Building a Second Brain, page 16
The Archipelago of Ideas technique is a contemporary reinvention of the age-old practice of outlining—laying out the points you want to include up front, so that when it comes time to execute all you have to do is string them together. The note you see above is exactly what I will want in front of me when I sit down in convergence mode to finish the first draft of my article.
Creating outlines digitally instead of on paper offers multiple major advantages:
A digital outline is far more malleable and flexible—you can add bullet points and cross them off, rearrange and expand on them, add bolding and highlights, and edit them after the fact as your thinking changes.
The outline can link to more detailed content—instead of trying to cram every last point onto the same page, you can link to both your own private notes and public resources on the web, which helps avoid overloading the outline with too much detail.
The outline is interactive and multimedia—you can add not only text, but images, GIFs, videos, attachments, diagrams, checkboxes, and more.
The outline is searchable—even if it gets long, you have a powerful search feature to instantly call up any term you’re looking for.
The outline can be accessed and edited from anywhere—unlike a piece of paper in a notebook, your outline is instantaneously synced to every one of your devices, and it can be viewed, edited, and added to from anywhere.
An Archipelago of Ideas separates the two activities your brain has the most difficulty performing at the same time: choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing).
The reason it is so difficult to perform these activities simultaneously is they require different modes: selection is divergent, requiring an open state of mind that is willing to consider any possibility. Sequencing is convergent, requiring a more closed state of mind focused only on the material you already have in front of you.
The goal of an archipelago is that instead of sitting down to a blank page or screen and stressing out about where to begin, you start with a series of small stepping-stones to guide your efforts. First you select the points and ideas you want to include in your outline, and then in a separate step, you rearrange and sequence them into an order that flows logically. This makes both of those steps far more efficient, less taxing, and less vulnerable to interruption.
Instead of starting with scarcity, start with abundance—the abundance of interesting insights you’ve collected in your Second Brain.
2. The Hemingway Bridge: Use Yesterday’s Momentum Today
Ernest Hemingway was one of the most recognized and influential novelists of the twentieth century. He wrote in an economical, understated style that profoundly influenced a generation of writers and led to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Besides his prolific works, Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.” He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.IV
You can think of a Hemingway Bridge as a bridge between the islands in your Archipelago of Ideas. You may have the islands, but that is just the first step. The much more challenging work is linking them together into something that makes sense, whether it is a piece of writing, the design of an event, or a business pitch. The Hemingway Bridge is a way of making each creative leap from one island to the next less dramatic and risky: you keep some energy and imagination in reserve and use it as a launchpad for the next step in your progress.
How do you create a Hemingway Bridge? Instead of burning through every last ounce of energy at the end of a work session, reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes:
Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one.
Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect.
Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing.
Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach.
The next time you resume this endeavor, whether that’s the next day or months later, you’ll have a rich set of jumping-off points and next steps waiting for you. I often find that my subconscious mind keeps working in the background to help me improve on those thoughts. When I return to the project, I can combine the results of my past thinking with the power of a good night’s sleep and put them together into a creative breakthrough.
To take this strategy a step further, there is one more thing you can do as you wrap up the day’s work: send off your draft or beta or proposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend, family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still a work-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. The next time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input and suggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.
3. Dial Down the Scope: Ship Something Small and Concrete
A third technique I recommend for convergence I call “Dial Down the Scope.”
“Scope” is a term from project management that has been adopted by software developers, from whom I learned it while working in Silicon Valley. The scope refers to the full set of features a software program might include.
Let’s say you’re designing a fitness app. You sketch out a beautiful vision: it will have workout tracking, calorie counts, a gym finder, progress charts, and even connect you with others via a social network. It’s going to be amazing! It will transform people’s lives!
As with so many ambitious goals, once you get into the details it dawns on you just how complex these features are to build. You have to design the user interface, but also build the backend system to make it work. You have to hire customer support representatives and train them how to troubleshoot problems. You need a whole finance operation to keep track of payments and comply with regulations. Not to mention all the responsibilities of managing employees, dealing with investors, and developing a long-term strategy.
