you want to do, every minute spent there will feel taxing and distracting.
Organizing for Action: Where 99 Percent of Notetakers Get Stuck (And How to Solve It)
If organizing by project was the most natural way to manage information with minimal effort, why not make it the default?
PARA,I which stands for the four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.
it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.
One of the biggest temptations with organizing is to get too perfectionistic, treating the process of organizing as an end in itself. There is something inherently satisfying about order, and it’s easy to stop there instead of going on to develop and share our knowledge. We need to always be wary of accumulating so much information that we spend all our time managing it, instead of putting it to use in the outside world.
The intention here is not to use a single software program, but to use a single organizing system, one that provides consistency even as you switch between apps many times per day. A project will be the same project whether it’s found in your notes app, your computer file system, or your cloud storage drive, allowing you to move seamlessly between them without losing your train of thought.
How PARA Works: Priming Your Mind (and Notes) for Action
With the PARA system, every piece of information you want to save can be placed into one of just four categories: Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories.
Projects: What I’m Working on Right Now Projects include the short-term outcomes you’re actively working toward right now.
First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or “publish.”
It is becoming more and more common for all of us to work across teams, departments, and even different companies to execute collaborative projects, and then once it’s over, each go our own way.
If you are not already framing your work in terms of specific, concrete projects, making this shift will give you a powerful jump start to your productivity.
Knowing which projects you’re currently committed to is crucial to being able to prioritize your week, plan your progress, and say no to things that aren’t important.
