In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, Brandon Laws sits down with Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. The two discuss Tiago’s innovative, time-tested method for the organization of ideas: the “second brain.” Learn how to boost your productivity and make an “external impact” in your personal life or career.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Tiago Forte, Founder of Forte Labs and Creator of “Building a Second Brain,” is an organization and productivity expert having written both books and online courses on the topic. Tiago seeks to help others revolutionize their effectiveness through knowledge management.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE BENEFITS OF A SECOND BRAIN
According to guest Tiago Forte, the “second brain” is a system that allows you to preserve and store all of your most important information — your thoughts, reflections, the things you’ve learned, information from external sources, quotes from books, highlights from articles, quotes from podcasts, images you’ve saved, bookmarks from the web, screenshots, photographs.
Simply put, your “second brain” houses any information that you not only wish to preserve but also to reflect on, process, analyze, and understand, “all for the purpose of creating some kind of external impact.” Virtually anyone can use this system, whether it’s to advance their career, start or grow a business, create content, make better decisions, or gain a greater sense of meaning and purpose.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Importance of Purpose
“There’s a big pitfall that a lot of people who enjoy organizing things can fall into, which is when you become an information collector without any particular purpose in mind. You don’t really know where it’s all going. And the problem with that is information collection can very easily turn into information hoarding. And at that point, you become like the house hoarders that you see on TV, except in a way it’s worse because you don’t have the physical limitations of the square footage of your home to reign you in. You can just buy more hard drives and pay for more cloud storage and essentially hoard information forever.”
The Tools to Use
“You could use something like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or a database, but those tools tend to be too formal. They’re too sophisticated with too many features, which just gets you caught up in which features to use. Not only that, but notes are this particular kind of way of interacting with information where they’re casual. They’re very free form. They’re very open-ended. […] You’re just noting something down, and notes apps are the perfect medium for this. They are accessible on any device. […] They’re really the digital equivalent of a journal or leather-bound notebook you would carry around with you.”
Supporting Effective Communication
“We are communicating something to someone to produce some kind of impact or some kind of result. Well, how do you get better at communicating? It’s having better inputs: better research, examples, metaphors, data points, stories, you know, all this kind of supporting material — the supporting evidence that then becomes part of your communication. That’s the CODE methodology. And by the way, that’s what links together all these tools. You’re never gonna have one app, even a digital notes app, that does everything. You’re gonna have dozens. Well, how do you use dozens of different pieces of software productively? What links them all together is this overarching step-by-step workflow that brings new ideas all the way from consumption to creation.”
Putting Your Notes Out There
“Today, we have something called the internet where you can “show your work” as often and as publicly as you want. […] And that’s really what I encourage people to do is to take notes. Yes. That private process is important, but as early and as often as you are comfortable with and as you’re willing to do, put it out there, and the feedback that you receive — even if that’s just people’s eyes lighting up or them saying, ‘Okay, I like this part, but not that part’ or telling you what’s missing — is the best learning that you can possibly have.”
Finding Your Way Back
“It’s actually become easy to save things. You can bookmark a webpage. You can save an image on your phone. You can favorite a social media post. You can highlight an ebook. […] You can move things around, but it’s the retrieval that’s really — I’d almost say in the evolution of technology in general — the bottleneck as a civilization. This is the problem we are working on. And what I would say is, first of all, there’s no one perfect ultimate solution. If there was, probably half of our jobs would be obsolete.”
Making Connections
“There’s this kind of luck that happens when you keep a collection of very succinct notes, all in one place. You start to see them juxtaposed together, or you see two notes next to each other and you notice some kind of connection or some kind of association. It’s not something you can exactly plan for, but just by keeping it all in one central place, you can explore and move through this playground of ideas in a very spontaneous, almost playful way.”
LEARN MORE
Find Tiago’s podcast, blog content, and a link to his Youtube channel by going to his website, and be sure to pick up a copy of his latest book, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential.