Building a Second Brain, page 17
You might experience some FOMO—that inner Fear of Missing Out—that pushes you to seek out yet another morsel of information somewhere out there. You will probably be tempted to go off and “do more research,” but you are not completing the entire project in one sitting. You are only creating the first iteration—a draft of your essay, a sketch of your app, a plan for your campaign. Ask yourself, “What is the smallest version of this I can produce to get useful feedback from others?”
If you find that you can’t complete the first iteration in one sitting, start by building a Hemingway Bridge to the next time you can work on it. List open questions, remaining to-dos, new avenues to explore, or people to consult. Share what you’ve produced with someone who can give you feedback while you’re away and save their comments in a new note in the same project folder. You can collect this feedback in a private conversation with a trusted colleague, or publicly on social media at full blast, or anywhere in between. Pick a venue for sharing that you feel comfortable with.
If you feel resistance to continuing with this project later, try Dialing Down the Scope. Drop the least important features, postpone the hardest decisions for later, or find someone to help you with the parts you’re least familiar with.
Throughout every step of this process, be sure to keep notes on anything you learn or discover, or any new Intermediate Packets you might want to seek out. Once your biological brain is primed by this first pass through your notes, you’ll start to notice signs and clues related to it everywhere you look. Save those clues as notes as well! Once you’re finished with your first iteration, have gathered feedback, and collected a new set of notes to work with, you’ll be ready for whatever comes next.
I. For more insight into what I learned about the creative process from my father, I made a short documentary on his work and life called Wayne Lacson Forte: On My Way To Me.
II. I first learned about the model of divergence and convergence from Design Thinking, an approach to creative problem-solving that emerged out of the Stanford Design School and was further popularized by the innovation consultancy IDEO starting in the 1980s and 1990s.
III. If your notes app syncs with your computer, this also means that you can disconnect from the Internet and still make progress, since you have all your notes saved on your hard drive.
IV. One way to think of this is to “end with the beginning in mind,” a clever rephrasing of author Stephen Covey’s classic advice to “begin with the end in mind.”
Chapter 9
The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers
Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks… It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.
—James Clear, author of Atomic Habits
Your Second Brain is a practical system for enhancing your productivity and your creativity.
While these domains are often seen as mutually exclusive opposites—one concrete and defined; the other abstract and open-ended—instead I see them as complementary. When we are organized and efficient, that creates space for creativity to arise. When we have confidence in our creative process, we don’t have to think about it as much, significantly reducing the background stress of constantly worrying whether we’re going in the right direction.
This balance between order and creativity is something that we can build into our Second Brain intentionally. Like every system, a Second Brain needs regular maintenance. There is a certain level of organization that you want to maintain in your digital world, so that when you go there to get things done, your virtual workspaces support your productivity instead of interfering with it.
“Being organized” isn’t a personality trait you’re born with, nor is it merely a matter of finding the right apps or tools. Being organized is a habit—a repeated set of actions you take as you encounter, work with, and put information to use. If we’re constantly scrambling to find our notes, drafts, brainstorms, and sources, not only do we waste precious time, but we also sabotage our momentum. At each step of CODE, there are habits that can help us be more organized so that our creativity has space to arise.
The Mise-en-Place Way to Sustainable Productivity
Consider how chefs work in a commercial kitchen. They have incredibly high demands on both the quality and quantity of their output. Every ingredient in every dish must be nearly perfect—one cold side or undercooked filet and the whole dish can be sent back, and the kitchen might have to produce hundreds of dishes on a busy night.
This fundamental tension—between quality and quantity—is a tension we share as knowledge workers. We also must produce work to an extremely high standard, and we must do it fast, continuously, all year long. We are like sprinters who are also trying to run a marathon.
Chefs have a particular system for accomplishing this daunting feat. It’s called mise en place, a culinary philosophy used in restaurants around the world. Developed in France starting in the late 1800s, mise en place is a step-by-step process for producing high-quality food efficiently. Chefs can never afford to stop the whole kitchen just so they can clean up. They learn to keep their workspace clean and organized in the flow of the meals they are preparing.
In the kitchen, this means small habits like always putting the mixing spoon in the same place so they know where to find it next time; immediately wiping a knife clean after using it so it’s ready for the next cut; or laying out the ingredients in the order they’ll be used so that they serve as placeholders.
