Building a Second Brain, page 19
The most common misconception about organizing I see when I’m working with clients is the belief that organizing requires a heavy lift. They seem to believe that if they could just block off their calendar and get a few days free of pressing commitments, then they’d finally be able to curb the clutter and clear their head.
Even on the rare occasions I’ve seen people somehow manage to clear such a big block of time, it never seems to go very well. They tend to get bogged down in minutiae and barely make a dent in the mountain of accumulated stuff they wanted to tackle. Then they’re saddled with a feeling of guilt that they weren’t able to make progress even with so much time at their disposal. It’s not natural for humans to completely reorganize their entire world all at once. There are too many layers, too many facets of a human life, to perfectly square every little detail.
It’s crucial to stay organized, but it needs to be done a little at a time in the flow of our normal lives. It needs to be done in the in-between moments of moving your projects forward as you notice small opportunities for improvement.
Here are more specific examples of what those opportunities might look like:
You decide to visit Costa Rica on your next vacation, so you move a note with useful Spanish phrases from your “Languages” resource folder to a “Costa Rica” project folder to aid in your trip.
Your director of engineering leaves for another job and you need to hire a new one, so you move the folder you created last time for “Engineering hire” from archives to projects to guide your search.
You schedule the next in a series of workshops you are facilitating and move a PDF with workshop exercises from an area folder called “Workshops” to a new project folder for the specific workshop you’re planning.
You notice that you need to buy a new computer because your current one is getting too slow, so you move some articles you’ve saved from the “Computer research” resource folder to a new project folder called “Buy a new computer.”
All these actions take mere moments, and are made in response to changes in your priorities and goals. We should avoid doing a lot of heavy lifting up front, not only because it takes up precious time and energy, but because it locks us into a course of action that might not end up being right.
When you make your digital notes a working environment, not just a storage environment, you end up spending a lot more time there. When you spend more time there, you’ll inevitably notice many more small opportunities for change than you expect. Over time, this will gradually produce an environment far more suited to your real needs than anything you could have planned up front. Just like professional chefs keep their environment organized with small nudges and adjustments, you can use noticing habits to “organize as you go.”
Your Turn: A Perfect System You Don’t Use Isn’t Perfect
Each of the three kinds of habits I’ve introduced you to—Project Kickoff and Completion Checklists, Weekly and Monthly Reviews, and Noticing Habits—are all meant to be performed quickly in the in-between spaces of your day.
They are designed to build on activities you are probably already doing in some form, adding perhaps a little bit more structure. These shouldn’t be massive feats, requiring you to set aside huge chunks of time in total Zen-like isolation. That’s not realistic, and if you wait until those perfect conditions arrive, you’ll never take even the first step.
The checklists I’ve provided are a starting point to help you add some predictability in an environment that is often chaotic and unpredictable. They provide a regular cadence of actions for taking in, processing, and making use of digital information, without requiring you to stop everything and reorganize everything all at once.
I want to remind you that the maintenance of your Second Brain is very forgiving. Unlike a car engine, nothing will explode, break down, or burst into flames if you let things slide for days, weeks, or even months. The entire point of building a Second Brain and pouring your thoughts into it is to make those thoughts less vulnerable to the passage of time. They will be ready to pick up right where you left off when you have more time or motivation.
To make this concrete:
There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually.
There’s no need to clear your inbox frequently; unlike your to-do list, there’s no negative consequence if you miss a given note.
There’s no need to review or summarize notes on a strict timeline; we’re not trying to memorize their contents or keep them top of mind.
When organizing notes or files within PARA, it’s a very forgiving decision of where to put something, since search is so effective as a backup option.
The truth is, any system that must be perfect to be reliable is deeply flawed. A perfect system you don’t use because it’s too complicated and error prone isn’t a perfect system—it’s a fragile system that will fall apart as soon as you turn your attention elsewhere.
We have to remember that we are not building an encyclopedia of immaculately organized knowledge. We are building a working system. Both in the sense that it must work, and in the sense that it is a regular part of our everyday lives. For that reason, you should prefer a system that is imperfect, but that continues to be useful in the real conditions of your life.
I. A premortem is a useful practice, similar to a postmortem used to analyze how a project went wrong, except performed before the project starts. By asking what is likely to go wrong, you can take action to prevent it from happening in the first place.
II. Although outside the scope of this book, I’ve included my recommendations for task managers on multiple operating systems in the Second Brain Resource Guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources.
