The Art of Manliness - Building a Second Brain

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.160 In the modern age, people are bombarded with more information and are more personally responsible

00:00:15.560 for managing that information than ever before. How do you stay on top of your schedule,

00:00:19.700 work responsibilities, financial obligations, and the spigot of media that runs full force

00:00:24.260 24-7 while not only avoiding becoming overwhelmed, but actually using all that information to

00:00:29.240 generate better ideas, advance your career, and generally improve your life? Well, my guess

00:00:34.080 would say that the answer lies in having a mind outside your mind. His name is Tiago Forte,

00:00:39.000 and he's the author of Building a Second Brain, a proven method to organize your digital life

00:00:43.100 and unlock your creative potential. Today on the show, Tiago explains how a second brain

00:00:47.780 is an external resource where you can store all the most important checklists, thoughts,

00:00:52.200 notes, ideas, and insights you acquire and generate. He explains how the second brain supercharges the

00:00:57.420 historical practice of keeping a commonplace book, and how it improves your productivity and

00:01:01.380 well-being by getting stuff out of your head, off your bandwidth, and into a place where you can

00:01:05.520 actually put it to use. Tiago then walks us through this system of personal knowledge management,

00:01:10.280 including the tools you can use to capture information, the question to ask yourself to

00:01:14.140 decide what to capture, and why he recommends organizing what you capture around action instead of

00:01:19.220 subject. And Tiago explains how the ultimate goal of having a second brain is to take what you put in this

00:01:24.220 treasury and synthesize it into better ways to live, think, act, and express yourself. After the show's

00:01:29.900 over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash second brain. All right, Tiago Forte, welcome to the

00:01:48.600 show. Thank you. Happy to be here. So you've got a book called Building a Second Brain, a proven method to

00:01:55.280 organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. So it's all about this idea that you spent

00:02:00.140 most of your adult life developing. This concept called the second brain. So let's start there. What is the second

00:02:07.860 brain? Sure, yeah. So second brain is an external, outside your head place that you trust. I suggest a piece of

00:02:16.240 software, but it can really be any kind of information storage tool. It's a place that you trust to

00:02:22.600 preserve and save all the most important information and knowledge that matters to you. Your ideas, your

00:02:28.820 insights, your life lessons, realizations, your theories about how the world works, your book notes,

00:02:35.180 quotes you found. We are such just high volume information consumers these days, but I would just ask

00:02:42.900 your listeners or you to really think about, you know, what do you have to show for all that

00:02:47.880 knowledge you've consumed? You know, where is it? Can you point to it? Can you say what it is? Can you

00:02:53.340 use it? And for most people, they have a vague sense of the things that they've learned in the past, but

00:02:58.060 no real record of it. Yeah, I would say I consume a lot of stuff and then like the next day I forget

00:03:03.880 about it. Or I've created sort of a slapdash organizational system where I like, I'll save and

00:03:09.380 read this later, but then I never do. Yeah, you know, that's a good point. I think most people have

00:03:14.360 some semblance of this, right? Almost everyone has a folder. They keep things on their computer. They

00:03:19.860 have bookmarks in their browser. They have, you know, the camera roll on their phone where they've

00:03:24.160 taken photos of, you know, interesting images. It's just, it's so it's already there somewhere. It just

00:03:29.640 needs a little bit of kind of organization and centralization. Like you need to centralize it a little

00:03:34.760 bit. Otherwise, when it's time to find it, you have to look like 25 different places.

00:03:39.840 Yeah, I think you're right. I think most people have some sort of, they offload some things to

00:03:43.120 external tools, right? A calendar is kind of can be part of a second brain. A to-do list is part of

00:03:48.380 a second brain, but you're like second brain trademark TM. What Tiago is doing is like, it's that,

00:03:54.400 but it's all in one place. So you can go there and see everything in one place and not have to go to

00:03:58.900 20 different things. Exactly, exactly.

00:04:01.680 And you highlight in the book, there are historical ancestors of the second brain.

00:04:06.460 There was one called the commonplace book that people in the Renaissance, the 19th century

00:04:12.160 used as a second brain. What was a commonplace book? How is it similar to what you're doing with

00:04:17.360 the second brain? And then like, I guess the follow-up would be, how does the second brain

00:04:21.420 turbocharge this idea of the commonplace book? Yes, this is one of my favorite things to talk about.

00:04:26.500 Basically, you know, I kind of did a DIY version of this for a few years, just using, I think at the

00:04:33.320 time, like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, just whatever I had available. But then I started to

00:04:38.780 get curious, you know, has anyone had this issue before? Has anyone done something like this in the

00:04:43.180 past? And I started really diving into the history. And I just discovered this is, this is an almost

00:04:49.260 ancient practice that humans have engaged in. The word commonplace book actually comes from ancient

00:04:57.200 Greece, comes from two or 3000 years ago, when, you know, they had these courts of law and these

00:05:02.940 assemblies, these democratic assemblies, and they would just take notes on what happened, you know,

00:05:07.820 like the, like the, the meeting notes or the, the, the court transcript, and they would keep it in a

00:05:13.460 commonplace was like the place. So it's ancient. And actually the word note, that word note is among

00:05:20.180 the 2% oldest words in the English language. Like, think about that. It's, it's as old as words like

00:05:26.260 fall or run or jump. It's like an ancient, ancient word. And so, you know, starting thousands of years

00:05:33.020 ago, I started tracing the history back, you know, up through the medieval times when there were these

00:05:38.840 manuscripts that the monks, you know, in the, in churches and convents would keep up through the

00:05:44.760 Renaissance, up through the Enlightenment, and all the way to the Industrial Revolution. And there's examples

00:05:50.300 all through each of those, those eras. In the Industrial Revolution, there was a very relevant example, which

00:05:55.840 was kind of a resurrection of these commonplace books. And people like John Locke, and Leonardo da

00:06:00.920 Vinci and others would just keep a notebook. It was just a simple paper notebook where they would

00:06:06.340 write down, it wasn't, it wasn't so much a journal with like personal thoughts and reflections. That's

00:06:11.500 one thing. It was more like copying and pasting and writing down little snippets of insight and ideas

00:06:19.460 and metaphors and examples and facts and observations that they would just find in the, in the outer world.

00:06:25.860 world. And just like today, the Industrial Revolution was this time that educated people were trying to

00:06:31.120 make sense of the world. They're trying to make sense of how things were changing and why. And so

00:06:35.340 a commonplace book was part of their effort to make sense of their world. So I don't know, I've just been

00:06:40.640 inspired by history. And I think we can now do the very same thing that people have done throughout

00:06:45.320 history, but supercharged by, you know, by the internet and by technology.

