# Building a Second Brain PKM course by [[Tiago Forte]]. ## Unit 1: Introduction **Goal: how to capture, organize and retrieve ideas and insights using digital notes using a systematic approach that you trust. People lack tools and skills needed for creative work because they aren’t being thought those skills.** > Things are only real when you share them. - **The best learning is social through discussions and debate** - **Show and tell is very important because you open yourself to the opportunity of getting feedback** > Any system which has to be perfect to provide value is deeply flawed (because it’s fragile). - Describes the problem with most note taking methods - It’s rare for people to share your notes. **We should start sharing knowledge that could be useful to other people** - **Second brain should be used** not to help you remember, but **to help you think**. ^x7mnyf - There are three levels of thinking - Level 1 is storing information - Level 2 is intermediate thinking (goal of the course) > The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable. – Robert Henri - Level 3 creative breakthroughs (difficult to achieve) - Note taking is the art of combining a human system and a technology system but the focus of the course are human systems. - Goal of PKM is to turn raw data into knowledge > Creativity doesn’t just involve imagination. It also involves motivation, organization, and collaboration. – Scott Barry Kaufman - The point here is that imagination is not enough. ## Unit 2: P.A.R.A. Organizing for Insight ### Requirements of a Digital Note Taking System In order for a digital note taking tool to enhance and support creativity it needs to be: 1. **Universal. It needs to support storing any possible kind of file/instance of data/information.** 2. **Flexible. It needs to be able to adapt to changing circumstances/any kind of future work we might take on** 3. **Simple. It’s a productivity tool so using it shouldn’t incur any additional overhead costs.** 4. **Actionable. It needs to be able to organize non-actionable information while keeping the focus on the actionable** 5. **Cross-platform.** 6. **Outcome-oriented.** 7. **Modular. It needs to be able to show or hide different parts depending on our needs** ### PARA The system that meets all of these requirements is PARA, which stands for - *Projects*. A series of tasks linked to a specific goal to be a achieved in a specific time frame e.g. running a marathon. - *Areas* (of Responsibility). A sphere of activity with a standard to be maintained over time. It doesn’t have a deadline (it’s indefinite) e.g. health. - *Resources*. A topic or theme of ongoing interest. - *Archives*. Inactive items from the previous three categories. PARA was originally developed for GTD but can be used for non-actionable knowledge as well. Until you convert your areas of responsibility into a list of projects you: - Can’t truly know the extent of your commitments. This allows you to say ‘no’ with integrity. - Can’t connect your current efforts to long-term goals. - You can’t know if you’re making progress. **A project without a goal is a *hobby*, and a goal without a project is a *dream*.** > Define your projects, or your projects will defined you. **If three days go by and you still have a task in your manager you should rewrite it.** Readings: - [[The PARA Method A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information - Forte Labs]] - [[P.A.R.A. II Operations Manual – Praxis]] ## Unit 3: Digital Cognition - **The purpose of the GTD weekly review is basically to update your project list** - If it’s a checklist it’s a checklist of things you should consider for ideas for next projects you could be doing ### Digital Note Taking Functions We Need to Support Creativity How can digital note-taking programs support and enhance creative output? **What functions do we need in a digital note taking tool to enhance and support creativity?** **1. Promote unusual associations between pieces of information** - **Creativity is connecting things, not just collecting things** (especially things that don’t seem connected) - **This ability to connect things is a skill and can therefore be trained** - “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections” – Eddie Opera, The Atlantic - “Increased sensitivity unusual associations is an important contributor to creativity.” – Scott Barry Kauffman, Harvard Business Review - **Keep everything in one place so that you can make links** i.e. embrace the messiness - Keep things right at the brink of chaos. That will promote unusual associations (and juxtaposition) **2. Creating visual artifacts** - It’s easier to interact with visual objects than with abstract ideas - “Math is great but math is not how we’re designed to think” - Prefer visual ‘anchors’ to abstraction - **Connections are there to be made, not discovered** **3. Incubating ideas over long periods of time** - **Heavy lifts vs. slow burners. Heavy lifts take toll on your personal relationships. Compare that to ‘slow-burners’, projects which run in the background.** - **Slow burns happen during all those small ‘pockets of time’, on the train, on your way to work, etc.** - **You have to keep a dozen problems present in your mind and evaluate new bits of knowledge you come across against those problems asking ‘can this help out’?