Focused - 154: Building a Second Brain, with Tiago Forte

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Tiago Forte joins us to talk about his new book, building knowledge assets, and flipping the switch from consumer to creator.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How are you? I am doing well. Thank you. Today, we have a fun show planned. We've got a guest with us today. Welcome to the Focus podcast, Tiago Forte. Great to be here. Tiago is just getting ready or has just recently released a new book called Building a Second Brain.

Listeners of the show may be familiar with Tiago's courses and materials on building a second brain. And congratulations on getting your book out. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a long journey, but we're finally at the finish line. You know, I have friends that have written books and it does seem like there's a long gap between the time you finish

and the time that the book actually gets published. It's especially for those of us that work online. You know, there's a lot of time online where we're used to these very fast timelines, very fast feedback loops. Yeah. It was probably a three and a half year project from start to finish. So yeah, I had to, I had to have some patience.

Well, we are, we are fans of what you do. I mean, the idea behind the focus podcast is that it's so difficult to stay focused anymore. You know, technology, which promised us a lot in a lot of ways has become our enemy. which promised us a lot in a lot of ways has become our enemy. And one element of that is just the mere amount of content that we're all provided these days. And when I think back to earlier in my life, before the internet was really a thing, it's just shocking to me how much more content that is thrown at me. A lot of it that I willingly want these days than when I was growing up. And I think for a lot of us, we feel overwhelmed because there's just so much that all we can do is receive

and not act on anything. And it feels to me like this is one of the things you're aiming at with this whole idea of building a second brain. Absolutely. Yeah. And I like that you highlight that it's a problem of abundance. The reason the information is so overwhelming is that it's good. Not that it's bad. Much of it is just the free content we have access to is just unbelievably high quality. A lot of it, it's thoughtful, it's helpful, it's useful. And that is exactly the problem is we can't get ourselves to turn away. It's like Homer Simpson in hell where he just starts getting fed donuts and he's very happy. The donuts just keep coming, but he's not doing anything with the donuts. And I feel like for technology and the content being thrown at us, I really hope that people can find a way to find peace with it, to find some way to work with it, to make their lives better. Me too.

Yeah. Me too. I'm with you. Well, with that context, tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are. Yeah, let's see. How far should we go back? Let's start with, in the book, you have a pretty fascinating story. You can tell the short version of kind of just what highlighted the need for building a second brain in the first place for you. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good place to start. It really started with an unexplained chronic illness. I was 21, 22 years old. The world was

my oyster, had all these plans for the future, all these things I wanted to do and learn and achieve. And suddenly, while I was working at the Apple store, actually in San Diego, I remember the exact moment of the day. It was a sunny day in La Jolla. I started having this unexplained, at first, like just a little tickle, which eventually became some tension, which eventually became pain in the right side of my throat, the right side of my neck.

And, you know, the way the U S medical system is designed, you are the project manager of your, of your health, right? You get shuttled back and forth between all sorts of hospitals and providers and specialists, and they all send you forms. And sometimes you have to fill out those forms or challenge those forms or submit claims. It really is a staggering information load. And I just wasn't prepared for that at all. I had no system. I took notes in school, but that was for a test or to pass an essay. Suddenly, I now had to track tons of information in paper form, which I had to learn how to convert to digital form from dozens of different sources for a super long-term effort over years without any clear milestone. There was no deadline. There

was no test. I wish there was, but it was like, you make of this what you will. It's all up to you. You're in the driver's seat. And so that was really the origin of my need to organize information digitally. I love that because not that you had to go through the health stuff, but building a second brain for most of the focus audience, they've probably heard that term before, and they've probably seen what you've created in some way, shape, or form over the last several years. But I love the most, the books that I get the most out of are the ones that have arisen from solving a need that the person who wrote them was experiencing. And it just happens to apply to my situation as well. And I love that this whole idea arose as a way

to solve this thing. I mean, I can only put myself in your shoes at this point, but wondering what is causing this thing and thinking, am I going to have to deal with this the rest of my life? There is definitely motivation to try to figure this out. This isn't a nice to have at this point. Exactly. I don't know if I would have really gotten into this stuff if I didn't have that need. But then what happened over time is the system that I created, I started to realize was general purpose. It wasn't a patient record system. It wasn't a doctor's appointment note-taking system. It was just an organizational system for really any kind of information. And so the scope started to expand.

I thought, well, why don't I use this same approach to school? And started for the first time in my life getting great grades, graduated with honors from college, which was not going to happen anyway. And then I thought, oh, well, let's keep going. I used it to apply to the Peace Corps and go and serve for two years in Ukraine as a Peace Corps volunteer where I was an English teacher. So I basically used it for my first job. And then it just kept going. Let me come back to the US and use it to get my first professional job. Then let me use it to start a blog. Let me use it to create content. Let me use it to start a

business. And that's really led me all the way to today where I feel like I kind of have this secret. I seem to have just this thing that can be applied to almost any problem that just helps you use information in a powerful way, crucially without relying. This was the lesson I learned. And I feel fortunate to have learned it so early. I learned early on that I cannot rely on my biological capabilities for my quality of life. I cannot rely on my brain to remember, keep track of and surface what I need. I just didn't have that option because of my condition. So it's sort of like once you stop relying on your body, your physical body, the sky's the limit. It's like having, you know, first on your body, your physical body, the sky's the limit. It's like having, you know, first a prosthetic, but then you get the prosthetic and you turn it up to 11 power.