00:06:49.740 And yeah, what they did with these commonplace books. So there's, there's this controversy,

00:06:52.480 this long ongoing philosophical debate that goes back to Socrates, whether you should write

00:06:56.860 things down or not, right? Socrates thought, well, no, you shouldn't write things down because

00:07:00.600 that'll weaken your memory. But there's been research that shows, well, actually, when you

00:07:04.360 write things down, it allows you to process things. It actually allows you to think better and embed it

00:07:10.280 more in your brain. And then it allows you to sort of start taking these ideas you've been writing

00:07:15.600 down and cross-pollinating them to come with new ideas. So that's what's going on in this

00:07:20.020 context. So I think a lot of people think, well, why would I want to just like record

00:07:23.460 everything? Cause I'll just forget about it. Actually, no, by recording, it actually helps

00:07:28.360 you remember.

00:07:29.920 Oh, absolutely. That, you know, in fact, I cite in the book, there's multiple studies that show

00:07:34.860 the act of writing something down has just tremendous benefits, just writing it down.

00:07:40.920 Like no one else even has to see it. You don't even have to see it in the future.

00:07:44.400 The moment you write something down, the study that I cite shows benefits to your health,

00:07:50.020 people who were in hospitals recovered faster, people who didn't have jobs, got jobs faster

00:07:55.360 or got promotions faster. There are benefits to your blood pressure, to your sleep, to your

00:08:01.460 objective physical health by essentially just getting the jumble of thoughts and emotions

00:08:06.500 and, and, you know, worries and anxieties in your head and just externalizing them, offloading

00:08:12.240 them into, into an external source. So that's one thing. That's a great benefit that you get

00:08:16.460 immediately. But then what I'm saying is you can get that benefit, but then also you additionally

00:08:22.180 get future benefits, such as reviewing and reflecting on what you learned in the past, such as incorporating

00:08:27.900 what you've written down in the future into your writing or into your speaking or into your product

00:08:32.200 development or into your business building. So it's like you get some benefits now and you get

00:08:36.720 some benefits later, which to me is a, is a pretty good deal.

00:08:39.360 And you make a point, this is important for people to, who are living in the 21st century

00:08:44.220 to do, because as you said, we're just, we have a glut of information and a lot of, you

00:08:49.820 know, books have been written about sort of like personal finance management, personal time

00:08:54.300 management, but you say now is the time people need to start thinking about personal information

00:08:58.420 management.

00:09:00.400 Exactly. Yes. Yeah. You know, you look at the past few decades of history, it's like one by

00:09:06.520 one, these practices have gone from, you know, only for companies or organizations or only for the

00:09:13.200 elite and kind of been democratized and found their way onto the individual level. The ones you

00:09:19.020 mentioned, you know, finance used to be for the CFO of a huge corporation. Now each of us has

00:09:24.700 personal finance. We have the tools and the knowledge to think about our personal investment

00:09:29.880 portfolio and our personal spending, the personal computer, right? Computers used to be,

00:09:34.800 used to take up a whole room and could only be, the only people who could afford them were huge

00:09:39.540 companies. Now each of us has practically a supercomputer on our desk and in our pockets.

00:09:45.400 So it's like one by one, these superpowers have been democratized. I think it's time for personal

00:09:51.260 knowledge management. You know, in the past knowledge management was something huge companies

00:09:55.340 would think about. How do we, you know, share knowledge across our divisions, across our teams.

00:09:59.460 But now one individual has so, has access to so much information, so much knowledge that we can,

00:10:08.600 and I think must, start to think about how does information get shared across my life?

00:10:14.180 How does knowledge get preserved and cultivated and distilled, you know, through the future?

00:10:18.720 It's a very new idea to people, but I think it's a massive years-long trend that we're all going to be

00:10:24.040 affected by. I can look at my own life where me neglecting my personal information management

00:10:30.720 caused me just a bunch of unnecessary headaches and caused me to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel.

00:10:37.820 I mean, here's an example I thought of when you were talking and describing that, you know,

00:10:41.380 sometimes my extended family gets together for a birthday and we order barbecue. But every time we

00:10:48.280 do that, we have to figure out, well, you know, how much food do we need? Because if we would just

00:10:54.840 would have saved what we ordered the previous time, because I mean, it's the same number of people

00:10:59.020 that come every single time. I wouldn't be spending an hour trying to figure out, well, how many ribs

00:11:04.240 do we need? How many, you know, orders of potato salad do we need? I know that's a trivial example,

00:11:10.260 but I think it highlights that if you have a way to manage your information, it can make your life

00:11:16.440 a whole lot easier. No, I love that example. These are some of my favorite examples.

00:11:22.260 You know, I have a similar one. One of my kind of oldest and most used notes is a packing list for

00:11:27.240 travel. And it's kind of obvious and yet unusual. Every time I go on a trip, basically I forget

00:11:33.940 something. And every time I forget something, I go, okay, good. I forgot an umbrella. Let me go get

00:11:39.060 that note. I just do a search for, you know, travel and it usually just pops up. And I just add the

00:11:44.160 item that I forgot onto the list. So over time, I am actually improving. I'm getting better at my

00:11:50.220 ability to, to pack for travel. And this is the key part without having to quote unquote, keep it in

00:11:56.780 mind, right? Like this is the key thing. You don't want to use your precious brain space for that.

00:12:01.680 You want to use an external tool. I actually think, you know, most people tend to think of these super

00:12:06.020 sophisticated, high, high and mighty uses of a second brain. I think of packing lists. I think of

00:12:11.880 grocery lists. I think of, you know, shopping lists, these mundane everyday things that you can

00:12:18.300 start there, which starts to kind of free up brain capacity, which then you can use that freed up brain

00:12:24.820 capacity on these more sophisticated, you know, use cases.

