Second Brain Utilization
Over the course of the past month, I’ve been experimenting with multiple different techniques of implementing a second brain and the process of knowledge management. I’ve had many realizations about the practical workings of how to store and share knowledge.
The second brain course created by Tiago Forte has taught me so much, in both the theoretical sides of knowledge management and the practical sides of how to organize information like in my current Evernote system which involves a certain number of projects, workflow strategies, list of top questions and ways to capture information.
I’ve learned so much throughout this month that it’s hard to condense it down into a single post. I’ve taken 27 (and counting) extensive notes and reflections on what a second brain looks like and how I can utilize it. I’ve learned some of my personal preferences on how to manage a second brain. But what works for me won’t work for everyone.
That being said, here are some of the most useful aspects of building a second brain that I’ve been putting into practice.
Progressive Summarization
This is the idea that if something’s valuable then you’ll bold the most important sentences to make it easier to skim at some point in the future. And if you skim it and find that it’s still immensely valuable then you start highlighting the most important bolded sentences throughout the note. And you progressively add more layers of summarization to allow for easy retrieval of this information in the future.
Here’s an example of what this may look like:
Projects
An important part of knowledge management is defining the projects you’re working on and separating them into separate categories so that you can focus your research on something specific and don’t feel like you’re always thinking about the big-picture concepts and never actually sharing the ideas that you’re coming across. There’s a simple process which, in this course, is called the Project List Mindsweep and it involves brain dumping all the projects that you’re working on then refining that list until you settle on 3–20+ projects that you’re focusing on. I found that being on the more minimal side of projects makes it less overwhelming and it’s super easy to keep track of all the other projects that you aspire to start at some later point in time.
This is extremely simple and doesn’t take longer than 30 minutes to an hour to perform an extensive project list mind sweep.
12 Favorite Problems
The idea behind your 12 favorite problems is that it drives the type of projects that you’re taking on and the topic and quality of information that you’re consuming and putting into your second brain. I’m still trying to clarify and get more specific on what problems really drive me more than anything so that I can use them as a compass and a system for where my curiosity is geared towards.
Let’s face it, we all have no clue where we’ll be in 5–10 years and no clue what we’ll know and what experiences we’ll have. We could go completely off the rails or we could end up being extremely well off. Formulating your 12 questions gives you life a guiding path based on what you value and what interests you. It reminds you of what you find important so that you can morph your and actions to fit these 12 guiding questions in your life. Here are some of the questions I’m currently battling with:
PARA
Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives is probably the most central idea in all of the Building a Second Brain Course. It’s the idea that the best way to separate all the information we’re intaking is into the four categories of PARA. These categories go from most actionable (projects) to least actionable (archives) and once you take the time to figure out what’s important to you in these 4 areas, or even once you start taking notes and seeing trends between the topics of all the notes you can divide your notes into these four categories. These are your stacks in Evernote. These are what mine look like and how they’re organized:
What I’ve learned is that you just have to do whatever works for you. Everyone’s system is going to be radically different in one way or another. These are the guiding outlines and principles I follow, but how you answer the 12 questions, what projects you focus on, and what notes you progressively summarize are going to be extremely different from my own and this is going to give you your own uniquely suited second brain that can be helpful to your life in your own perfectly suited way.