And suddenly your prosthetic is like a cognitive exoskeleton that amplifies you. Oh, it's like the human brain is a great CPU, but it's poor RAM. Yes. And we had Annie Murphy Paul on a few months ago and I feel like her show really ties with this one because you're right. I think one of the ways we deal with that problem at the start of the show of too much is, is accept that we can't keep it all in our brains and that we do need a way,

a system to track this information without having to store it all between our two ears. Yeah, it's a crucial realization. Part of the idea behind that is the idea of the commonplace book that you mentioned. Do you mind just unpacking that idea a little bit and how that can benefit people in whatever situation? Absolutely. The Commonplace book was really one of my biggest inspirations. I'm a huge fan of history.

I read a lot of history. And in fact, the book, you'd think it would be full of futuristic predictions about second brain and AI and cognitive extension. Actually, there's a lot more history. There's more history than futurism, because if you look to the past, we've been in this place in this moment many times before, which is the moment where the world is changing. Technology is transforming society. It's transforming the economy, transforming how we live. And suddenly we have an incredible tidal wave of new information and complex information, uncertain information, information that requires us to do something and to change and to make sense of. And so I really went back to the 17th, 18th centuries primarily when at that time,

it was just the super educated class, which was like this one little layer of society, right? The people who went to universities, who wrote treaties and had theories and gave speeches and were leaders, they had this thing called a commonplace book in Europe. And it was just a way and a place to make sense of information. They would, you know, write in passages, they would copy, you know, Bible verses or recipes for food, or, you know, or magical spells, or, you know, scientific observations, or things they'd collected, leaves, drawings, sketches. And that was the one place that they could decide what it meant. All the other sources of information is like received authority. The church, the state tells you this is what it means.

But the commonplace book was one of the first times where the Enlightenment really gave us permission to say, no, you're allowed to interpret what things mean for yourself. And the practical medium of that was these essentially notebooks that people kept. And we find ourselves in another period of technological change and in need for a digital commonplace book, for lack of a better term. Exactly. What I love about that is that it's a lot more accessible now. That was the time when information was scarce. Now information is abundant. So the need that they had was to collect the things that are important.

That's still the same today, but literally anybody can apply this. Exactly. That's what's really changed since last time is what is the educated class now? Everyone to varying degrees, right? Who are the creators and the creatives now? Practically everyone. When I first started working on this stuff, I thought this might be for, you know, software engineers in Silicon Valley, or maybe, you know, designer, high-end designers in New York City. But I've been surprised repeatedly how many people are struggling with information overload. You know, I've spoken to truck drivers, truck drivers, you wouldn't believe how much information truck drivers have to keep track of, right? They are knowledge workers. I think I've talked to, you know, my brother's a contractor, like a construction? They are knowledge workers, I think. I've talked to,

you know, my brother's a contractor, like a construction in construction. He has, I think, more challenging demands. You know, if I get something wrong, I just re-update the document. If he gets something wrong, they've just drilled through a concrete wall, right? And so I've come to the conclusion, I think virtually everyone in society needs something like this in some form. I agree. Everybody needs it. I'm not sure everybody is looking for it. The thing I find with interacting with our audience is that most of the people, no matter where they are in life, they could be retired or students or any profession, and between the commonalities, curiosity, people who are seeing all this stuff and do want to make sense of it and that's all you need if you bring curiosity to the game

tools like this can really up your game really make it easier absolutely one of the things that you talk about in your book is and this is later on but i think it's relevant for the discussion we're having right now about how productivity and creativity are related. And you just used a phrase where this can help you create essentially, that there's an output associated with all this information that you're collecting. And this is one of the things that kind of drives me nuts is the, because I've fallen into this myself, this belief that people have, limiting belief, that I'm just not creative because I don't draw or paint or host a podcast or have a blog, whatever. Could you speak to that a little bit?

Because I think you would probably say that everybody is creative in some way. And really, it's just the fact that you have to have this output that helps you kind of codify all this stuff and what it means in your head. that we were divided on upon like along tracks quite early on, you were sort of late labeled. You were designated as someone who was good at math. Right. And I think the year that happened, maybe like sixth, seventh grade, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, I skipped around to different schools. And so I didn't have that continuity. And I, I think I, I kind of have a, you know, a mathematical mind and analytical mind,

but because I just didn't get on that track for the rest of my academic career, I wasn't advised to really invest in those kind of classes. And then even in the workplace, when I worked at the Apple store, you have the Mac. At the time, they were called the creatives. And they always were filmmakers and audio people and drawing and all these things. And then you had the Mac geniuses who were the technical people who fixed the computers and there was no crossover. Right. And I think the, the opposite view, I really learned from my father. My father is an incredibly prolific artist. He always has been an artist since he was a little kid.