00:12:28.840 Well, with these sophisticated use cases, these are things like life projects you might have,

00:12:32.740 right? It could be, you're redesigning your house or redesigning a room. Well, you can have a

00:12:38.280 second brain place for that. You're thinking about changing careers. Well, you have, if you have all

00:12:43.700 this information that you've collected, you know, you're able to start seeing connections between

00:12:48.380 different stuff and you're able to better make decisions because you have all the information at

00:12:52.980 your fingertips. Oh man, I wish more people would understand what you just said. It is, this is kind

00:12:59.100 of the, one of the deep implications of this is it's like, you know, we are, we are one holistic

00:13:06.340 human. We tend to wear different hats. You might be, you know, I have a hat, a father and then a husband

00:13:12.380 and then a business owner and then a writer, you know, you might have a dozen or more different hats

00:13:18.100 you wear, but it's one, it's one soul. It's one human being, one psyche that is in common between all

00:13:24.740 these things. And so this often happens when people have been using their second brain for a

00:13:30.540 while, some weeks or months, they start to notice what you just said, patterns, right? They start to

00:13:35.380 notice, oh, there's a pattern across these different areas of my life, such as something that I seem to be

00:13:41.160 interested in or a question I'm, I'm passionate about answering or the same lesson or principle that

00:13:47.920 keeps popping up again and again. And if you can notice that, if you can, if you can identify it a

00:13:54.180 little bit earlier, that means you can start to act on that information. You can start to,

00:13:59.580 you know, make decisions and take actions based on that insight into yourself and save potentially

00:14:05.840 years. I mean, sometimes people spend years trying to find their life purpose or what they really want

00:14:10.980 or who they really are, which is wonderful. But I say, instead of starting with this grand, you know,

00:14:16.880 10 year plan or life goal or whatever, just start by noticing what is arising in your subconscious

00:14:23.400 through the mundane things that you notice and care about and that resonate with you on a day-to-day

00:14:29.080 level. And another thing too, the second brain does, okay. Yeah. You as a person, you're, you're

00:14:33.260 one soul, but you have these different hats you wear, but you're also, you're a temporal being and

00:14:38.880 you have different temporal parts of you, right? So there's like a future self where you read something

00:14:43.160 now when you're 30 and you're like, wow, this, this is probably won't come in handy until I'm 80.

00:14:48.020 But I like to, I like to hold onto this, right? Maybe you listen to a podcast about

00:14:51.840 end of life decisions and like how to manage your estate or whatever. Yeah. That's not going to be

00:14:56.620 useful for you too much when you're 22 and have no family, but you're like, I want to, I want to

00:15:01.060 hold onto this for my future self. Cause he might, he might want to know this.

00:15:05.180 Exactly. Exactly. You know, there, there's this bias we have as humans, which is called a novelty

00:15:10.700 bias, right? Which is we, and it's so deep in how we think and how we live in the world. It's

00:15:16.540 practically invisible. If you think about anytime you make a decision or take an action, most people,

00:15:22.960 most of the time are relying on information that they just encountered, right? Like this hour or

00:15:29.460 maybe today, or maybe in the past week. And that's completely natural. That's what's what you have top

00:15:35.420 of mind. That's what you can remember. But you know, when you go to make a decision, let's say about

00:15:39.180 your career, your business, what are the chances that the best idea, the best choice is one that

00:15:46.060 you thought of just now, just recently. So I kind of think of along the lines of what you're saying,

00:15:52.200 I think of a second brain as a system for countering novelty bias, right? It's, it's like

00:15:58.860 the antidote. I find when I'm working with my notes, I'm just as likely. And often people who work

00:16:05.240 with me point this out, they notice it. I'm just as likely to use a note, a digital note from five

00:16:10.440 years ago as one from this year. I'm just as likely to use a note, an idea from six months ago as one

00:16:15.920 from this month, which is so unusual, but that's, that's kind of what a second brain is all about.

00:16:21.500 All right. So let's start walking through the process of building and maintaining a second brain. 0.92

00:16:25.580 And I think the, the thing that people, they get hung up on, at least in my, this has been my

00:16:31.100 personal, I'm, I'm a universalizing from my personal experience. The thing that you get hung

00:16:35.780 up on is the software or apps you're going to use for your second brain. Cause you go online and you

00:16:41.640 might search like personal information management software, and you're going to see like seven

00:16:45.700 different options. Are there like, is there like one best note-taking second brain app out there,

00:16:52.100 or is it just whatever, whatever works for you? You know, there is, so is not there. So is not

00:16:59.160 one app to rule them all. And I think you're, you're completely right. The belief that there is

00:17:04.540 and the search for that one ultimate app derails people for a long time, a long, long time.

00:17:11.820 So a few things. So first, I think it's important to recognize that your second brain is not one app.

00:17:18.340 It can never be. I mean, the average person uses between one and two dozen apps,

00:17:23.820 software programs per day. Think about that. You know, some for writing Google docs, some for

00:17:29.580 reading the Kindle app or a read later app, some for storing information, some for sharing information,

00:17:35.920 social media sites, you know, editing programs, Photoshop, all these different software programs.

00:17:43.140 And to think that those are all information management apps, all of them. So to think that

00:17:47.380 you're going to replace all these highly capable specialized platforms with one is just ludicrous.

00:17:53.360 So that's the first thing that, that just that acknowledgement frees people up that they're

00:17:58.440 going to use a constellation of different apps always. But I will say there is an important place

00:18:03.920 for one app, which is your notes app, your digital notes app. This is apps like Evernote or Notion or

00:18:09.680 Obsidian or Apple notes, Google Keep, Microsoft, OneNote. It's like a, it's like a specific category.

00:18:15.680 And when it comes to choosing your digital notes app, there are a few kind of frameworks that we

00:18:20.720 can use. I actually have a three part series on my YouTube channel called how to choose your

00:18:24.740 digital notes app. And we consider, we kind of place people into four archetypes. There's kind

00:18:30.200 of like a personality quiz that people kind of fall into. You're either an architect, you're a gardener,

00:18:36.340 you're a librarian, or you're a student. And I kind of describe each one of those archetypes.

00:18:41.100 Once you have one archetype that you identify with, then the choice actually becomes quite

00:18:45.360 clear. And I recommend some, you know, a handful of very specific apps for each one.

00:18:50.180 Okay. So you, so basically you got to find the app that works for you, that suits your

00:18:53.280 personality. It's going to be different. And this, this note-taking app is where all the

00:18:58.020 stuff that you capture with these different apps you might be using, whether it's a, a read

00:19:02.200 later app highlights from your Amazon Kindle. What's great about all these apps is that they

00:19:07.380 can work together. So a highlight you make on Kindle, you can import that into Evernote

00:19:13.040 or Google Keep, for example, correct?

00:19:15.360 Exactly. That's one of the most common starting points. It's actually one of my earliest starting

00:19:19.560 points is if you read eBooks, any kind of ebook, for example, you know, Kindle books on a,

00:19:24.500 on a Kindle or like the Kindle app on iPad or iPhone. If you're reading those books, it's

00:19:29.980 so easy to just add a highlight. You know, you just put your finger down, drag it, and it

00:19:34.340 turns yellow. But a lot of people, in fact, almost no one knows that there is a simple

00:19:40.800 way to all at once on mass in a completely automated way that doesn't require any manual

00:19:47.960 work. You can import all of those highlights from all the books, all the Kindle books you've

00:19:53.580 ever read all at once to a notes app. And that way, what you're doing is you're, you're getting

00:19:58.800 that work you've done. I mean, reading a book is hard, right? And in the age of distraction

00:20:03.500 that we live in, reading a book is like an accomplishment, I think. And then you're

00:20:07.320 additionally, if you're adding highlights, it's so obvious. Why not put in an extra, you

00:20:12.560 know, 1% of work to import those into your notes app. And then you have this lifelong

00:20:17.160 record of the ideas and the quotes and the insights and the advice that you found most

00:20:22.040 valuable.

00:20:23.640 So then also when you're browsing the internet, I think I know a lot of people, they'll find

00:20:26.760 this article and like, oh, that was really good. I should remember that for later. Usually

00:20:30.680 they bookmark it, but I tend to, when I bookmark things in my browser, it just goes through

00:20:34.440 this abyss that doesn't, I'll never look at it again. But like things like get, what's

00:20:39.300 it? Pocket. Pocket is a, is a cool app you can use. It sort of creates a digital magazine

00:20:43.900 for you to go back and read through articles you wanted to check out again. And again, with

00:20:48.380 I think some of these read later apps like Pocket, you can import the articles that you

00:20:53.340 saved into your main note-taking app like Evernote.

00:20:57.840 Yeah. That's exactly right. So yeah, there's always a starting point. Some, for some people

00:21:02.160 it's, you know, highlights from eBooks, but then once you have this central repository,

00:21:07.860 the second brain, you start to realize, oh, I can do that same thing everywhere. I can pull

00:21:13.980 from many sources, as many sources as I want. And so then they start, you know, using Pocket

00:21:19.520 or Instapaper for blog posts or online articles or news articles. Then there's tools that you

00:21:25.280 can do it for YouTube videos and YouTube transcripts. Then you can do it for podcasts.

00:21:29.280 And one by one, you start realizing, oh, each of these sources of information that I consume

00:21:34.420 is a, is a source. It's an input. And by the way, no, no one company wants you to do this.

00:21:41.540 Right. I think this is the reason that I had to create a course on it and now write a book.

00:21:45.400 You know, Apple doesn't want you, or let's say Amazon doesn't want you to save your highlights

00:21:52.480 in some place that you control, that you'll always have access to no matter what Amazon does.

00:21:57.740 Right. Apple doesn't want you to do that. Facebook doesn't want you to do that. Twitter

00:22:00.880 doesn't want you to do that. So no one is making it easy because they want to keep all the data and

00:22:05.740 have it be in their proprietary system. So it's kind of like you're, you're like kind of hacking.

00:22:10.200 I mean, there's nothing illegal here. Obviously this is all, you know, completely legitimate,

00:22:14.020 but you're sort of hacking and connecting and customizing how these different apps talk to each

00:22:20.480 other, all with the goal of having your knowledge library is how I think of it. Your knowledge

00:22:25.680 collection in a place that no one can mess with it. No one can take it away from you. No one can,

00:22:31.180 can lock down access. Another really powerful capture tool is your smartphone's camera.

00:22:36.800 These things I was, I've been, I figured this stuff out whenever I'm taking pictures randomly. I just

00:22:41.240 figured out recently the iPhone, when you take a picture and there's text, like it recognizes that

00:22:46.320 it's text and it'll be like, do you want to say this as a note? And I'm like, this is voodoo stuff. 0.66

00:22:49.840 But like, that's the same thing. You can use your smartphone to take pictures and import text

00:22:53.940 to your notes. I've done this before. Like if I've been whiteboarding with a group of people,

00:22:58.040 take a picture of the whiteboard and then use that in my notes.

00:23:01.840 Exactly. I mean, the, the, I couldn't agree more. The camera on your smartphone

00:23:07.440 is probably the most effective, what I call a capture tool that has ever been invented.

00:23:13.900 I mean, it is, it is perfect. It's always on you, right? It takes no special effort to use.

00:23:20.100 All of it gets saved, which, you know, in a central place, which is your camera roll and,

00:23:24.620 you know, probably synced to Google photos or Apple iCloud or somewhere. Those photos are easily

00:23:30.580 shareable. They can be edited. As you said, there's new features coming out all the time

00:23:35.020 where it can read text, which can then be copied and pasted. I mean, it is the most, it's a,

00:23:39.980 it's an incredible era for this, this idea of knowledge capture. I think your, your camera

00:23:46.680 smartphone is the ultimate capture tool. We're going to take a quick break for your

00:23:49.660 word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So we've talked about the tools you're

00:23:58.340 going to use. You're going to have one note taking app. That's going to be sort of the central

00:24:01.560 location for your second brain. And then you can use varying different other apps to collect

00:24:07.320 information. Let's talk about the process of building your second brain. And you have this

00:24:11.800 method called code, which is an acronym and the C in code stands for capture. And we've been kind

00:24:17.540 of talking about how to capture the tools you're going to use to capture, but let's talk about this.

00:24:22.160 What sorts of things are we capturing? Like, how do we decide what we should capture? I think this,

00:24:27.240 this is another place people can get overwhelmed. They're like, well, I'm going to capture all the

00:24:30.080 things. And then your second brain becomes useless because you just have the whole universe in your

00:24:34.980 second brain. That's not useful. So how do you decide what to capture and what not to capture?

00:24:40.740 Yeah, great. So, so as we just talked about, you know, capture has become radically easier in the past

00:24:46.140 just 10 or 20 years. We capture all day long, whether we want to or not, right? Every email

00:24:52.180 which enters your inbox in a way is being captured. Every tab in your browser, every photo you take on

00:24:58.880 your smartphone, every, you know, file or PDF that you download, every bookmark that you save,

00:25:04.820 all of it is, is being captured. But then that creates a new problem, which is then what to do

00:25:10.360 with the immensity of information that you've captured. And this is where, as you said, my,

00:25:15.540 my methodology comes in. So it's code, which stands for capture, organize, distill, and express.

00:25:20.780 It's basically a workflow. Information comes in with a C, then it gets, it moves on to the next

00:25:28.340 stage, which is organize. Then once it's organized, it moves on to the next stage, which is distill.

00:25:33.460 And finally, it ends up at express, which stands for expressing those ideas or that knowledge through

00:25:39.000 your own choices, your own writing, your own speaking, your own productivity. So we can go through

00:25:45.620 those one by one if you want, but it's, it's essentially a, it's, it's a, a workflow for

00:25:49.800 turning inputs. It's kind of raw, unfinished inputs into outputs that accelerate your career

00:25:57.220 and bring your business and your life to the next level.

00:25:59.900 Okay. So yeah, I want to talk about this. So capturing, it's really easy. I think in the book

00:26:04.080 you talk about, you know, you should just, when you're first starting out with this, like capture

00:26:08.060 with abandon, like get in the habit of cap, something like that, I feel like I should

00:26:12.380 capture that. Then go ahead and capture it. It might be more than you really need, but

00:26:16.780 it's getting you, it's helping you develop that skill of capturing. But then as you do

00:26:21.480 this second brain process, this code process, you'll begin to refine, you'll be able to figure

00:26:26.020 out kind of like, well, I actually don't need to capture that. I don't need that. I mean,

00:26:29.260 you say here, like on average, you capture just, just two notes per day, right? That's it.

00:26:33.580 And I think most people will probably get to that point because you've been doing this

00:26:37.080 for, for years. So, you know, you really know what's important to you and like what, what

00:26:41.200 you need to capture and what not to capture.

00:26:43.200 I think that's exactly right. So yeah, most people go through a couple of stages. They go

00:26:47.100 through a, an information hoarding stage. It's kind of like, you know, a house hoarders.

00:26:52.640 They go a little, go a little crazy with it. They kind of capture everything and, and just

00:26:57.600 all things, which I think is actually fine. It's actually good to go through a,

00:27:03.580 a period of information gluttony because you sort of see all the possibilities, but then

00:27:09.220 most people, if they keep going quickly realize it just by seeing all the stuff that they've

00:27:15.640 accumulated, that there's really no point to that. There's really no point. If you capture

00:27:20.800 everything, you might as well capture nothing, right? If you value everything equally, then

00:27:26.280 you're really valuing nothing. What it means to, to build a second brain is to take on what

00:27:32.660 I call the mindset of a curator. So think of a curator, a curator. So let's say of a

00:27:37.380 museum is very, very picky. You don't just take up anything off the street. You, you make

00:27:43.120 cure curating choices. You're very selective, very picky, right? There's this principle that

00:27:49.220 in any set of information, the value is not evenly distributed, right? When you read a book,

00:27:56.120 the value of the information is not evenly distributed. As you listen to this podcast,

00:28:02.300 the value of what I'm saying is not evenly distributed. Some points are much, much more

00:28:07.720 valuable than others. And if you follow that principle, it tells you what to capture, right?

00:28:13.380 And, and yes, this takes practice. It takes judgment, takes wisdom, honestly, but it is a skill

00:28:18.960 and it's a skill you can get better at over time. Simply by asking yourself, the question I always ask

00:28:23.320 myself is what is the 1% of this that holds most of the value? The 1% of this book, this podcast,

00:28:30.640 this course, this life experience. And instead of trying to write down a hundred percent, which will

00:28:35.080 just, you know, create all this work in the future for me to make sense of, I just try to write down

00:28:40.260 the 1% best points. Gotcha. Okay. So that's capture. This is a skill you're going to develop. So

00:28:47.320 when you're first starting out, capture a lot. As you do this code process, you'll refine

00:28:51.300 what you capture. The next part of this code process is organize. And this is where I think a lot of

00:28:56.260 people get stuck. You know, they say, well, I got all this stuff. Now how do I organize it so I can

00:29:00.460 find it when I need it? And I've had this problem. I've tried different things where I've got these,

00:29:04.920 these phases where I'm like, I'm going to digitize all my paperwork that I have. So I've created like

00:29:10.060 this digital file cabinet. And then it's just so, I don't know how to, or I'm like, okay, do I, do I have

00:29:14.960 like a business folder? And then how do I divide the, how do I subdivide the business folder? And the, you say

00:29:19.860 that sort of old school file cabinet mentality, not particularly useful. You offer something, a rubric

00:29:26.920 for organizing that is based around action. Why is organizing around action more effective than

00:29:32.940 organizing by, you know, topics or whatever? Yeah, I think there's a lot of, in fact, this is the exact

00:29:40.200 situation that most people are in when they, when they come to me, they've captured a bunch of stuff

00:29:45.040 and it's like, now what? And the framework that I have is called PARA for how to organize us. That's

00:29:50.520 P-A-R-A. I'm a, a big fan of four letter frameworks, if you couldn't tell. And that stands for

00:29:56.500 basically the, the categories of action in your life. Every person that I've met so far has these

00:30:05.420 four things, projects, the things that they are trying to achieve or build the outcomes they're

00:30:10.720 trying to create. They have areas, areas of responsibility, things that they're responsible

00:30:15.060 for kind of more long-term over time. They have resources, useful kinds of information that they

00:30:21.100 draw on to, to both manage their areas and move forward their projects. And then they have archives.

00:30:26.620 They have stuff from the past that they want to keep around for reference, but otherwise don't want to

00:30:32.620 clutter up their space. And I think the reason PARA has been so impactful and it's definitely,

00:30:37.960 you know, the single thing that I've created that's most popular. It's the most popular

00:30:42.600 blog post on my blog. The most popular single idea is that most people try to organize information

00:30:49.780 according to subjects. And I think this comes from school and it comes from libraries, right? They

00:30:55.760 think, okay, this is, this goes under design. This goes under psychology. This goes under goals. This

00:31:01.240 goes under, I don't know, marketing. This goes under entrepreneurship. It's like they act like they are,

00:31:06.560 you know, the, you know, the, the librarian who's making the shelves in the library.

00:31:12.020 And that really doesn't work. It really doesn't work because what I'm focused on is personal

00:31:16.980 knowledge management. That personal is the key. The way that an individual should organize knowledge

00:31:23.300 is completely different from a team, a company, an organization, a library, or a government.

00:31:30.000 And the main difference is that the reason it's worth capturing information as individuals is to

00:31:35.280 advance our goals. I really think that is the main purpose. We're trying to live a better life.

00:31:41.600 We're trying to achieve certain things in our work or our business. And therefore, information,

00:31:48.000 all information should be organized according to those projects and those goals.

00:31:53.180 Okay. So give us an example of a project. I mean, this is something that's discreet. It'd be like,

00:31:57.800 I'm thinking like build a website, for example.

00:32:00.580 Yes. So I love it. Let's do a concrete example. So here's an example. Many people would come across

00:32:09.120 a quote. This is a common one. Let's say in a book, they highlight a quote and they say, this is

00:32:14.060 cool. What they will do almost in every case is save that in a folder or give it a tag that is just

00:32:22.120 quotes, right? There's like a big folder or notebook quotes. These are all my quotes. That is not what you

00:32:29.360 should do. And here's why. It doesn't really add much value to have all your quotes in one place,

00:32:36.640 right? Like, like why, why do you need dozens or hundreds of quotes in one giant repository? You

00:32:42.660 really don't. What I would have people do is at the moment that they are organizing that, that note

00:32:49.960 that has that quote, ask themselves, right? Generally, you can ask yourself one question for

00:32:55.940 every note that you take. I found that over the longterm, if I have to ask myself multiple

00:33:00.040 questions, you know, what category does this go in? What subject does it relate to? Add all these

00:33:03.960 different tags. That's not going to be sustainable. So you have one question that you can ask yourself.

00:33:08.960 And that question, in my opinion, should be, what is the project or goal that this quote is going to

00:33:14.360 help me make progress on? Right? So one of the answers might be, as you said, a website. Many websites

00:33:21.000 have quotes, quotes from, you know, customers, quotes from, you know, people from the past quotes

00:33:26.800 from, I don't know, leaders in your, in your industry. So just take that one moment and ask,

00:33:32.960 what is the project such as a website that this quote is going to be useful and put it in the folder

00:33:37.620 or add the tag for that specific project, which means later that day or week or month, when you come

00:33:44.060 to work on that project, instead of being like, oh gosh, let me think of some good ideas from nothing.

00:33:49.960 You're starting with this kind of like batch of ready-made ideas, including quotes that you've

00:33:55.060 already prepared for yourself. Gotcha. And then, oh, and then if it's, if it doesn't fit in a project,

00:33:59.880 then you'd go down that list. Okay. Well, does this belong to an area? And again, you said area that

00:34:04.800 this is just sort of a, sort of a general, it's a not general, but it's like a, it's, it's a thing

00:34:09.640 that's related to your life that you have a sort of general responsibility for. And that can change over

00:34:14.680 time, right? So you could have area, it could be like kids, could be business, it could be music.

00:34:21.140 There's no specific project assigned to it, but it's something that you're interested in or it's

00:34:24.980 relevant to you. So if it, if that quote doesn't fit in that project, be like, well, would it fit

00:34:29.260 in any of these areas and organize it there? Exactly. Yeah. So you just go down the, you know,

00:34:34.680 the, the para categories. Often you're right. Something doesn't, doesn't have a project. There's

00:34:40.680 no project. You're just kind of interested in the subject, but then I would ask, okay,

00:34:45.360 is there any kind of long-term life responsibility? And these definitely do tend to be long-term like

00:34:51.240 being a spouse is an area of responsibility, being a father, being a homeowner, some other areas of

00:34:57.760 responsibility I have are my health or my finances or my hobbies or my car or my, you know, these

00:35:06.420 different, think of it like the hats that you wear in your life. And often those have

00:35:11.080 information related to them, right? Like I know I became a homeowner a couple of years

00:35:14.800 ago. It is just staggering how much information you have to keep track of as a homeowner, right?

00:35:22.660 It's like a part-time job. There's just passwords to remember what kind of light bulb to use,

00:35:28.980 maintenance schedules, who you call when the thing breaks. It's like, it's, it's amazing. And so this

00:35:35.280 is a category of information I save all the time. You know, we just deep cleaned our rug and I put

00:35:40.880 into my notes, okay, the, this lawn, local laundromat has a, you know, six X commercial

00:35:46.300 capacity washer, right? Which took me a while to find. Now I'm going to save that in my notes

00:35:51.900 under, you know, home maintenance. So the next time that I go to deep clean our rug,

00:35:56.260 I have that information at hand.

00:35:58.900 And then resources, these are just things you want to reference in the future. So that could be like

00:36:03.400 packing list that we were talking about earlier. There's that mundane stuff, packing list, food

00:36:07.760 order list, list that you, whenever you're going on vacation, like, here are the things I got to do

00:36:12.320 before I leave on vacation. You'd put here under resources.

00:36:15.660 Exactly. Yeah. It's like a catch-all. It's almost like a miscellaneous. And I like the word resources

00:36:20.320 because it just reminds you, okay, even though this is a miscellaneous kind of other category,

00:36:25.040 you still want to save things that are going to be useful, right? Like I save stock photos. So when I go to

00:36:30.380 and make a thumbnail for a blog post, I have that ready. I save packing lists. I save ideas of Christmas

00:36:35.320 presents, you know, that I find throughout the year. So when December comes around, instead of, oh, shoot,

00:36:39.780 what do I get? So-and-so. I just go into my Christmas presents, you know, notebook, and I have all sorts of

00:36:45.560 ideas. People, my family and friends think I'm the most thoughtful gift giver, when in fact, I just have a

00:36:51.040 place where I save, you know, ideas of good Christmas gifts. Yeah, it's everything they're interested in,

00:36:57.160 everything that you're curious about, everything you're learning about, which is all important.

00:37:01.260 You just don't want it cluttering up your more actionable categories like projects and areas.

00:37:06.200 It's kind of like tucked away, kind of out of sight, out of mind, but it's there when you need it.

00:37:11.180 And then you have the archives, and this is for completed projects, or maybe there's an area of

00:37:14.580 your life that you no longer have an interest in, or it's no longer responsibility for. And that's

00:37:18.620 useful to keep because, you know, you can share that stuff. Like that can be useful for someone else.

00:37:23.600 So if someone else is doing a similar project, like, well, here's the things that I used with that

00:37:26.700 project. Or let's say, I'm thinking about this with an area. So maybe an area is father. Well,

00:37:32.120 you'll always be a father, but there's a certain point in your father career where your kids are

00:37:36.140 out on their own, and you're really, you're not thinking about baseball practice and, you know,

00:37:42.060 buying clothes for school. But you can archive that stuff because maybe your kid will want to use

00:37:47.500 that. Or maybe you've got a young mentee that could use that information.

00:37:51.300 Totally. Totally. Yeah, I think that this is the, both the amazing thing and the hard thing about

00:37:58.080 digital information is you never really have to throw anything away. Right? This is different from

00:38:04.120 like organizing your house. Like if you're, if you're familiar with the Marie Kondo, you know,

00:38:08.300 KonMari method, her method is a method for throwing things away because you have to, because physical 0.99

00:38:14.020 space is fundamentally limited. Whereas digital space is not. As fast as we accumulate information,

00:38:20.660 the storage space that we have access to on our hard drives, on external drives in the cloud is

00:38:25.860 always increasing. So you never really have to throw anything away, but that creates this problem

00:38:31.500 where just because you don't have to throw something away, our, our digital world, our digital spaces start

00:38:38.020 to fill up with so much junk that we can't even, we can't even see the forest for the trees. We can't

00:38:44.120 even, you know, wade through the chaos and complexity of all this stuff. Um, and so the archives,

00:38:49.980 I think of it like cold storage. It's like the basement that you never go into that is dark,

00:38:56.440 you know, barely visited. You still want to keep stuff, but you want it to be nowhere in your,

00:39:02.900 your space, nowhere cluttering up what you're doing. Uh, so every time, like you said, you finish

00:39:07.900 a project or you cancel it or you postpone it or an area of responsibility kind of becomes no longer

00:39:13.960 active. For example, you move out of a house or a relationship ends, or you just move on to a new

00:39:18.980 phase of life. You just get those, those folders. You don't have to do extra work. You don't definitely

00:39:24.020 don't have to organize them because they're, they've just become inactive. You just move them

00:39:28.240 on mass in one second over to the archives. Uh, and that way you always have access to anything

00:39:33.800 from the past, but you also have a clear space to be productive.

