Building a Second Brain, page 13
Butler did it by drawing on her life experience: “The painful, horrifying, the unpleasant things that happen, affect my work more strongly than the pleasant ones. They’re more memorable and more likely to goad me into writing interesting stories.”
She used her notes and her writing to confront her demons: “The biggest obstacle I had to overcome was my own fear and self-doubt—fear that maybe my work really wasn’t good enough, maybe I wasn’t smart enough; maybe the people telling me I couldn’t make it were right.”
She used every bit of insight and detail she could muster from both her daily life and the books she immersed herself in: “Use what you have; even if it seems meager, it may be magic in your hands.” Butler found a way to express her voice and her ideas even when her circumstances made it seem impossible.
The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blank page, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth. 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.
How to Protect Your Most Precious Resource
As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource.
The creative process is fueled by attention at every step. It is the lens that allows us to make sense of what’s happening, to notice what resources we have at our disposal, and to see the contribution we can make. The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world. We have to jealously guard it like a valuable treasure.
You have twenty-four hours in a day, but how many of those hours include your highest-quality attention? Some days are so frenetic and fragmented that you might not have any at all. 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.
We’ve been taught that it’s important to work “with the end in mind.” We are told that it is our responsibility to deliver results, whether that is a finished product on store shelves, a speech delivered at an event, or a published technical document.
This is generally good advice, but there is a flaw in focusing only on the final results: all the intermediate work—the notes, the drafts, the outlines, the feedback—tends to be underappreciated and undervalued. The precious attention we invested in producing that in-between work gets thrown away, never to be used again. Because we manage most of our “work-in-process” in our head, as soon as we finish the project and step away from our desks, all that valuable knowledge we worked so hard to acquire dissolves from our memory like a sandcastle washed away by the ocean waves.
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 tomorrow? How can you package up what you know in a form that you’ll be able to revisit it again and again no matter what endeavors you take on in the future?
The final stage of the creative process, 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. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.
Intermediate Packets: The Power of Thinking Small
The idea of dividing our work into smaller units isn’t new. You’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times: if you’re stuck on a task, break it down into smaller steps.
Every profession and creative medium has its own version of “intermediate steps” on the way to full-fledged final works. For example:
“Modules” in software development
“Betas” tested by start-ups
“Sketches” in architecture
“Pilots” for television series
“Prototypes” made by engineers
“Concept cars” in auto design
“Demos” in music recording
Each of these terms is the equivalent of a “rough draft” you create as part of the process of making something new.
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 a list of action items from a conference call. Any note can potentially be used as an Intermediate Packet in some larger project or goal.
Think of a salesperson planning a new campaign for a health-branded energy drink. Sales might seem like the kind of job that is least related to “knowledge management.” Isn’t it all about making calls, having meetings, sending pitches, and closing deals?
If we take a closer look, there are many building blocks such a sales job relies on. The company brochure, the sales prospectus, the cold-calling scripts, the list of warm leads, notes from past calls with an important distributor—these are the assets that a salesperson depends on for their performance.
Like LEGO blocks, the more pieces you have, the easier it is to build something interesting. Imagine that instead of starting your next project with a blank slate, you started with a set of building blocks—research findings, web clippings, PDF highlights, book notes, back-of-the-envelope sketches—that represent your long-term effort to make sense of your field, your industry, and the world at large.
Our time and attention are scarce, and it’s time we treated the things we invest in—reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides—as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch. 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.
There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work:
Distilled notes: Books or articles you’ve read and distilled so it’s easy to get the gist of what they contain (using the Progressive Summarization technique you learned in the previous chapter, for example).
Outtakes: The material or ideas that didn’t make it into a past project but could be used in future ones.
Work-in-process: The documents, graphics, agendas, or plans you produced during past projects.
Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered as part of past projects, which could become components of something new.
Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can reference and incorporate into your work.
If you’re reading how-to articles in your free time, you can save the best tips in your notes and turn them into distilled notes for when it’s time to put them to use. If you’re writing an essay and decide to cut a paragraph, you can save those outtakes in case you ever write a follow-up. If you are in product development and create a detailed set of requirements, you can save that work-in-process as a template for future products. If you’re a management consultant, you can save the slides you presented to an executive team as a final deliverable, and reuse them for similar presentations. If you’re a lab scientist and a colleague designs the perfect lab protocol, you can reuse and improve that document for your own use (with their permission, of course).
You should always cite your sources and give credit where credit is due. A scientist doesn’t obscure her sources—she points to them so others can retrace her footsteps. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and it’s smart to build on the thinking they’ve done rather than try to reinvent the wheel.
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 you have free and choose to work on an IP that you can get done within that time, even if it’s tiny. Big projects and goals become less intimidating because you can just keep breaking them down into smaller and smaller pieces, until they fit right into the gaps in your day.
Third, Intermediate Packets increase the quality of your work by allowing you to collect feedback more often. Instead of laboring for weeks in isolation, only to present your results to your boss or client and find out you went in the wrong direction, you craft just one small building block at a time and get outside input before moving forward. You’ll find that people give much better feedback if they’re included early, and the work is clearly in progress.