He's created thousands of paintings. A painter is like the classic, the quintessential artist. And people would come over and be like, wow, his imagination is so good. And these are so fanciful. They're so imaginative. But behind the scenes, what I saw was someone very dedicated to productivity. I mean, my dad is one of the most disciplined, principle-oriented, consistent people I know. He had his schedule. He had his routines. He had what he called his systems. He was constantly taking in notes, constantly drawing in outside sources of inspiration. It was incredibly systematic. And those two things weren't opposed. They weren't intention. They were completely complimentary. What allowed him to be efficient is what is also what allowed him to be imaginative. So I'm trying to bring that philosophy to the knowledge worker world.

Art is hard work. I want to talk about this idea of content consumption versus creation for a minute, because I do feel like there's a lot of people out there who are excited and curious and collecting a lot. And the world now makes it so easy, you know, web clipping services. And like, I know you're a big fan of Evernote and there's all these different tools out there that make it easy to create these war chests full of information. But I also think there is a line to be crossed there between collecting it

and acting upon it. And I think as I understand it, that's what really building a second brain is about is finding is crossing that Rubicon. And I was wondering if you could share with us a little bit about how people can start making progress from a consumer to creator. Yeah, that's such a great observation. I don't know if I put it in this explicit of terms, but it's absolutely the case.

I think what it is, is in the past, consumption and creating were extremely different. They were completely different worlds and there was very little overlap right you were a consumer of text and writing or you were a producer of text you were you watched Gilligan's Island or you wrote papers you know there was nothing in the middle exactly you couldn't be like oh I like this you know Gilligan's Island great let me just step into this onto the set and be an actor in this show. But I think we're getting closer and closer to where those worlds are merging. Now you can watch a TV show. You like it. You start a podcast on the TV show. And starting a podcast is as simple as downloading

Anchor, hitting record on your phone, and now you have a podcast. So it's like the two worlds that were now in opposite dimensions are now kind of merging and people have not realized this. They really have not woken up to this fact. Um, and I'm just encouraging them. It's just a little step, something like reading a book to summarizing the book, right? For me, that was one of the earliest moments where I realized, wait a minute, I read this book. I recommended it to people. Of course, no one that I recommended it to read it, who has the time to read a book? And so I realized at some point, if I want the ideas in this book to be shared with the people I care about, I need to put in some effort. I need to synthesize it, curate it, turn it into a more succinct form. And so book summaries have been, were one of the kind

of my first, the first moments where I saw, wow, I can be a creator too. Yeah. Let's talk about that for a minute. Cause I think that's super important. There's so much, you know, the information we do consume, merely reading it is not enough. You need to engage with it and you've got a whole workflow about how you do that. Absolutely. That's true. It's about learning it too. People get caught up in, oh, but I'm not a creator. I'm not an influencer, a blogger, a thought leader, but forget all that for a sec. Maybe one day you'll make some money. This will be a cool side gig or a business. Just do it for selfish reasons. Do it for your own learning it for your own learning for your own purpose to start there you know get your hands dirty with the ideas and see you know in the future it may lead

somewhere else but it doesn't have to yeah and i guess when i say creator maybe i'm using too narrow of a term because really what you're talking about is getting your own head straight about how this material impacts you and how it can make changes for you. Not necessarily putting it on a podcast or a blog, but just figuring it out what it means for you. Because reading a book, I just finished reading your book. It's very good. I've got a bunch of highlights. Now it's time for me to go through and process highlights and get my takeaways and my action items out of your book. And I think it's that extra work, which honestly doesn't take that long, but it's where all the payoff comes.

And I know you cover that quite extensively in your course too. Totally. So that is such a great point is reading the book or consuming the source is the hard part. Yeah. Right. If you read it, I don't think people understand this. If you read a book these days, you're part of like an intellectual elite, you know, you have somehow, you know, carved out focus, maybe using some of the strategies you guys talk about here, um, to fit, you know, spend five to 10 hours. It takes for, you know, an average book of dedicated focused reading time. That is an accomplishment that is hard. Once you put in that much time and energy, the effort to summarize or distill or just save those highlights is like an extra one to 5%.

It's just like a little, it's like you made the money. Now just get the money and deposit it into your checking account. It's like marching the football down to the five yard line and then leaving the field. Exactly. Not that much harder. Well, I definitely like reading books. So you guys are speaking my language. I've got a whole podcast called Bookworm where we read a different book every couple of weeks. And that's one of the things that I've learned through reading 144 of them now for that that podcast is i don't need to completely understand and apply everything that comes from every book that i read

reading a bunch of them has given me permission to decide for myself what is relevant for my situation and what I'm going to take and apply. And I would almost caution people, like if you go into a productivity book specifically and you just try to apply everything that the author is talking about just exactly as they describe it, it's almost always never going to work for you. You have to figure out how to synthesize this into a way that makes sense for the way that you work and the way that your brain works, which really is getting into the building a second brain stuff. Because one of the books we read was How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. He talks about syntopical reading, right? So I've read this book, and I understand the arguments the author is making, but I have to consider these arguments

in context of all of the other books that I've read. So it's not just this single book, and it's either going to change my life or not, and if it doesn't, it's my fault. And it's either going to change my life or not. And if it doesn't, it's my fault. It's what's the good stuff in here, spit out the sticks. And then how does it connect to everything else that is bouncing around inside of my brain? I feel like building a second brain is kind of uniquely positioned to do just that, not just with books, but with all the other information that you determine is valuable.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly right. The end of the book is just the beginning of the process of sense-making, connection-making, relating, contextualizing. And I think often people just don't even go there. They don't even, you know, reading, finishing the book is okay, you know, let me wave my hands and on to the next thing. But I think the value really comes when you do those, those subsequent steps. upgrade your job posts. For your company's next hire, you know you want them to have great problem-solving skills and think like an entrepreneur. The thing you need to help with, how to find them, easy, you need Indeed. Indeed is a hiring partner where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Instead of spending hours on multiple job sites hoping to find candidates with the right skills, you need one powerful hiring partner that can help you do it all.

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So let's talk about those steps and you can go into as much detail as you, you want here. I'm kind of assuming that you are okay talking through high level, at least some of the stuff that's in building a second brain. I'd love for you to just kind of walk people through code and then we can dig into some specific ideas there because I have thoughts on some of this stuff. I really like some of the framing and positioning you use for this, but what is the process that people follow when they engage with building a second brain? Yeah, let's do it. So I think the first thing to know is a second brain is not just a thing.

It's not just a place. It is a workflow. It is a process. It's a creative process, right? And this goes back to our discussion of, well, everyone is creative. I truly believe everyone has some element of creativity. And so the creative process is now something, not just for, you know, artists and poets and, and people like that, but for all of us. So I developed this framework called a code, which is the main chapters of the book C O D E, which describe what that workflow is and what is entailed in each step. The four letters stand for capture, organize, distill, express. And it's essentially describing inputs on one end, right? You capture inputs, you document them, you write them down in some external medium outside your head. Then the next stage is you organize them, right? You have to put them into some order, some

structure. Then once they're in a structure, you want to distill. This is the one most people miss. You have to boil them down to their essence. You have to refine them into building blocks that you can use. And then finally express, which is really a synonym for implementing, applying, using, sharing, publishing, shipping, like whatever that looks like for your work. Knowledge is meant to be shared. It's meant to be used, I think. So I really have adopted this process and teach this process where everything you learn, think about how it could make it all the way through your system and eventually out into the world where it can make some positive difference for the world or for others. So we can get into each of those, but the overall workflow is code.

Love it. And the ultimate output is you're creating something. There is an output from all this information that you've collected, which as we talked about in the previous segment, that's kind of the thing that a lot of people miss. Without the output, you're missing out on the value of the information. Absolutely. And it kind of harkens back to that quote,

you know, begin with the end in mind. Begin with the end in mind. This is really one of my top recommendations is sometimes people start at the, at the beginning of code and they try to capture everything perfectly. And then once they've perfected that, which often never happens, then they say, I'm going to move on to organize. Once I've perfected that, I'm going to move on to distill. Don't do it that way. That's, that's trying to boil the ocean right each one

of those steps is an infinity trap if you're not careful it is it's true capture specifically though i want to dig into this one because um when you were talking about limiting the things that you are going to capture i felt that i had found my knowledge soulmate. This is something I have been preaching for a long time, but you explained it a lot better than I ever did. But I feel like the term you use is curation. You are deciding for yourself which pieces of this information are not just good, but are the best ones to be plugged into this second brain system. And that means that a lot of good information is probably not going to make the cut, and that's okay. That's it.

I mean, this is really, if I could save people years of pain, because it took me years to learn this lesson, that in order to have the great ideas shine, you need to cut the good ones. Another way of saying that is ideas are dilutive, right? It's not that each idea that you or notes that you throw onto the giant pile of existing notes adds value it often it often reduces the

value it's like dilution you know it's like you have a nice drink and you're adding water or ice cubes right it's getting more and more dil. The value that the signal and the noise is becoming less concentrated. Whereas what you actually want is to have the signal and the noise become more concentrated, which often means taking things out. To torture the analogy for me, it's more like when you were a kid and you went up to the soda fountain and you put Coke and Sprite and it not only just diluted it, it just made everything taste bad. Oh, yeah. Tell me, how do you, because I think this is one of the points where a lot of people listening to the show are going to struggle with. I know I do as well. It's so tempting because the availability

of information to say like, oh, I want to do something like that. Recently, I was researching interstitial journaling for something I was writing, and it was so tempting for me to spend like two days finding anything ever written or published on this subject. And like, how do you stop? You know, where have you faced that in your life? And how do you give some tips to people so they know, you know, give them some way to govern themselves with this? Yeah, it's a great point. It's hard to know, you know, it's just, this is why this is a skill. It is a capability you have to develop.

There's not one single rule of thumb. I do give different rules of thumb that are useful for different kinds of people. For example, you know, is this useful? That is a really good filter. It's not just if it's interesting, the interesting filter is too broad, right? Especially if you're someone who's curious, you have many interests, you like to learn. If you capture what is interesting, you're just going to have a, you're just going to have be inundated with stuff. I think it's powerful to make a switch and think about information in terms of its utility.

Like what is the usefulness of this specifically? How am I going to use it to solve a problem? How am I going to use it to build something new? How am I going to use it to make a connection? Like some, some practical outcome for that. How can it serve me? Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's one. Another one is if it's personal, you know, I think we have to always keep in mind that there's this thing called Google. So anything that Google is good at finding, which tend to be kind of straightforward facts, you don't really need to save, right? You know, what is the population of Paris? Okay. Maybe that could be useful. I don't know if you're, maybe you're a demographer or something, but any minute of the day on any device, you can find that information instantaneously on Google. Whereas your photos of your trip to Paris and the museum you visited,

right, whose collection isn't online and you had to be there in person. Now that you should say, because no one else in the world has access to that specific content. One of the terms you use as you're talking about what to capture is this term resonance, which I myself have used frequently, but I've never stopped to really define it for people. And I feel like this is a really powerful idea because you shared some

great clarifying questions on whether this should end up in your second brain or not. But sometimes it doesn't meet the criteria and you just have this gut feeling that this is going to be important later. And so that is something that you should capture so you don't miss out on it. Do you mind just explaining what you mean by that term resonance and maybe give some examples from your own experience? know, build systems of knowledge management. There's a type, right? We are nerdy. We love to learn. We are detail-oriented often. We're nerds. We're big nerds. And so often I think we want this checklist. We want to follow a rigorous, super analytical, logical checklist for what to, at all stages, for what to capture, for what to organize, for what to distill, for what to express, which is wonderful. I love that. I love that nerdiness. But the thing is, there's limits to it.

The problem with analytical, logical thinking is that it's taxing. It's taxing. It takes up a lot of energy. So when it comes to capturing, capturing is only the first step. It's only getting on the train. You cannot afford to exhaust yourself on the very first leg of your journey so that you never even make it to the end. And so one of the best ways of preserving energy is by making decisions about what to capture, not based on logic, but based on essentially intuition, emotion, resonance.

I remember growing up and my father would have his artist friends over and they were academics, they were professors, that whole type. And they would often say, oh, that really resonates with me. You know, someone would talk about a show, you know, one of their drawings or paintings or talk about an idea they read and someone would go, oh, that really resonates. And as a kid, I would overhear this and be like, what does, what does that mean? Like, that doesn't make sense to me. But now I understand that what they're saying is like, it's, it's kind of like, I like that, but it's more than just liking something, right? It's like, it's kind of like, I like that, but it's more than just liking something, right? It's like feeling almost like an echo. Resonance has this feeling of an echo,

right? There's an echo in your soul. There's an echo in your mind, in your heart, or actually in your body. Part of this is getting in touch with your own physical, the physical sensations in your body that happen when you encounter an idea that is interesting. There's actually things that go on. You may not even understand why, but there is a subconscious intuition that will tell you that is interesting, valuable, rare, beautiful, true, good, important, these kinds of criteria that would be very hard to decide on analytically. Yeah. You know, we take it for granted, but it's a beautiful word. You know, when you think about it, resonance is like, you know, the vibrations of you, the emotional

vibration. I don't know. I, yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. When I hear that term resonance, kind of what I think of is, yeah, this causes something to go off inside of I feel like that's really powerful. If you understand that this is being captured not because it might be important and you don't want to miss out on something, that scarcity mindset, but this is going to be useful for me in producing something else. This is the Lego piece that I was looking for that kind of changes your interaction, your relationship with the information that's around you that you could potentially capture. It really does. It really does. Yeah. I love that financial analogy. We know about compounding, you know, the law of compounding, the magic of compounding. I think something similar happens with ideas, happens

with knowledge, that it builds on each other. It's become something more than the sum of its parts. But we have to, you know, money we have systems for. We know, okay, if I get a check, we know exactly what to do with it, you know, deposit it in the checking account. But when it comes to knowledge, it's less clear. We almost have to invent the knowledge infrastructure the same way that we have financial infrastructure. What are the accounts? What are the checks? How do you check your balance? How do you pay for things?

What are the credit cards? What are the ways by which we capitalize on the value of our ideas? sure isn't enough to to thwart our nerdy brains the next one is organized which for us geeks is like that is like uh you know that's red meat for us wait i can build a system and organize it sign me up and i feel like that's another another place it's easy to get captured how do you how do you get how do you organize and how do you not get lost in organization? It's so true. Organizing, it's like a big tar pit. The smarter you are, the more you can go down that rabbit trail.

So this is actually a technique that I teach that is the most popular thing on my blog. Most popular kind of framework that I've created, which is called PARA, P-A-R-A. And it is a radical simplification of organizing in that all information, I mean all information from any source in any format for any purpose can be placed into one of just four categories, which sounds absurd, right? You know, as I was researching recently, Aristotle back, you know, 2,500 years ago was trying to come up with the universal

categories, like a universal taxonomy for everything. And he had like 12 categories. So if Aristotle couldn't get it down further than 12, what makes us think we can get it down to four? But the key here, and this is a really big breakthrough for a lot of people, is the key to being able to do that is organizing information not by what it means or what topic it relates to or what subject. Because as soon as you do that, you start having topics and then subtopics and then subsubtopics. You start to recreate the Dewey Decimal System, which has potentially hundreds of categories. But remember, we're talking about personal knowledge management. We're not creating a library. We're not creating a research database.

We're not a university. All we're doing is organizing information for one person, and that person is us. And so there's a different principle of organization we can use, which is what's actionable. And what's actionable is the projects you're working on. That's what's most actionable. That's the P in para. Then there's your areas of responsibility. That's still actionable, but a little bit less, a little more long-term. Then there's resources, which is everything else, all the other things you're interested in, things you're curious about, things you're learning. And then there's the archives,

the last A in PARA, which is everything from the previous three categories that is in cold storage, that is on pause. And that way, the reason for all this is most of your attention goes to the top of that pyramid. Think of it like a big pyramid with projects at the top. Most of your attention should be on your project, should be on what's active and happening right now. And that's what para facilitates. It's a hierarchy, which I like because it shines a light on what you should be thinking about right now. In the book, you mentioned the mindfulness meditation practice that helped you at the end. And we've talked a lot about that on this podcast. That's one of the things that I tend to struggle with. So I recognize the importance of staying in the moment and not freaking out about things that are coming later that you can really do nothing about right now.

That's it. It's almost like an external mindfulness tool. Well, I mean, and the interesting thing about this is if you look at Aristotle's categorization, it was animal, vegetable, mineral. It was a historical or traditional categorization. You have done with Parra what I would call a contextual categorization. You're not organizing information by the subject, but in relation to the context that I, the user, am in relation to it, which is, it's really nice to take your brain out of what you would historically consider, you know, of how you would organize information and look at it in terms of your own personal context. And I felt like that's one of the big takeaways from the book is what are my personal contexts and how do I make sure information is organized to serve me in

that way rather than a historical Dewey Decimal System or something else. And I thought that was really smart. Totally. That idea of context really I learned from David Allen. David Allen with GTD had this idea that you should choose what to work on based on context. The difference is his context were when you're at your computer, when you have your phone, when you're out and about. Now with knowledge work and specifically remote work, digital work, all those contexts have collapsed. Now, if I have my phone, I can do virtually any task. And so the contexts have shifted from like physical locations to states of mind, which is really what I think of as the categories of para. When you're in a project mindset, you know, you're focused, narrowed in,

this is deep work. This is like, you're focused, narrowed in. This is deep work. This is like, you're really going to make progress. Areas are more like running a marathon, right? Your finances, your health. It's more about the consistency, the ongoing resources is like learning when you're in a learning state of mind and archives is like down in the basement, you know, in the garage, never have to see it again, unless you really want to. But with digital tools, you do have an archive, so why not? This episode of Focused is brought to you by Timing, the intelligent time tracking app

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subscribe. Our thanks to Timing for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. The next step in the process is the distill, you know, and we talked a little bit earlier about progressive summarization, but I feel like that is another really good thing you have to share with the world. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yes. Yes. Distill. So distill is a broad concept. There's many ways of distilling information, right? When you talk about an idea, you automatically distill it, right? You sort of turn it into language, which is kind of compresses those ideas in a communicable form. But of the

many different ways of distilling information, the one I find most relevant to digital note-taking in particular is, yeah, progressive summarization, which really comes from, you know where this comes from, is my time in Silicon Valley. I spent about seven, eight years there working for various companies, consulting for various companies. And I was exposed to UX design, UX design in the field. And what you quickly learn in UX design is that human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to the way that information is presented. Surprisingly so. You would think, oh, it's just information. We're just going to absorb it. No, the smallest differences in size, shape, color, the spacing of text, the typeface,

the hue of the color, the brightness of the screen can have a double digit percentage impact on whether people will pay attention to it, how much attention. I mean, you guys, I'm preaching to the choir here, right? Like you guys know, like this stuff matters. Yeah. We're genetically a lot closer to monkeys than we are computers. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So really I've just gotten that insight and applied it to notes. I think people really don't appreciate this about notes. We know that changing the headline on a webpage can have a 10, 20% impact on how many people stay on the webpage. We know this. But then we go to our notes and most of the time,

they're ugly. There's no thought put into the UX of our notes. There's no thought put into the readability, the glanceability, our ability to quickly scan a page and find what's relevant. I don't know why that is exactly, but there's very few note-taking apps that have any kind of UX thinking put into them. Yeah, it does seem like an afterthought. And it's interesting because I do agree with you that a lot of technically-minded people are going to really adopt the stuff you're talking about. But as a breed, us technically-minded people often look for notes apps that have features over UI. Yes. We want all the bells and whistles.

