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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
Read between
January 13 - January 14, 2023
Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting
When it comes to notetaking for work, less is more. You can capture entire books, articles with dozens of pages, or social media posts by the hundreds. No one will stop you, but you’ll quickly learn that such volume will only create a lot more work later on when you have to figure out what all that information means. If you’re going to capture everything, you might as well capture nothing.
A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. If you save a series of excerpts from a book amounting to five hundred words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty.
Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind
you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something.
Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes. If you try to do it with every note up front, you’ll quickly be mired in hours of meticulous highlighting with no clear purpose in mind.
The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it. This ensures that the notes you interact with most often will naturally become the most discoverable in a virtuous cycle.
Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult
Just as you listened for a feeling of internal resonance in deciding what content to save in the first place, the same rule applies for the insights within the note. Certain passages will move you, pique your attention, make your heart beat faster, or provoke you. Those are clear signals that you’ve found something important, and it’s time to add a highlight.
More is not better when it comes to thinking and creating. Distilling makes our ideas small and compact, so we can load them up into our minds with minimal effort. If you can’t locate a piece of information quickly, in a format that’s convenient and ready to be put to use, then you might as well not have it at all.
Start by saving only the best excerpts from that piece of content in a new note, either using copy-paste or a capture tool. This is layer one, the initial excerpts you save in your Second Brain. Next, read through the excerpts, bolding the main points and most important takeaways. Don’t make it an analytical decision—listen for a feeling of resonance and let that be your guide for what to bold. These bolded passages are layer two. Now read through only the bolded passages, and highlight (or, if your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, underline) the best of the best passages. The
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Express—Show Your Work
Professional creatives constantly draw on outside sources of inspiration—their own experiences and observations, lessons gleaned from successes and failures alike, and the ideas of others. If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.
Attention can be cultivated but also destroyed—by distractions, interruptions, and environments that don’t protect it. The challenge we face in building a Second Brain is how to establish a system for personal knowledge that frees up attention, instead of taking more of it.
If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear. If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again. What are the knowledge assets you’re creating today that will be most reusable in the future? What are the building blocks that will move forward your projects
Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others.
Here’s what most people miss: it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them. That system is your Second Brain, and the small pieces of work-in-process it contains I call “Intermediate Packets.” Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work.I For example, 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
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Reusing Intermediate Packets of work frees up our attention for higher-order, more creative thinking. Thinking small is the best way to elevate your horizons and expand your ambitions.
Making the shift to working in terms of Intermediate Packets unlocks several very powerful benefits. First, you’ll become interruption-proof because you are focusing only on one small packet at a time, instead of trying to load up the entire project into your mind at once. You become less vulnerable to interruptions, because you’re not trying to manage all the work-in-process in your head. Second, you’ll be able to make progress in any span of time. Instead of waiting until you have multiple uninterrupted hours—which, let’s face it, is rare and getting rarer—you can look at how many minutes
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While you can sit down to purposefully create an IP, it is far more powerful to simply notice the IPs that you have already produced and then to take an extra moment to save them in your Second Brain.
Our creativity thrives on examples. When we have a template to fill in, our ideas are channeled into useful forms instead of splattered around haphazardly. There are best practices and plentiful models for almost anything you might want to make.
How to Resurface and Reuse Your Past Work The Express step is where we practice and hone our ability to retrieve what we need, when we need it. It’s the step where we build the confidence that our Second Brain is working for us.
This inherent unpredictability means that there is no single, perfectly reliable retrieval system for the ideas contained in your notes. Instead, there are four methods for retrieval that overlap and complement one another. Together they are more powerful than any computer yet more flexible than any human mind.
Those four retrieval methods are: Search Browsing Tags Serendipity
Retrieval Method #...
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Search has the benefit of costing almost nothing in terms of time and effort. Just by saving your notes in a central place, you enable software to search their full contents in seconds. You can run multiple searches in quick succession, running down rabbit trails through your knowledge garden as you try out different variations of terms.