Chefs use mise en place—a philosophy and mindset embodied in a set of practical techniques—as their “external brain.”1 It gives them a way to externalize their thinking into their environment and automate the repetitive parts of cooking so they can focus completely on the creative parts.
We have a lot to learn as knowledge workers from the system of mise en place. We likewise have to contend with a deluge of tasks, under uncertain conditions, with tight deadlines. We also receive a constant stream of inputs and requests, have too little time to process them, and face many demands requiring simultaneous attention. For us as well, the only time we have available to maintain our systems is during the execution of our regular work.
There’s no time that’s magically going to become available for you to stop everything and completely reorganize your digital world. It’s not likely that your manager is going to look kindly on you blocking off a whole day to “get caught up.” Your business won’t last long if you turn customers away because you’re “maintaining your systems.” It’s difficult to find the time to put the world on hold and catch your breath. We tend to notice our systems need maintenance only when they break down, which we then blame on our lack of self-discipline or our failure to be sufficiently productive.
Building a Second Brain is not just about downloading a new piece of software to get organized at one point in time; it is about adopting a dynamic, flexible system and set of habits to continually access what we need without throwing our environment (and mind) into chaos.
It’s not enough to have inner discipline. We also need to follow an outer discipline—a system of principles and behaviors—to channel our energies, thoughts, and emotions productively. A system that adds some structure to the constantly changing flux of information that we interact with every day.
In this chapter, I will introduce you to three kinds of habits that can be integrated into your routine to ensure your Second Brain remains functional and relevant. Each of these habits creates boundaries—of time, space, and intention—around the states of mind that you want to protect and promote in your life. These boundaries tell you what you should be focusing on, and just as importantly, what you should ignore. The three habits most important to your Second Brain include:
Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work.
Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything.
Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.
You can think of these habits as the “maintenance schedule” of your Second Brain. Just like you have a maintenance schedule for your car, which advises you to regularly change the oil, rotate the tires, and change the air filters, your Second Brain occasionally needs a tune-up to ensure it’s in good working order.
Let’s explore these habits one at a time.
The Project Checklist Habit: The Key to Starting Your Knowledge Flywheel
At the most basic level, knowledge work is about taking in information and then turning it into results. All day, every day we are consuming and then producing. You don’t need special training to perform these activities, and you certainly don’t need a Second Brain.
What most people are missing, however, is a feedback loop—a way to “recycle” the knowledge that was created as part of past efforts so it can be used in future ones as well. This is how investors think about money: they don’t get the profits from one investment and immediately spend it all. They reinvest it back into other investments, creating a flywheel so their money builds on itself over time.
This is exactly how I want you to treat your attention—as an asset that gets invested and produces a return, which in turn can be reinvested back into other ventures. This is how you can ensure your knowledge grows and compounds over time like a high-yield asset. Like investing a small amount in the stock market every month, your investments of attention can likewise compound as your knowledge grows and your ideas connect and build on each other.
If you look closely, there are two key moments in this process of recycling knowledge. Two places where the paths diverge, and you have the chance to do something different than you’ve done before.
Those two moments are when a project starts, and when it finishes. For the former, I’ll introduce you to the Project Kickoff Checklist, and for the latter, the Project Completion Checklist.
Checklist #1: Project Kickoff
Before they taxi onto the runway and take off, airline pilots run through a “preflight checklist” that tells them everything they need to check or do. It ensures they complete all the necessary steps without having to rely on their unreliable brains.
The way most people launch projects, in contrast, can be described as “haphazardly.” They might look through their existing notes and files for any information that might be relevant, or they might not. They might talk to their colleagues about any lessons from past experience, or they might not. They might create a plan to guide their progress, or they might not. The successful start of the project is more or less left to chance.
In Chapter 5 we saw how work is becoming ever more project-centric. Every goal, collaboration, or assignment we take on can be defined as a project, which gives it shape, focus, and a sense of direction. If we consider that these projects are our biggest investments of attention, it’s worth adding a little bit of structure to how we start them. This is where the Project Kickoff Checklist comes in.
Here’s my own checklist:
Capture my current thinking on the project.
Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes.
Search for related terms across all folders.
Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder.
Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.
1. Capture my current thinking on the project. I often find that the moment a project begins to form in my mind, I start to have ideas and opinions about it. I like to start by creating a blank note and doing a brainstorm of any thoughts that come to mind. This first note is then placed inside a new project folder dedicated to storing all the notes I’ll be creating related to it.