III. The book Getting Things Done, known as GTD, is a helpful counterpart to personal knowledge management, applying the same lens of “getting things off your mind” that we are using for notes to “actionable” information such as to-dos.
Chapter 10
The Path of Self-Expression
An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people.
—adrienne maree brown, writer and activist
For most of history, humanity’s challenge was how to acquire scarce information. There was hardly any good information to be found anywhere. It was locked up in difficult-to-reproduce manuscripts or stuck in the heads of scholars. Access to information was limited, but that wasn’t a problem for most people. Their lives and livelihoods didn’t require much information. Their main contribution was their physical labor, not their ideas.
That has all changed in just the last few decades. Historically, in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, we are all plugged into an infinite stream of data, updated continuously and delivered at light speed via a network of intelligent devices embedded in every corner of our lives.
Not only that, but the very nature of labor has changed. Value has shifted from the output of our muscles to the output of our brains. Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention our most valuable skill. The tools of our trade have become abstract and immaterial: the building blocks of ideas, insights, facts, frameworks, and mental models.
Now our challenge isn’t to acquire more information; as we saw in the exploration of divergence and convergence, it is to find ways to close off the stream so we can get something done. Any change in how we interact with information first requires a change in how we think. In this chapter we’ll explore what it looks like and feels like to make that shift.
Mindset Over Toolset—The Quest for the Perfect App
The majority of this book has been about acquiring a new set of tools in your relationship to information. However, over the years I’ve noticed that it is never a person’s toolset that constrains their potential, it’s their mindset.
You might have arrived at this book because you heard about this new field called personal knowledge management, or maybe when you were trying to find guidance in how to use a cool new notetaking app. Maybe you were drawn in by the promise of new techniques for enhancing your productivity, or perhaps it was the allure of a systematic approach to creativity.
Whatever you are looking for, all these paths eventually lead to the same place, if you are willing to follow: a journey of personal growth. There is no divide between our inner selves and our digital lives: the beliefs and attitudes that shape our thinking in one context inevitably show up in other contexts as well.
Underlying our struggles and challenges with productivity, creativity, and performance is our fundamental relationship to the information in our lives. That relationship was forged during your upbringing as you encountered new experiences, and was influenced by your personality, learning style, relationships, and your genes. You learned to react in a certain way when faced with new ideas. You adopted a default “blueprint” for how you treated incoming information—with anticipation, fear, excitement, self-doubt, or some complex mix of feelings that is unique to you.
That default attitude to information colors every aspect of your life. It is the lens through which you studied for classes and took tests in school. It set the stage for the kinds of jobs and careers you pursued. At this very moment, as you read these words, that default attitude is working in the background. It is telling you what to think about what you’re reading—how to interpret it, how to feel about it, and how it applies to you.
Our attitude toward information profoundly shapes how we see and understand the world and our place in it. Our success in the workforce depends on our ability to make use of information more effectively and to think better, smarter, faster. As society gets ever more complex, this emphasis on personal intelligence is only increasing. The quality of our thinking has become one of the central defining features of our identity, our reputation, and our quality of life. We are constantly advised that we need to know more to be able to achieve our goals and dreams.
What would you say if I told you that isn’t true?
The Fear Our Minds Can’t Do Enough
When it comes to accomplishing our goals, it’s not that innate intelligence isn’t valuable. I’m saying that the greater the burden you place on your biological brain to give you everything you want and need, the more it will struggle under the weight of it all. You’ll feel more stressed, anxious, like there are way too many balls in the air. The more time your brain spends striving to achieve and overcome and solve problems, the less time you have left over for imagining, creating, and simply enjoying the life you’re living. The brain can solve problems, but that isn’t its sole purpose. Your mind was meant for much more.
It is this fundamental attitude toward information that will start to change as you integrate your Second Brain into your life. You will begin to see connections you didn’t know you could make. Ideas about business, psychology, and technology will connect and spawn new revelations you’ve never consciously considered. Lessons from art, philosophy, and history will intermingle to give you epiphanies about how the world works. You will naturally start to combine these ideas to form new perspectives, new theories, and new strategies. You will be filled with a sense of awe at the elegance of the system you’ve created, and how it works in almost mysterious ways to bring to your attention the information you need.
Maybe you don’t see yourself as a writer, creator, or expert. I certainly didn’t when I first started taking notes on my health problems. Once you start seeing even your biggest ambitions in terms of the smaller chunks of information they are made up of, you’ll begin to realize that any experience or passing insight can be valuable. Your fears, doubts, mistakes, missteps, failures, and self-criticism—it’s all just information to be taken in, processed, and made sense of. All of it is part of a larger, ever-evolving whole.