00:39:37.880 All right. So that's organize. So we've done capture, we've done organize, and it sounds like

00:39:41.700 you can capture and organize at the same time. This can be one movement. You take a picture

00:39:45.020 and then you put it into that PARA framework. Uh, the next part of code is distill. What do you

00:39:51.380 mean by, what do you mean by distill? Yeah. So this is the one that people most often miss,

00:39:56.060 right? They see capture. Okay. That makes sense. Organize. That makes sense. But then distill,

00:40:01.620 that's, that's not a word that we use, you know, commonly day to day. Um, and what it refers to is

00:40:07.960 a really critical thing when you're dealing with this volume of information, right? Like the average

00:40:14.220 person consumes over 30 gigabytes of data per day, uh, the equivalent of 174 newspapers every single

00:40:21.860 day. When you're dealing with these kinds of industrial quantities of information, if you

00:40:28.340 only collect and collect and collect, no organizing system is ever going to save you, right? Even the

00:40:35.060 best organizing system eventually will be completely overwhelmed at some stage or another. And I like

00:40:40.540 to do it after organize, you have to distill, you have to boil. What that means is you boil down the

00:40:46.520 contents of your notes to their essence. You, you decide, you distinguish between the points or the

00:40:54.180 ideas or the parts that really truly matter that are really important and interesting and surprising

00:40:59.960 and everything else that isn't. Uh, you can think of it like, like finding the signal in the noise,

00:41:04.500 finding the, the most important juice from that note. And this takes skill and it takes judgment,

00:41:10.880 but until you do, you're not really going to be able to move on to the final step, which is to take

00:41:16.400 action on those ideas. And so the distilling, this involves, you can, you can say that you saved an

00:41:21.700 article from, um, some website you read. You can go back and just bold passages that you think are,

00:41:28.000 that are important. You can highlight passages, um, that you think are really important,

00:41:32.840 but you said like the, the best thing you can do is take that article, read through it,

00:41:36.620 and then come up with an executive sum of yourself, like four bullet points that summarize

00:41:40.400 what this article is about and why it's important, why it's important to you.

00:41:43.740 Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's highlighting. Everyone knows what highlighting is. Everyone has done

00:41:48.720 highlighting. Highlighting is, is kind of in some ways the universal language of distilling,

00:41:53.380 right? When you come across, when you're reading a book or let's say a textbook in school,

00:41:57.400 you come across a highlight, whether it was made by you or someone else, you know what that means.

00:42:01.880 You know, that it means this is an especially important point. And so what I advise people to

00:42:07.260 do is get that, you know, very common practice and just apply it to digital notes. Uh, and the point

00:42:12.480 is when you come across that note in the future, like you said, let's say it's an article, even if

00:42:17.660 you've saved only the most important parts in the first place in the middle of your busy work day,

00:42:22.340 you're not going to have the time to go back and read, you know, 500 words of excerpts from this

00:42:29.120 article. You're just not, it's just not realistic. You're it. You don't have the time and it's not a

00:42:34.740 good use of your time. And so what I, the rule of thumb I use is it has to be glanceable. You have

00:42:40.580 to be able to see a note and in like five seconds, be able to grasp the gist. What is this about?

00:42:47.640 What is the main takeaway? What is the headline? If you can't do that, you're just gonna, you're not

00:42:53.000 gonna spend the time. You're going to move on. And all the benefit of that note-taking was lost.

00:42:57.780 Okay. So you've distilled it. Next part of the code process is express. What do you mean by that?

00:43:02.440 What's going on here?

00:43:04.560 Yes. So express is the final and kind of culminating step. It's the reason,

00:43:09.940 it's the reason all this is worth doing. It's the reason, you know, people ask, well, what is the,

00:43:15.120 what is the point of all this? What is the purpose? Yes, it is to offload, you know,

00:43:20.920 details from your memory. Yes, it is to have more peace of mind, not trying to keep track of

00:43:25.660 everything. Yes, it is to be more productive. But in my, in my opinion, in my experience,

00:43:31.140 that is just the starting point. The ultimate point of all this is to express yourself.

00:43:37.320 It's to express, it's, it's to take in all these ideas from the outer world. Yes. But then you combine

00:43:42.600 them with ideas and insights from your inner world. And then those merge together and get synthesized

00:43:48.560 into something much greater, which is something that you want to communicate to others, to the

00:43:53.480 world. It might be telling your story. It might be creating a product or a service. It might be the

00:43:59.820 way that you lead and manage your team. It might be the way that you communicate with your family.

00:44:05.180 Communication is, is one of the most fundamental parts of all human life. And for me, the point of

00:44:12.780 building a second brain is to do that more effectively, to express yourself more succinctly,

00:44:17.760 more powerfully, more compellingly, and with more effectiveness.

00:44:21.640 Yeah. You say this express, the goal is to create a, an intermediate packet, which is you call it as

00:44:26.580 it's a concrete individual building block that make up your work. So you can take these intermediate

00:44:32.100 packets that you've made from capturing, organizing, distilling information. And as you said, you can

00:44:36.880 take them and start playing with them, remixing them, coming in with new ideas, because now this

00:44:42.220 information is easy to retrieve, easy manipulate, now that you have it in your second brain in a distilled

00:44:49.940 format.