The solution that software teams landed on to deal with this kind of ballooning complexity is to “dial down the scope.” Instead of postponing the release of the app, which might prove disastrous in the face of looming competition and only delays the learning they need, the development team starts “dialing down” features as the release date approaches. The social network gets postponed to a future version. The progress charts lose their interactive features. The gym finder gets canceled completely. The first parts to be dialed down are the ones that are most difficult or expensive to build, that have the most uncertainty or risk, or that aren’t central to the purpose of the app. Like a hot-air balloon trying to take off, more and more features get thrown overboard to lighten the load and get the product off the ground. Any features that don’t make it into this version can always be released as part of future software updates.
How does this relate to our careers as knowledge workers?
We also deliver complex pieces of work under strict deadlines. We also have limited time, money, attention, and support—there are always constraints we must work within.
When the full complexity of a project starts to reveal itself, most people choose to delay it. This is true of projects at work, and even more true of side projects we take on in our spare time. We tell ourselves we just need more time, but the delay ends up creating more problems than it solves. We start to lose motivation as the time horizon stretches out longer and longer. Things get lost or go out of date. Collaborators move on, technology becomes obsolete and needs to be upgraded, and random life events never fail to interfere. Postponing our goals and desires to “later” often ends up depriving us of the very experiences we need to grow.
The problem isn’t a lack of time. It is that we forget that we have control over the scope of the project. We can “dial it down” to a more manageable size, and we must if we ever want to see it finished.
Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time. You can’t wait until everything is perfect. There will always be something missing, or something else you think you need. Dialing Down the Scope recognizes that not all the parts of a given project are equally important. By dropping or reducing or postponing the least important parts, we can unblock ourselves and move forward even when time is scarce.
Your Second Brain is a crucial part of this strategy, because you need a place to save the parts that get postponed or removed.
You might cut sentences or entire pages from an article you’re writing, or delete scenes from a video you’re making, or drop parts of a speech when you’re trying to keep within your allotted time. This is a completely normal and necessary part of any creative process.
That doesn’t mean you have to throw away those parts. One of the best uses for a Second Brain is to collect and save the scraps on the cutting-room floor in case they can be used elsewhere. A slide cut from a presentation could become a social media post. An observation cut from a report could become the basis for a conference presentation. An agenda item cut from a meeting could become the starting point for the next meeting. You never know when the rejected scraps from one project might become the perfect missing piece in another. The possibilities are endless.
Knowing that nothing I write or create truly gets lost—only saved for later use—gives me the confidence to aggressively cut my creative works down to size without fearing that I’ve wasted effort or that I’ll lose the results of my thinking forever. Knowing that I can always release a fix, update, or follow up on anything I’ve made in the past gives me the courage to share my ideas before they’re perfectly ready and before I have them all figured out. And sharing before I feel ready has completely altered the trajectory of my career.
Whatever you are building, there is a smaller, simpler version of it that would deliver much of the value in a fraction of the time. Here are some examples:
If you want to write a book, you could dial down the scope and write a series of online articles outlining your main ideas. If you don’t have time for that, you could dial it down even further and start with a social media post explaining the essence of your message.
If you want to deliver a workshop for paying clients, you could dial it down to a free workshop at a local meetup, or dial it down even further and start with a group exercise or book club for a handful of colleagues or friends.
If you’d like to make a short film, start with a YouTube video, or if that’s too intimidating, a livestream. If it’s still too much, record a rough cut on your phone and send it to a friend.
If you want to design a brand identity for a company, start with a mock-up of a single web page. Even easier, start with a few hand-drawn sketches with your ideas for a logo.
How can you know which direction to take your thinking without feedback from customers, colleagues, collaborators, or friends? And how can you collect that feedback without showing them something concrete? This is the chicken-and-egg problem of creativity: you don’t know what you should create, but you can’t discover what people want until you create something. Dialing Down the Scope is a way of short-circuiting that paradox and testing the waters with something small and concrete, while still protecting the fragile and tentative edges of your work.
Divergence and convergence are not a linear path, but a loop: once you complete one round of convergence, you can take what you’ve learned right back into a new cycle of divergence. Keep alternating back and forth, making iterations each time until it’s something you can consider “done” or “complete” and share more widely.
Divergence and Convergence in the Wild: Behind the Scenes of a Home Project
Let me share an example of one of my own projects in which I used all three of these techniques: remodeling our garage into a home office.