A participant in one of my courses named Amelia recently told me that starting to build her Second Brain had caused her to make a 180-degree change in her relationship to the Internet. She had seen it as “sensationalistic and offensive” and, as a result, hadn’t wanted to engage with the online world at all. Once she had a place where she could curate the best of the Internet while ignoring everything that didn’t serve her, she told me she began to see it in a completely new light. Amelia is a skilled leadership coach who runs a clinic teaching leaders how to manage their nervous systems to improve their well-being and effectiveness. Imagine how many more people she can reach with her expertise now that she sees the Internet as a source of wisdom and connection, not just noise.
How does such a dramatic change happen? Amelia didn’t necessarily learn a new fact that she didn’t know before. She took on a new perspective. She chose to look at the world through a different lens—the lens of appreciation and abundance. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.
As you build a Second Brain, your biological brain will inevitably change. It will start to adapt to the presence of this new technological appendage, treating it as an extension of itself. Your mind will become calmer, knowing that every idea is being tracked. It will become more focused, knowing it can put thoughts on hold and access them later. I often hear that people start to feel a tremendous sense of conviction—for their goals, their dreams, and the things they want to change or influence in the world—because they know they have a powerful system behind them amplifying every move they make.
Giving Your First Brain a New Job
Instead of trying to optimize your mind so that it can manage every tiny detail of your life, it’s time to fire your biological brain from that job and give it a new one: as the CEO of your life, orchestrating and managing the process of turning information into results. We’re asking your biological brain to hand over the job of remembering to an external system, and by doing so, freeing it to absorb and integrate new knowledge in more creative ways.
Your Second Brain is always on, has perfect memory, and can scale to any size. The more you outsource and delegate the jobs of capturing, organizing, and distilling to technology, the more time and energy you’ll have available for the self-expression that only you can do.
Once your biology is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, you’ll be free to expand the flow of information as much as you want without drowning in it. You’ll be more balanced and peaceful, knowing you can step away from that flow at any time because it’s all being stored safely outside your head. You will be more trusting, because you’ve learned to trust a system outside yourself. It will be incredibly humbling and reassuring, in fact, that you are not solely responsible for all the remembering that needs to happen in your life. You will be more open-minded, willing to consider more unorthodox, more challenging, more unfinished ideas, because you have a plentiful supply of alternatives to choose from. You’ll want to expose yourself to more diverse perspectives, from more people, without necessarily committing to any single one. You’ll become a curator of perspectives, free to pick and choose the beliefs and concepts that serve you best in any given situation.
Delegating a job you’ve been doing for a long time is always intimidating. The voice of fear creeps up in the back of your mind: “Will there be anything left for me to do?” “Will I still be valued and needed?” We are taught that it’s better to have a secure role than risk being replaced. That it’s safer to keep your head down and not make a fuss rather than strive for something better. Emptying ourselves of our jumble of thoughts requires courage, because without our thoughts as distractions, we are left to sit with uncomfortable questions about our future and our purpose.
That is why building a Second Brain is a journey of personal growth. As your information environment changes, the way your mind operates starts to be transformed. You leave behind one identity and step into another—an identity as the orchestrator and conductor of your life, not its passenger. Any shift in identity can feel confronting and scary. You don’t know exactly who you will be and what it will be like on the other side, but if you persevere through the transition, there is always a new horizon of hope, possibility, and freedom waiting for you on the other side.
The Shift from Scarcity to Abundance
How do you know when you’ve begun making the shift to this new identity I’ve described? The biggest shift that starts to occur as soon as you start creating a Second Brain is the shift from viewing the world through the lens of scarcity to seeing it through the lens of abundance.
I see so many people trying to operate in this new world under the assumptions of the past—that information is scarce, and therefore we need to acquire and consume and hoard as much of it as possible. We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: that more is better, without limit. Through the lens of scarcity, we constantly crave more, more, more information, a response to the fear of not having enough.1 We’ve been taught that information must be jealously guarded, because someone could use it against us or steal our ideas. That our value and self-worth come from what we know and can recite on command.
As we saw in the chapter on Capturing, the inclination to amass information can become an end in itself. It is all too easy to default to collecting more and more content without regard to whether it is useful or beneficial to us. This is indiscriminate consumption of information, treating every meme and random post on social media as if it was just as important as the most profound piece of wisdom. It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.