I mean, Mike and I are both users of Obsidian, which is pretty ugly. And, you know, and there's apps out there that have less power that look prettier. And, you know, you wonder sometimes if you're barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, absolutely. This field has been so, it's been so dominated by engineers, which is fine. Those have been, you know, the early adopters. Yeah. But there's a legacy there. This is why I bring in art so much. We need art and science. We need the full spectrum

of human styles of thinking if we're going to create a good second brain. Yeah. The progressive summarization that you talk about, that I think was the first idea I became aware of. I know you mentioned Para is the one that is most popular on your blog, but this is the one that introduced me to Tiago Forte. And I think this is pretty brilliant. And I like how you have applied this to plain text notes apps. An example of this sort of thing that I do with my book notes, I read physical books and I take notes in my note on my iPhone and I've developed over the years a whole emoji system. So if this is a quote, it gets a quote bubble. If it's an inspiring idea, it gets a little light

bulb. If it's a key idea, like there's an argument the author's making, it'll get a little key icon. And that has been helpful as I look at those mind maps and i review basically what it what was this book about and then i synthesize it down which is this whole distillation process that you're talking about but you don't have to have a mind mapping app or an emoji key in order to do this you can use the features that are built into literally any notes app you could possibly use. That's it. That's it. I've been burned so many times trying to push the technological frontier.

I've tried many times trying to use, because there's so many sophisticated software programs out there. And after kind of making that mistake so many times, I'm just in the mindset that I only want to use technology that is like 10 years old. Once it hits 10 years old, I start to become interested because that means it's totally stable. There's no surprises. It's widely supported. It's found its way into many contexts. And in this example, that means simple formatting, bolding, highlighting, underlining, italics, right? Which you can do. You mentioned note-taking apps, but even beyond, you know, Microsoft Word,

Google Docs. I use progressive summarization in Apple Keynote for my speaker's notes, right? Because I want the full text of what I want to say when I'm giving a presentation. But if I also need to just glance and get just the main point, I want that thing highlighted. So it's, it's really universal and even extends beyond digital. I mean, highlighting, highlighting, and we all know what highlighting is.

That's what we did in school. Yeah. So, yeah. Do you mind real briefly just kind of walking through, we've been talking about progressive summarization, summarization and kind of generically what it, what it is and what it does,

but I mean, just real briefly talking about like the different layers and how this could be useful. Yes, of course. It's really getting the same approach to highlighting, which is highlight the important parts, which you learn in school. But instead of treating those highlights as essentially disposable, right? For the test, for the essay, for this class, for my university degree, and then never looking at them again, you think of your highlights for anything, for a book you're reading, a website you're reviewing, an article you're reading, even a tweet storm you're reading

as those knowledge assets. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but when I make a highlight, what I'm thinking is, it's like I'm creating a time capsule. Do I want to put this sentence into a time capsule that any version of my future self can access? Which, by the way, makes you more picky, more selective, which is the main change that a lot of people need to make is to be way more selective in what they highlight. But then with digital, so with paper, you can only highlight once, right? There's only two states, highlighted or not highlighted. With digital, we can go beyond that because you want a little more, you want a few more

options than just this is important or this is not important, right? You want kind of, it's almost like a spectrum. You actually want not important, important, very important, extremely important, and absolutely crucial. You want to be able to have different stages where you can designate whether an idea is just slightly interesting or absolutely life-changing. And so what we do is we just think of the highlights in different layers. So the text, let's say, that you initially capture in your digital notes is layer one. That's like the ground floor. That's like the original text. Then you add bolding, you bold the most important parts. That's layer two. Then from within the bold parts. So you're not having to go back to the original text. You're only looking at a small number of bolded parts.

You highlight using the actual, you know, yellow formatting that most notes apps offer, truly the most important parts. And you should limit yourself to a handful of points per source. reason that's so important, going back to UX, is in the midst of the insanity of your workday, when you might have 10 or 20 seconds to find the information you need, you need to be able to open that note. Your eye needs to be able to jump straight to just a few of those main points. And then in that moment, be able to decide this is relevant to my current needs, and I'm going to use it or it's not, and I'm going to move on. That's the key. I love this idea so much. To me, it seems like you've got whatever portion you've captured of whatever book or article you were reading, that's the 80-20. And then when you select the important part from that and you bold it, That's the 80-20 of the 80-20. You just keep drilling down.

And what you end up with is whatever is in this category at the bottom, this is really, really, really great stuff. And then from there, you can just reference that stuff and get the majority of the value from it when you're trying to communicate it or teach it, which kind of gets into the last part, obviously, the express, the output, right? You don't understand something until you can explain it to a nine-year-old.

So that's kind of what this progressive summarization allows you to do. That's right. It's a very simple, kind of embarrassingly mundane thing to do. It's not that impressive, right? You're not going to win any, you know, technology innovation awards. And yet it's never failed me. You know, I never go to use the highlighter feature and there's a, you know, there's an error or I don't know, there's a software update needed. It's just, it's as reliable or even more so than the highlighter on my desk.