When we moved into our home, my wife and I soon realized we needed a better workspace. We both work from home, and the tiny extra bedroom wasn’t cutting it, especially once our son was born. We excitedly made plans to turn our garage into a home studio. The moment I created a dedicated project folder, I knew it was on.
I started by creating an Archipelago of Ideas—an outline of the main questions, considerations, desired features, and constraints I thought our project would entail. Here is the outline I came up with after fifteen minutes:
I didn’t know up front what the main headings of this document would include, but as I wrote out my thoughts they soon emerged: Intro, Cost, Ideas, Phases, Aesthetics, Zoom Setup, Equipment, and Open Questions. I did a few searches of my Second Brain for terms like “home office” and “home studio” and found several existing notes that could come in handy as well. For example, I found the notes with recommendations from a friend who had experience designing studios, which I mentioned previously; photos of a beautifully designed café in Mexico City that my wife and I loved visiting and wanted to mimic; and a note with best practices for hosting Zoom calls, such as finding the right lighting and a background that isn’t too distracting. I added links to them at the bottom of my outline as well.
Even with some existing material to work with, there were gaps in our plan. Over the next few weeks, whenever I had a free window of time, I collected and captured tidbits of content to inform our home studio remodel. I saved photos from Pinterest showing examples of home offices that I thought looked neat; notes from a conversation with a musician friend who taught me about soundproofing; and a list of local contractors a neighbor shared with me to reach out to. I even went on a late-night spree watching dozens of videos of YouTubers giving tours of their studios, taking notes on the small details of how they converted empty spaces into functional workspaces.
Between managing the business and our household, my time was incredibly scarce as we began the remodel. Whenever I could, I would highlight and distill the last few notes I’d captured and leave my future self a brief note about where I left off. I used a series of Hemingway Bridges to string together many such windows of time that otherwise wouldn’t have been of much productive use.
Finally, as all these thoughts and ideas and wishes and dreams began to add up, the project became quite a juggernaut. Before I knew it, our ambitions had expanded to knocking down walls, cutting through the roof for a skylight, laying down cable for superfast Internet, and redesigning the layout of the backyard to accommodate it all. We had diverged too far and needed to rein it in a bit.
This is where Dialing Down the Scope was essential: we identified the most outlandish of our plans and decided to save those for a later stage. I moved those ideas to their own “someday/maybe” section of my outline to revisit later. My wife and I also added several constraints to the project, such as the budget we were willing to spend, and a deadline to have the remodel done by a certain date. These constraints helped us reduce the scope of the project to something reasonable and manageable. As soon as we did, the next steps of finding a contractor and finalizing the floorplan became crystal clear.
Your Turn: Move Fast and Make Things
If you’d like to give this approach to executing projects a try, now is the perfect time.
Start by picking one project you want to move forward on. It could be one you identified in Chapter 5, when I asked you to make folders for each active project. It could alternatively be something you know you want to (or have to) get started on. The more uncertain, new, or challenging the project, the better.
Make an outline with your goals, intentions, questions, and considerations for the project. Start by writing out anything already on your mind, and then peruse your PARA categories for related notes and Intermediate Packets. These could include points or takeaways from previously created notes, inspiration from models or examples you want to borrow from, or templates you can use to follow best practices.
Here are some useful questions to ask as you conduct your search:
Is there a book or article you could extract some excerpts from as inspiration?
Are there websites that might have resources you could build upon?
Are there podcasts by experts you could subscribe to and listen to while commuting or doing household chores?
Are there relevant IPs buried in other projects you’ve worked on in the past?
Some material you find will be very succinct and highly polished, while some might be quite rough. It doesn’t matter—your only goal is to get all the potentially usable material in one place. Move all the notes and IPs you might want to use into a new project folder.
Set a timer for a fixed period of time, such as fifteen or twenty minutes, and in one sitting see if you can complete a first pass on your project using only the notes you’ve gathered in front of you. No searching online, no browsing social media, and no opening multiple browser tabs that you swear you’re going to get to eventually. Only work with what you already have. This first pass could be a plan, an agenda, a proposal, a diagram, or some other format that turns your ideas into a tangible artifact.