** This is an idea from Richard Feynman. - **You have intellectual capital that you gain from current projects that you can use in future projects** **4. Provide the raw materials for unique interpretations and perspectives** - Machines can’t persuade, so **you should nurture any knowledge capital that will help you persuade people. Accumulate any ’ammunition’ that you can use for future arguments** - **You will be much more successful in everything you do if you don’t just pass on information but present it with other materials (from your intellectual capital) to built new connections** Furthermore a note taking **tool needs to have the following properties**: - It needs to be **durable** (backed up on your cloud and locally) - It needs to **store any type of file** (to support linking and making connections) - It needs to be **cross platform** - It needs to be **note first (instead of within layers with deep hierarchy)** Participant questions from the end of the unit: - Is slow-burn a project? - **Slow-burn projects could be considered resources** - My own thoughts: **they are projects because they need to be reviewed and usually have a definition of done (which is kind of like a deadline)** ## Unit 4: Progressive Summarization Readings: [[Tagging Is Broken]]. The goal is to learn a **new summarization method that makes notes easily discoverable and easily understandable**. Whenever Tiago says discoverable he means the **ability to quickly determine if a note can be reused for whatever problem you're working on at the moment**. How to structure notes for your future self when you don’t know anything about your future self? Two approaches: tagging-first and notebook-first (Evernote perspective). **Tagging is too fragile and requires too much maintenance.** **Notebook-first matches how things are in real life. Flaw: suppresses randomness.** **Suggestion: make it “note-first” which works with whatever system you prefer (tagging or notebook-first or something else).** In the case of notes, the two priorities you have to balance are *discoverability* (making it small, simple and easy to digest i.e. compression or summarizing very succinctly) and *understanding* (including all the context, examples, explanations, sources, etc.). Problem: you cannot compress without loosing context. In order to communicate something you need to compress it (think quotations which embody life ethos but without any context the author found himself in at the time of the quote). You’re taking things out of context i.e. reducing understanding but increasing summarization. Most people default to save everything, instead of spending time to identify the key point. **The main goal of progressive summarization is to make consuming a unit of knowledge (note) easier for my future self. The goal is to quickly determine if the whole piece (note, article, whatever) is worth (re)reading.** ^eh2ods ### Progressive Summarization Layers **Progressive summarization works in layers:** 1. **Layer 1 is notes themselves. The best parts of the source you're consuming.** (50% of Tiago's notes are in this layer) 2. **Layer 2 is added later. Most important parts are bolded.** (25%) 3. **Layer 3 parts of bolded text are highlighted** (20%). Think of this as **creating your own headings.** 4. **Layer 4 is an executive summary** (5%) 5. **Layer 5 is remixing if you want it to become a part of your own "fabric of life"** (<1%) ### Progressive Summarization Advice With each pass you're making knowledge more discoverable. **Allow for time to pass between layers so that you can gain perspective. Tiago advises at least a week of time between notes.** The layering system is not meant to be universal. There's no preferred level of summarization. **You surface whatever resonates with you, use instinct and emotion, not logic**, as that will help your future lazy self. **The key idea** behind progressive summarization **is to maximize glanceability**. ^hxdv9d You might want to change the meaning of these layers and the way they are marked. This is encouraged. You should modify the workflow to suit your personal goals. ## Unit 5: Maximizing Return-on-Attention Readings: - [[Highlighting and Its Relation to Distributed Study and Students’ Metacognitive Beliefs]] Another article about highlighting that offers similar conclusions, although seemingly different (not from this course): [[Highlighting Is Ineffective—Here’s How to Change That]] Similar to 'return-on-investment' but for attention. PKM system should produce a positive return-on-attention. It comes down to flow, a state where you're fully focused and involved. It often leads to an increased sense of enjoyment and satisfaction after the fact. A sense of accomplishment. In psychology this is called *transient hypofrontality*, in which your body produces hormones that are linked to: - Tightened focus (norepinephrine) - Improved pattern recognition (dopamine) - Improved lateral thinking (anandamide) - Reduced stress response (nitric oxide) - Increased sense of inner tranquility (endorphines) This all leads to increased creativity. **In order to reach flow you have to go through some struggle because your brain tries to reduce investment** (are you sure you want to work on this? really really?). The struggle are distractions like checking Twitter, Facebook, etc. **Primary asset of knowledge workers are flow sessions so it is imperative that we use a knowledge base that improves over time. How? Split work into smaller reusable (in future projects) chunks** (think [[Zettelkasten]]). This allows you to better feedback earlier. **Requirements for flow:** 1. **Clear goal** (something you're going to finish in a couple of sessions at most) 2. **Immediate feedback which is much easier on intermediate feedback (as people are more likely to give more feedback on rough drafts)** 3. **Challenge/skill ratio. You need to work on tasks that are around 5% more difficult than you're comfortable with. If it's too easy you'll get bored. If it's too hard the difficulty will frustrate you. It's much easier to hit this Goldilocks zone with smaller packets.