Skip to content

How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain

2022-06-21 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:21 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book

In a Book Club episode on Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Ali explains why everyone doing knowledge work needs a digital commonplace book and walks through the CODE steps (capture, organise by actionability, distil, express), with his own Apple Notes practice and the slow burns that make his projects easier.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Information overwhelm and the Book Club episode on Building a Second Brain

  • ★★ One of the most annoying problems Ali faces is information overwhelm: he reads books, listens to podcasts and watches videos but does not know what to do with the information. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali has used Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain system for several years and took Forte's course of the same name. — 00:00:00 · Tiago Forte
  • ★ Ali says we apparently consume 34 gigabytes of information a day, and cites a news article saying we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers every day. (hedged) — 00:00:29
  • ★★ The easy solution to information overload is to write things down, Ali says, yet most people do not take this first step and assume they will just remember. — 00:00:29

00:00:39 — What a second brain is and why you should have one

  • ★★ An old-school way of writing things down is a commonplace book, which great artists used to note their thoughts. — 00:01:10
  • ★ Ali cites Taylor Swift writing down interesting thoughts from her day and Jerry Seinfeld writing funny ideas from the shower on paper, a standard part of many people's creative process. — 00:01:39
  • ★ Leonardo da Vinci apparently kept a commonplace book of inspiration and sketches, Ali says, which became the source of his creativity. (hedged) — 00:01:39
  • ★★ Ali carries a physical journal at all times as a commonplace book, but finds an analog system inefficient: it cannot be searched or organised, so he prefers a digital one. — 00:01:39

  • ★★★ A second brain, as Tiago Forte calls it, is a digital commonplace book: one place to write down any inspiration, from books, podcasts and friends or from your own musings. — 00:02:56 · second brain, Tiago Forte

    “this digital commonplace book is what Tiago Forte calls a second brain”

  • ★★ For songwriters, writers, YouTubers and podcasters, a second brain of captured ideas means sitting down with abundant ideas to choose from instead of wondering what to write this week (week of 20 June 2022). — 00:02:56 · second brain

  • ★★★ Tiago Forte argues, and Ali fully agrees, that basically every job today involves knowledge work, so a second brain is not only for creators. — 00:03:25 · Tiago Forte, second brain
  • ★★ Beyond Bertrand Russell's definition of a job as moving matter, Ali says, today's third kind of job moves information: inputs, processing and outputs, from medicine to banking and consulting. — 00:03:53

  • ★★★ The key insight of capture, Ali says, is David Allen's line from Getting Things Done that your brain is for having ideas, not holding them; capturing frees it for creativity and fun. — 00:04:51

    “your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them”

00:04:55 — C for capture: your brain is for having ideas; what Ali captures in Apple Notes

  • ★★ Beyond the calendar and to-do list of any productivity system, the second brain means capturing any idea that resonates with you into a note-taking app. — 00:05:26 · second brain
  • ★★★ These days Ali uses Apple Notes for most of his second brain: any thought goes straight into it. — 00:05:26 · second brain
  • ★★ Ali uses Notion for all team-based work on videos and podcasts, because it is very good for team collaboration. — 00:05:55 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali writes down anything that resonates with him: book highlights, quotes from podcasts or real life, websites and blog posts, and notes from coaching calls or lunches with authors and creative friends. — 00:05:55
  • ★★ Ali asks viewers to submit video ideas for his channel through a form linked in the description, and pays $100, in US dollars or in Bitcoin, for each idea his team turns into a video. — 00:06:24
  • ★★ On train journeys Ali opens Apple Notes on his iPad and writes down thoughts he has had in the last week. — 00:06:53 · iPad
  • ★★ Ali has learned his own perspective is valuable: writing his book, he finds forgotten thoughts saved in his notes one or two years ago that could become paragraphs or a whole chapter. — 00:06:53
  • ★★ Besides capturing manually, Ali captures automatically: over many years he has built up hundreds if not thousands of highlights from books and articles, which he revisits to apply a book's insights. — 00:07:22
  • ★★ Asked how he is so productive, Ali says a big part is a decent productivity system with a way to capture things into a digital system so his brain does not have to remember them. — 00:07:52
  • ★★ Freeing your brain from having to remember everything in your life really reduces your stress levels, Ali says. — 00:08:21
  • ★★ Following Tiago Forte, Ali says the wrong way to organise notes is by where you found them, such as book or podcast folders, which you will probably never look through. — 00:08:21 · Tiago Forte