Fourth, and best of all, eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. This is a magical experience that will completely change how you view productivity. The idea of starting anything from scratch will become foreign to you—why not draw on the wealth of assets you’ve invested in in the past? People will marvel at how you’re able to deliver at such a high standard so consistently. They’ll wonder how you find the time to do so much careful thinking, when in fact you’re not working harder or longer—all you’re doing is drawing on a growing library of Intermediate Packets stored in your Second Brain. If they are truly valuable assets, then they deserve to be managed, just like any other asset you possess.
Intermediate Packets are really a new lens through which you can perceive the atomic units that make up everything you do. By “thinking small,” you can focus on creating just one IP each time you sit down to work, without worrying about how viable it is or whether it will be used in the exact way you envisioned. This lens reframes creativity as an ongoing, continual cycle of delivering value in small bits, rather than a massive all-consuming endeavor that weighs on you for months.
Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output
Every time you make a sketch, design a slide, record a short video on your phone, or post on social media, you are undertaking a small creative act that produces a tangible by-product. Consider the different kinds of documents and other content that you probably regularly produce as part of your normal routines:
Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media
Journal or diary entries with your personal reflections
Highlights or underlined passages in books or articles
Messages, photos, or videos posted on social media
Slides or charts included in presentations
Diagrams, mind maps, or other visuals on paper or in apps
Recordings of meetings, interviews, talks, or presentations
Answers to common questions you receive via email
Written works, such as blog posts or white papers
Documented plans and processes such as agendas, checklists, templates, or project retrospectives
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.
Let’s look at an example: planning a large conference. If it’s a brand-new event, or you’ve never organized a conference before, it might seem like you have to produce everything from scratch. However, if you break down that mega-project into concrete chunks, suddenly the components that you’ll need become clear:
A conference agenda
A list of interesting breakout sessions
A checklist for streaming the keynote sessions
An email announcing the conference to your network
An invitation for people to be speakers or panelists
A conference website
These are some of the building blocks that you’ll need to be able to run the conference. You could put them all on your to-do list and make them yourself, but there’s a different, much faster, and more effective approach. Ask yourself: How could you acquire or assemble each of these components, instead of having to make them yourself?
The conference agenda could easily be modeled on an agenda from a different conference, with the topics and speaker names switched out. You could start compiling a list of potential breakout sessions, adding any topic suggested by others that strikes you as interesting. You might have a checklist for delivering effective keynotes left over from a live event you’ve organized in the past. Emails can draw on an archive of examples you’ve saved from other conferences you’ve attended. Screenshots of conference websites you admire are the best possible starting point for designing your own.
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.
Most professionals I work with already have and use Intermediate Packets—that’s the point! Your Second Brain is the repository of things you are already creating and using anyway. All we are doing is adding a little bit of structure and intentionality to how we use them: capturing them in one place, such as a digital notes app, so we can find them with a search; organizing them according to our projects, areas, and resources, so we have a dedicated place for each important aspect of our lives; and distilling them down to their most essential points, so they can be quickly accessed and retrieved.
Once we’ve completed these initial steps, expression transforms from a gut-wrenching, agonizing feat to a straightforward assembly of existing packets of work.
Over time, your ability to quickly tap these creative assets and combine them into something new will make all the difference in your career trajectory, business growth, and even quality of life. In the short term, it might not matter. You might be able to scramble and put together a particular document right when you need it, but there will be a slowly accumulating, invisible cost. The cost of not being quite sure whether you have what you need. The stress of wondering whether you’ve already completed a task before. There is a cost to your sleep, your peace of mind, and your time with family when the full burden of constantly coming up with good ideas rests solely on your fickle biological brain.
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.
Let’s take a closer look at the process of retrieval: How can you find and retrieve Intermediate Packets when you need them?
This isn’t a trivial question, because the connection between IPs we’ve saved in the past and future projects is often quite unpredictable. A concert poster on the side of a building you snapped a photo of might inform the shapes in a logo you’re designing. A song overheard on the subway might influence a jingle you’re writing for your child’s school play. An idea about persuasion you read in a book might become a central pillar in a health campaign you are organizing for your company.
These are some of the most valuable connections—when an idea crosses the boundaries between subjects. They can’t be planned or predicted. They can emerge only when many kinds of ideas in different shapes and sizes are mixed together.
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. You can step through them in order until you find what you’re looking for.
Those four retrieval methods are:
Search
Browsing
Tags
Serendipity
Retrieval Method #1: Search
The search function in your notes app is incredibly powerful. The same technology that has revolutionized how we navigate the web via search engines is also useful for navigating our private knowledge collections.
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.
This quick, iterative approach to searching is where notes apps shine—you don’t have to open and close individual notes one at a time as in traditional word processing. In a sense, every note in your Second Brain is already “open,” and you can view or interact with its contents with a mere click or tap.