** **In order to reduce the size of packets we need good methods of encoding and retrieval i.e. saving working session state.** ## Unit 6: Workflow and Retrieval > Digital notes are an accounting system for attention. Sixteen different techniques for retrieval in order to quickly compile project deliverables. **Whereas encoding knowledge (into notes) is very orderly, retrieval is hectic.** **Project research basically consists of two parts: divergence and convergence. In divergence you go wide, researching loads of different sources. In convergence you filter your research and start composing a deliverable.** These techniques are used at the end of the convergence process, to compile the research you gathered. A strategy essentially consists of three parts (from a book called [Good Strategy Bad Strategy](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s204/client/snv?noteGuid=c747cd06-a209-43a8-b23a-48bbf1a602ca&noteKey=d4e56c70258defc1&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs204%2Fsh%2Fc747cd06-a209-43a8-b23a-48bbf1a602ca%2Fd4e56c70258defc1&title=Good%2BStrategy%252C%2BBad%2BStrategy%2Bnotes) by Richard Rumelt): 1. A diagnosis of the situation (definition of the problem) 2. Overall guiding policy (principles of the solution) 3. Action plan (implementation steps) Techniques are split into solutions to common problems. ### "I'm having trouble getting started." 1. Archipelago of Ideas - **Collect things over time so that you don't start from an empty slate** - “Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It's a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.” –Danny Choo 2. **Headings First** - **Write down the outline first to get a broad overview. This will trigger ideas for the contents** ### "I'm intimidated by the scope of my deliverable" 3. Dial Down the Scope - **Split the deliverable into sprints, with each sprint having a smaller deliverable.** - Tweet storm > Blog Post > Book - Live stream > YouTube Video > Short Film - No matter how big or small your project is you can be broken down into smaller chunks 4. Plan the Plan - This is basically an extension of the above with even greater granularity. Basically write down each step so that you'll know what to do the next time you have 5 or 10 minutes to spare. ### "I have trouble remembering where I left off" 5. Temporary Tags - **Make temporary tags that help you mark your progress** 6. Status Summary - **Summarize where you're at with a particular project** ### "A source is too big to hold in my mind" 7. Color Commentary - **Make your commentary to content stand out (color or similar)** 8. Sentence Hacking - **Try to group individual parts of a book (or another piece of content) into themes and reorganize it with your own words (kind of summarization).** Identify the scaffolding, break it down, and then build it back up. ### "I can't see the big picture of how the pieces fit together" 9. Context Switch - **If you're stuck, context switch** (different locations, different times, different devices, different people (feedback)). **This allows you to get a different perspective on the problem.** 10. Function Follows Form - **Try different structures instead of the traditional ones** - Chronological structure - Prioritized - Sequential - By objective - By size - By theme - Question-Answer - By shape ### "I can't find the most relevant notes" 11. Interlinking notes 12. Context Suggestions (Evernote specific) 13. Advanced Search Syntax ### "I'm working with someone else" 14. Table of Contents (Evernote specific) 15. Tag Hierarchy 16. Naming Conventions ## Unit 7: PKM Workflow Canvas ## Unit 8: The Big Picture Until now information availability represented a bottleneck to learning (you had to go to a physical library / college campus to have access to information), so **in the era of information abundance, we need to fundamentally change how we learn.** In order to best adapt to the new era of information abundance the following three thinking shifts are important: 1. Fundamental convergence 2. Strengths as constraints 3. Food for thought Fundamental convergence is like that quote from Kyle X.Y.: > Life is a puzzle. Every piece fits together to create who we are, what we do, how we feel. Every experience shapes us into who we will eventually become. ### Strengths as Weaknesses **There will come a time in your life when you will encounter a problem that will not be solvable using your strong suits. Those strengths will then tend to become your weaknesses due to the [[Maslow's Hammer]].** > Systems that must be perfect to be reliable are deeply flawed. – Unknown