00:08:38 — O for organise: by actionability, not by where you found it or by topic

  • ★★★ Ali has taken on Tiago Forte's advice to organise notes by actionability, by where he might use the information, and files anything relevant to his book in his book project folder. — 00:09:01 · Tiago Forte
  • ★★ Ali does not bother categorising or tagging his notes: he chucks them into the project folder, and search is now so good that you almost do not need a hierarchical organisational system. — 00:09:01
  • ★★ Interested in longevity, Ali reads David Sinclair's Lifespan and listens to Sinclair's and the Huberman Lab podcasts; his notes go into the script of a video on how he is trying to live forever, not a health folder. — 00:09:30
  • ★★ Organising notes by a project rather than by a topic makes his approach far more targeted, Ali says, even if he never ends up making the thing. — 00:09:59
  • ★★★ Ali advises students writing essays to organise notes around a question, such as the structure and function of the sodium-potassium pump, rather than a subject, so reading is targeted and builds a mental map. — 00:09:59

00:11:13 — D for distil: progressive summarization

  • ★★ Distilling, the third step, uses Tiago Forte's progressive summarization, which Ali calls highlighting on steroids, to find the essence of what was captured. — 00:11:13 · Tiago Forte

    “highlighting, but like highlighting on steroids”

  • ★★ Highlighting is not particularly effective for retention in your own brain, Ali says, but it is effective for flagging up the particularly important areas. — 00:11:26

  • ★★ Ali took Tiago Forte's really expensive Building a Second Brain online course and was a mentor on it. — 00:11:26 · Tiago Forte
  • ★★★ Express, the final step of the CODE framework, means showing your work, and Ali calls it the whole point of the second brain system. — 00:11:26 · show your work, second brain

00:11:52 — E for express: show your work

  • ★★ Hoarding ideas in a note-taking app without expressing or sharing them is of little use, Ali says; you could apply them to your own life, but sharing them is way nicer. — 00:11:52
  • ★★ Following Tiago Forte, Ali says almost every job involves expressing: a consultant's slide deck, a banker's trading strategy, a musician's, artist's or writer's work. — 00:12:21 · Tiago Forte
  • ★★ A digital second brain that brings all ideas together makes expressing them way easier, with less friction and less stress, Ali says. — 00:12:50 · second brain

00:13:16 — How the second brain has helped him: slow burns and teaching

  • ★★ Before the system, Ali treated YouTube videos and medical publications and presentations for his specialty training applications as heavy lifts to sit down and bash out. — 00:13:16
  • ★★★ Slow burns, from Tiago Forte's course and book: work on several projects in parallel, feeding information into each, so most of the work is done when you sit down to finish one. — 00:13:49 · Tiago Forte
  • ★★ Ali currently has about eight video ideas and various book chapters on a slow burn, as he once had medical projects at various stages of completion. — 00:13:49
  • ★★ The second brain helps Ali's teaching: he prepared a live talk for a hundred Part-Time YouTuber Academy students in about two minutes in an Uber, finding supporting evidence in his notes. — 00:14:18 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, second brain

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Apple Notes · Building a Second Brain · second brain · slow burns · Tiago Forte

Also: People: Andrew Huberman · Bertrand Russell · David Allen · David Sinclair · Jerry Seinfeld · Leonardo da Vinci · Taylor Swift

Projects: Book Club · Deep Dive · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Getting Things Done · Lifespan

Concepts: CODE framework · commonplace book · personal knowledge management · progressive summarization · show your work · Specialty training

Products: iPad · Notion

Also centred on Apple Notes: Why I Spent $28,402 on Apple Products This Year · My Complete Productivity System · How to Build Your Ultimate Productivity System

Also centred on Building a Second Brain: The Second Brain - A Life-Changing Productivity System

Also centred on slow burns: The Second Brain - A Life-Changing Productivity System

Replies to

Replied to by

← Previous: I Read 2,216 Resumes. Here’s How You Stand Out 🚀 · Next → The 3 Laws of Sustainable Productivity #shorts