Retrieval Method #2: Browsing
If you’ve followed the PARA system outlined in Chapter 5 to organize your notes, you already have a series of dedicated folders for each of your active projects, areas of responsibility, resources, and archives. Each of these folders is a dedicated environment designed specifically for focusing on that domain of your life. Each one can contain a wide range of content, from brief notes dashed off during a phone call to polished Intermediate Packets that you’ve already used in past projects. When the time comes to take action, you’ll be able to enter the appropriate workspace and know that
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Retrieval Method #3: Tags
Tags can overcome this limitation by infusing your Second Brain with connections, making it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns that defy simple categorization.
I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational system. It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your folders. However, tags can come in handy in specific situations when the two previous retrieval methods aren’t up to the task, and you want to spontaneously gather, connect, and synthesize groups of notes on the fly.
Retrieval Method #4: Serendipity
There is no way to plan for them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create the ideal conditions for them to arise. This is the main reason we put all sorts of different kinds of material, on many subjects and in diverse formats, all jumbled together in our Second Brain. We are creating a soup of creative DNA to maximize the chance that new life emerges.
First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good idea to keep your focus a little broad. Don’t begin and end your search with only the specific folder that matches your criteria. Make sure to look through related categories, such as similar projects, relevant areas, and different kinds of resources.
Second, serendipity is amplified by visual patterns. This is why I strongly suggest saving not only text notes but images as well (which is difficult to do in other kinds of software such as word processors). Our brains are naturally attuned to visuals. We intuitively absorb colors and shapes in the blink of an eye, using far less energy than it takes to read words. Some digital notes apps allow you to display only the images saved in your notes, which is a powerful way of activating the more intuitive, visual parts of your brain.
Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element of serendipity. When you present an idea to another person, their reaction is inherently unpredictable. They will often be completely uninterested in an aspect you think is utterly fascinating; they aren’t necessarily right or wrong, but you can use that feedback either way. The reverse can also happen. You might think something is obvious, while they find it mind-blowing. That is also useful feedback.
Reframing your work in terms of Intermediate Packets isn’t just about doing the same old stuff in smaller chunks. That doesn’t unlock your true potential. The transformation comes from the fact that smaller chunks are inherently more shareable and collaborative. It is much easier to show someone a small thing, and ask for their thoughts on it, rather than the entire opus you’re creating.
The fundamental difficulty of creative work is that we are often too close to it to see it objectively. Getting feedback is really about borrowing someone else’s eyes to see what only a novice can see. It’s about stepping outside your subjective point of view and noticing what’s missing from what you’ve made.
These moments are so important that you will begin changing how you work in order to get feedback as early and often as possible, because you know it is much easier to gather and synthesize the thoughts of others than to come up with an endless series of brilliant thoughts on your own. You will begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.
Reframing your productivity in terms of Intermediate Packets is a major step toward this turning point. Instead of thinking of your job in terms of tasks, which always require you to be there, personally, doing everything yourself, you will start to think in terms of assets and building blocks that you can assemble. As the potential of your intellectual assets becomes apparent, you’ll start to look for any way to spend your time creating such assets and avoid one-off tasks whenever possible. You will start to seek out ways of acquiring or outsourcing the creation of these assets to others,
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My favorite quote about creativity is from the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.” To truly “know” something, it’s not enough to read about it in a book. Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action. Thoughts are fleeting, quickly fading as time passes. To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it. You have to get your hands dirty and apply that knowledge to a practical problem. We learn by making concrete things—before we feel ready, before we have it completely figured out,
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The Art of Creative Execution
Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging. —Silvano Arieti, psychiatrist and author of Creativity: The Magic Synthesis
by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done. We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. I learned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine that systematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of our awareness.I
Divergence and Convergence: A Creative Balancing Act If you look at the process of creating anything, it follows the same simple pattern, alternating back and forth between divergence and convergence.
A creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence. You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible.
