Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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Further, Forte’s recommendation to reuse old task bundles for current products might boost productivity more than Allen’s system. Saving task bundles from old projects and reusing them in current ones will save time that would be wasted re-doing work you’ve already done. Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now. This is what it means to “organize by actionability,” a mantra I will return to again and again throughout this book. Segala informasi, pengetahuan, refleksi, dan lain sebagainya simpan saja di dalam second brain. Taruh di situ supaya nggak menuh-menuhin otak kita yang sesungguhnya. Taruh di situ supaya memudahkan diri sendiri saat mau memakainya.

But then without realizing it, we took that same approach into adulthood. We continued to categorize our documents and files according to incredibly broad subjects like “Marketing,” “Psychology,” “Business,” or “Ideas.” I took out my journal and began to write what I was feeling and thinking. I wrote out the history of my condition, through my own lens and in my own words, for the first time. I listed which treatments had helped and which hadn’t. I wrote down what I wanted and didn’t want, what I was willing to sacrifice and what I wasn’t, and what it would mean to me to escape the world of pain I felt trapped within.Tebakan gue, habis lo baca, bisa-bisa langsung pengin praktik :D Kenapa perlu punya, atau seenggaknya mempertimbangkan untuk punya second brain? Over the years, I’ve taught thousands of people around the world how to clear the mental clutter, organize their knowledge, and capitalize on the full potential of their thinking through my popular online course Building a Second Brain. Most of us first learned how to organize information in school. We were taught to categorize our class notes, handouts, and study material by academic subject , such as Math, History, or Chemistry. This makes zero sense in your post-academic career. In the workplace, there are no classes, no tests, no grades, and no diplomas. No teacher is going to tell you what to write down for the final exam, because there isn’t one. Forte explains that in the final step of contraction, you’ll use your previous work—organizing your ESS, recording information, sorting information, and refining information—to create something new. This “something” may be a personal project like a travel itinerary or a professional project like a speech.

Every item on this list is, in fact, an area of responsibility. This might seem like semantics, but it’s anything but. I’ve learned that no matter how smart or driven you are, there are two critical things you cannot do until you break down your areas of responsibility into specific projects. 1. You Can’t Truly Know the Extent of Your Commitments Skip forward ke momen saat gue mau beneran bikin kontennya, apakah gue bisa ingat berbagai macam kutipan buku itu? Mungkin hanya samar-samar, tapi isi persis kalimatnya jelas nggak mungkin gue bisa ingat semua. That’s when second brain comes into play. Apa sih “second brain” itu? Sederhananya, “ second brain” ini adalah tempat kita menyimpan, mengatur, dan menyortir semua informasi. Second brain ini nggak hanya berguna untuk saat ini, tapi juga untuk diri kita sendiri di masa mendatang. If you find yourself getting caught up in perfection—continually looking for new information or getting overwhelmed by the number of task bundles— consider narrowing the scope of your project. While the scaled-down project might not be perfect, making it smaller will allow you to keep your momentum and ensure that the project gets done. While pausing parts of your project might seem difficult, Forte explains that it’s always possible to revisit the project at a later date to revamp it.It would need to be both flexible, adapting to your needs in different seasons of your life, but also comprehensive, so you can use it in every one of the many places where you store information, such as your computer’s file system, a cloud storage platform (e.g., Dropbox or Google Drive), or a digital notetaking app . Good things don’t come easy. You want a Digital Brain? You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves.

If you can’t afford it (and I imagine 99% of people reading this fall into that boat) – don’t worry. As I said, all the material’s online for free. I wish I’d discovered it a decade ago personally. Here are some free places to get started if you’d like:I had the misfortune of graduating into one of the worst job markets in a generation, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Faced with few employment opportunities in the United States, I decided to join the Peace Corps, an overseas volunteer program that sends Americans to serve in developing countries. I was accepted and assigned to a small school in the eastern Ukrainian countryside, where I would spend two years teaching English to students aged eight to eighteen. Incubating our ideas over time. When we go beyond relying on ideas we can only think of right now, we draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination. But most of all, the ideal organizational system would be one that leads directly to tangible benefits in your career and life. It would dramatically accelerate you toward completing the projects and achieving the goals that are most important to you.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen’s advice for outlining tasks for projects is similar to Forte’s, yet it has some key differences. Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and use any of the workflow and express techniques outlined here . See if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain. If a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note. How a Second Brain Works Tiago Forte came up with the 4-step CODE System to help you develop a Second Brain systematically. Here’s an overview of the 4 steps:Of course, given the unpredictability between IPs we’ve saved in the past the future projects, there’s no single, perfectly reliable retrieval system for finding them when you need them. To help, Forte offers four retrieval methods we can use in our notetaking apps: If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.” As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly.” These techniques are designed to help you execute your projects more effectively. They are standardized procedures to move faster, save your progress, and produce work of higher quality. 10. Schedule a Weekly Review Tiap section itu bisa gue bikin dari notes yang ada/yang gue simpan di second brain. Bakal lebih gampang karena gue udah punya banyak materialnya ( thanks to my capturing habit), udah jelas di mana tempatnya, dan project ini jadi nggak terlalu mengintimidasi karena bisa gue pecah, bongkar pasang kayak lego sampai bisa kesusun jadi final result-nya.