00:44:51.100 That's exactly right. Yeah. My, my inspiration for this was Legos. You know, most people have played

00:44:56.280 with the little plastic blocks known as Legos. And if you remember when you were a kid, you know, you'd come

00:45:03.220 upon this, this pile of Legos and you didn't know what you were going to create, right? You, in many cases,

00:45:08.400 didn't have a plan, didn't have a goal. Kids tend to not be very goal oriented. They tend to, to kind of

00:45:14.460 move toward what excites them, move toward what interests them, their, their curiosity. And we can

00:45:20.720 do that as adults too. We can, we can move and we can create our digital environment in such a way

00:45:26.640 that we can move toward what we're passionate about, what we care about. But there is something

00:45:31.640 we can do to make that much easier, which is as a kid, the more blocks that you had and the more

00:45:38.520 diverse and different and unusual, those pieces were the better, right? You, you knew that you

00:45:46.140 could create something much more interesting and exciting with a thousand blocks versus a hundred

00:45:50.260 blocks versus 10 blocks. And so I kind of see, you know, modern life is so uncertain. We don't know

00:45:58.100 where it's going to lead. We don't know what the next stage of life is going to bring. We often don't

00:46:03.280 even know the goals and the, and the interests we're going to have in the future, right? I, I don't

00:46:08.160 want to try to predict what's going to happen in the future. I just don't know. But what I do know is

00:46:13.300 what can make any future endeavor so much easier is collecting these building blocks, is collecting

00:46:20.600 these little snippets of knowledge from the stuff that I'm already consuming and already experiencing

00:46:26.120 so that when it comes time to create that website or to give that speech or to write that, you know,

00:46:31.840 essay or to make that decision, I'm never, ever, ever starting from scratch. That's what I think we

00:46:37.100 want to avoid is starting with a blank page, which is so terrifying. We want to start with this,

00:46:42.520 this batch of creative raw material that we've already collected. And it just makes you,

00:46:48.760 it makes it so you can take new things on so much more effectively and also with so much more

00:46:54.440 ease without having to kind of reinvent the wheel. Because it's on a single note storage app,

00:47:01.240 like Evernote or whatever it is you want to use. Let's say you're, you have these discrete blocks

00:47:05.960 that you've created there. And let's say you're, you're working on a project and you're like,

00:47:09.800 oh, you know, I'm looking for, I'm trying to, I want to redesign this, this bedroom. I'm just

00:47:15.560 coming up with this on the fly here. So you type, you can type in bedroom in your, your app,

00:47:20.700 your Evernote, and it's going to bring up all the notes you've collected about that involve

00:47:25.120 bedrooms. And it might not even be connected to like your actual bedroom. It might be some sort of

00:47:29.900 tangential thing related that's in another project, but you know, you wouldn't have known

00:47:33.800 that was there unless you had the ability to search for it. It's a perfect example. Yeah. Yeah.

00:47:41.500 If you just collect things that resonate with you, this is, this is how I advise people to decide.

00:47:47.220 Don't make it too analytical. Don't try to, you know, rationally deduce what should be captured.

00:47:52.760 If it moves you, if it excites you, if it surprises you, if you find yourself, your eyes kind of

00:47:59.460 widening, your heart beating faster, your breath getting deeper, like the, the body knows your body

00:48:06.720 is an information processing system and it knows subconsciously, even if you don't know consciously

00:48:12.440 when you encounter an idea or a story or whatever that is powerful, that is important for you.

00:48:18.180 If you just pay attention to those physical signals, you'll capture things that often, you know,

00:48:22.720 you're not sure why you're capturing it, but I promise you over the longterm, they're going to

00:48:26.640 be so much more interesting and valuable. Yeah. I think this is what like, this is how the,

00:48:30.340 the second brain turbocharges the commonplace books, but the commonplace book, if you wanted to find

00:48:34.660 something, you had to know where it was at, like flip through the page where that quote was

00:48:38.480 with your second brain, you just do a search and you're going to, it's going to bring it up to you

00:48:43.340 right away. Exactly. Exactly. You know, I'm a fan of paper note-taking as well. I think you can use

00:48:48.380 both, but I have a shelf here with, you know, 15 or more notebooks. If I want to know, you know,

00:48:54.460 what insight about, let's say, I don't know, resilience have I had in the past? That is a

00:48:59.940 multiple hour endeavor, uh, whereas digitally it's not. Yeah. Well, let's say you got your,

00:49:05.680 you got your second brain, you've built it, you're, you got it, you're coming up with new ideas with

00:49:10.360 these intermediate packets that you've developed because you distilled things down. Uh, how do

00:49:15.120 you maintain your second brain? Are there any maintenance routines you got to run through?

00:49:19.300 So that's always in tip top shape. Yeah, that's a great question. Um, the one thing that I do really

00:49:25.440 for maintenance is just go through my inbox, which is what's called the default folder. Most notes apps

00:49:33.580 have one designated place where new notes get saved, get captured. Right. Um, and what I do is

00:49:42.840 just go through my inbox, one note at a time, making one decision about each note, which is what

00:49:47.760 project does this relate to? If none, what area does it belong in? If none, what resources are going

00:49:53.260 to takes maybe five minutes per week. Um, and that's really it. When it comes to periodic maintenance,

00:50:00.540 there are a lot of other things you can do and should do, but they're really just part of your

00:50:05.260 projects, right? Like it could be useful, for example, to the example I was using, I might want

00:50:10.800 to, let's say I'm going to write an article on resilience. I probably should go through all a

00:50:15.680 bunch of different notebooks and try to find our folders and try to find everything that I I've learned

00:50:20.200 about resilience. But I shouldn't do that just because I shouldn't do that. Like just because

00:50:25.920 I have it on a checklist, the right time to pull together all those ideas is when I'm getting ready

00:50:33.240 to execute that project. This is the thing. Once you have everything in your second brain, you can

00:50:38.260 kind of leave it kind of messy and kind of loose. And you should, because you don't know what the

00:50:42.860 future is going to bring. Wait until you're actually starting on something. Use that momentum

00:50:48.380 and that energy to kind of, it's almost like you're reorganizing your second brain a little bit,

00:50:53.540 trying to find a pattern that may, um, a pattern of notes, a collection of notes that may reside in

00:50:59.980 a bunch of different folders. Um, but it's really quite light touch and quite what I call just in

00:51:05.360 time. You take these little organizing actions just in time when you actually need that information.

00:51:11.360 I love it. Well, Tiago, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go

00:51:15.020 to learn more about the book and your work? Yes, you can find everything, including the free content

00:51:20.040 that I have, uh, our YouTube channel, our podcasts, and of course the book, which has just come out

00:51:25.780 at building a second brain.com. Fantastic. Well, Tiago Forte, thanks for his time. It's been a

00:51:30.000 pleasure. Thanks so much, Rhett. My guest today was Tiago Forte. He's the author of the book,

00:51:34.640 building a second brain. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more

00:51:38.720 information about his work at his website, fortelabs.co. Also check out our show notes at

00:51:43.060 aom.is slash second brain, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

00:51:54.640 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

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00:52:28.900 of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay.

00:52:32.960 Remind you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:52:40.420 AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - July 06, 2022

Building a Second Brain

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