This step can and should be messy: I pour out all my random musings, potential approaches, links to other ideas or topics, or reminders of people to talk to.
Here are some questions I use to prompt this initial brainstorm:
What do I already know about this project?
What don’t I know that I need to find out?
What is my goal or intention?
Who can I talk to who might provide insights?
What can I read or listen to for relevant ideas?
Anything that comes to mind from these questions I write down in my starting note. I prefer using bullet points so the information is compact and can easily be moved around.
2. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Second, I look through any existing folders that might contain information relevant to the new project I’m starting, including related templates, outlines, and outtakes from previous projects. PARA and Progressive Summarization really come in handy here: I already have a variety of folders, each containing a curated set of notes, highlighted and summarized so I can rapidly recall what they’re about. I choose a handful of folders that seem most relevant to what I’m starting, including in projects, areas, resources, and archives. Then I quickly scan any notes inside that look interesting, taking care to keep the momentum going so I don’t get bogged down anywhere. Now is not the time to go on tangents that will only distract me from moving forward.
3. Search for related terms across all folders. The third step is to perform searches for any notes I might have missed. Sometimes there are valuable ideas buried in unexpected places, which I may not find through browsing alone.
This is where the Curator’s Perspective I used when I first captured the content really pays off—because each and every note in my Second Brain was deliberately chosen, I am able to search through a collection of exclusively high-quality notes free of fluff and filler. This is in stark contrast to searching the open Internet, which is full of distracting ads, misleading headlines, superficial content, and pointless controversy, all of which can throw me off track.
I run a series of searches for terms related to the new project, scanning the results and quickly jumping into any note that seems relevant. Progressive Summarization helps here too, enabling me to zoom into and out of notes without having to absorb their full contents.
4. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Fourth, any notes found in the previous two steps I move to the project folder, titled after the name of the new project I’m starting. Alternatively, depending on the capabilities of your notes app, you can also tag or link any relevant notes with the project, so you don’t have to move them from their original location. The important thing isn’t where a note is located, but whether you can reference it quickly while staying focused on the project at hand.
5. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project. Finally, it’s time to pull together the material I’ve gathered and create an outline (an Archipelago of Ideas) for the project. My goal is to end up not just with a loose collection of ideas. It is to formulate a logical progression of steps that make it clear what I should do next.
The form this outline takes depends on the nature of the project. If it is a piece of writing such as an essay or report, the outline might be the main points or headings I want to include in the final piece. If it is a document outlining a collaborative project with colleagues or outside contractors, the outline might include the objectives we’re working toward and tentative responsibilities for each person. If it is a trip I’m planning to take, it might be a packing list and itinerary.
The important thing to remember as you move through this checklist is that you are making a plan for how to tackle the project, not executing the project itself. You should think of this five-step checklist as a first pass, taking no more than twenty to thirty minutes. You’re only trying to get a sense of what kind of material you already have in your Second Brain. Once you do, you’ll have a much better sense of how much time it will take, which knowledge or resources you’ll need access to, and what your challenges will likely be.
I encourage you to use my kickoff checklist as a starting point and customize it over time as you understand how it fits into your own context. Depending on your profession or industry, you might need more or less formality, more or less time for a first pass, and more or fewer people involved. Here are some other options for actions you might want to include in your own version:
Answer premortemI questions: What do you want to learn? What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer? What is most likely to fail?
Communicate with stakeholders: Explain to your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., what the project is about and why it matters.
Define success criteria: What needs to happen for this project to be considered successful? What are the minimum results you need to achieve, or the “stretch goals” you’re striving for?
Have an official kickoff: Schedule check-in calls, make a budget and timeline, and write out the goals and objectives to make sure everyone is informed, aligned, and clear on what is expected of them. I find that doing an official kickoff is useful even if it’s a solo project!
Checklist #2: Project Completion
Now let’s take a look at the Project Completion Checklist, the other side of the equation.
The completion of a project is a very special time in a knowledge worker’s life because it’s one of the rare moments when something actually ends. Part of what makes modern work so challenging is that nothing ever seems to finish. It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Calls and meetings seem to stretch on forever, which means we rarely get to celebrate a clear-cut victory and start fresh. This is one of the best reasons to keep our projects small: so that we get to feel a fulfilling sense of completion as often as possible.