Yeah. I spent 30 years as a lawyer and a significant portion of that as a litigator. And I went to a seminar, it was with Jerry Spence, who's a famous, famous attorney. And the thing he said that stood out to me the most, he said, if you can't summarize your case in two sentences then you don't know your case well enough and i feel like that that's a variety of what you're talking about here i feel like what does this material mean to me it's only through this progressive summarization and actually the fact of at the end going through and putting in your own words that you actually that is the five to one yard line run that you need. Yes. And honestly, the thing that shocks me, cause I talked to people about this and I've been doing forums of this my entire career. That is not that much work. I don't understand why people, you know, don't do the last five

yards because it's like, it really is where you get the seven points, you know? So just do it. it's like, it really is where you get the seven points, you know, so just do it. Yeah. I think we're not taught. We're not taught. You know, there's no, in school, if you're taught any of this, it's just for that near term deadline. The idea of building up a lifelong knowledge asset is, I mean, this is why I've had to build my whole career, you know, popularizing this concept. Yeah. I agree. build my whole career, you know, popularizing this concept. Yeah, I agree. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Setapp, curated playlists to help you get things done. Just search and follow Setapp, S-E-T-A-P-P on Spotify. Getting things done is a challenge that everyone struggles with. Listening to music is a long-used productivity hack among creatives.

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Search and follow Setapp on Spotify and stay productive. That's S-E-T-A-P-P. Our thanks to Setapp for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. I know you don't have a lot of time for us today. One other thing in your book that really just knocked me right between the eyes is this idea of 12 interesting problems. It's a Feynman issue. But you had a thing in the book about this idea of carrying around 12 of your favorite problems.

And Feynman had used that. And it was like a background routine running all the time. And then he would see information as he's going through his code. And he would all of a sudden see a way to get enlightenment for that. The book is full of little stories like that with things that may land with you if you're listening to this and I recommend it. But man, I just wanted to thank you for sharing that story. I've read a lot of productivity stuff with you. I've never come across that story.

I immediately opened a note that said my 12 favorite problems. I only have three so far, but I'm going to be filling that out over the next month. And I can't wait to add that one to my bag of tricks. Can we hear them? Are you willing to share? Well, one of them is, so I'm at a point in my life where my children are transitioning to adulthood. And one of them is how do I manage my relationship with them now that they're adults because that's a different thing that you can do um one of them is um I have you know I'm as Max Barkey my goal is there's a different element of the technology problem and that is that um technology steals

people's attention and technology can help you recover it. And I feel like that is my main purpose. And it's like, how do I get that across? So that's another big problem. The third one is kind of personal. I don't really want to share it, but it's fun doing that. And I don't know that all 12 of them are going to be as monumental as the two I've shared, but what a great trick, man. I love that. Have you noticed,

I'm curious, just having written those down, have you started to notice little insights and ideas related to them? Yeah, I'm a week into it and it's like, I use a linked system. So now I'm finding the links back to this with all sorts of stuff I've seen. And it is just a great idea. And not only do I like the idea

of identifying problems that you're working on, but problems have a negative connotation to them normally, right? It's a problem. That's a bad thing. But Feynman calls it his favorite problems. And so he puts this positive spin to a problem, a curiosity to be solved, a challenge to be overcome. And I really like that. I just like the whole approach to that. And so I'm looking forward to finishing it. But yeah, there was a lot of stuff like this in the book, but that is one that really resonated with me. So happy.

That really makes me so gratifying. That's, that's really makes me so, so, um, it's so gratifying. That's, that's what it's about. Just these little tweaks, these little tricks to tune and tweak how your, your first brain works actually. questions because my oldest, I have five kids and my oldest is 14 and getting to the age where he needs a cell phone and he's going to be using all this technology. And I understand the dangers of social media and just how the system is kind of rigged against you in terms of your attention and intention. So I didn't realize that I had been doing this already, but when you got to that section of the book, I realized this is one of my questions is how do I teach my kids to interact with technology so that they create and not consume? I've done some things already, but that's, and I like the term favorite problem, like David was saying, because I actually enjoy thinking about this. It's, and I like the term favorite problem, like David was saying,

because I actually enjoy thinking about this. It's not like I'm going into it worried, like, oh, we need to avoid this negative outcome. Just the fact that there is now attention being shown on this dragon lurking in the darkness, that's a positive thing. And now we can avoid it and we can turn the tables and we can use it for good. It's the dragons you don't know about that are the problem. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

There is a healthy relationship to technology that is possible, I believe. Yeah. It just takes some intention and strategy and will on our end. We can't just react. We can't just wait around to see what are the tech companies going to lay on us this year. Yeah, agreed. I mean, they have an interest that is contrary to your own. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. I mean, the whole idea of managing the overwhelm and getting things out of this fire hose that can help you make your life better and help you help other people. I mean, that's why we're all here today, right? Absolutely.

Yeah. There's so much more we could talk about. So many more great ideas in the book. But we want to respect your time. So thank you so much, Tiago, for coming on the show today. If people want to find out more, where can they go? You can find out everything at buildingasecondbrain.com. It's all there. Yeah, it was great talking to you guys. Thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure. You can tell we are of like minds. We're in the same niche. And I just hope,

sounds like you guys have gotten something out of it and I hope your listeners do as well. All right. Thanks again, Tiago, for coming on the show. Everybody check out the book, Building a Second Brain. You can get it anywhere you can get books now. And I think you will enjoy the book a great deal. If you listen to our show, this is going to be great for you. So go check it out.