Cultivating Organized Thinking
What I read: The most successful people are always ‘sharpening their memory power,’ says brain expert—here’s how by Tiago Forte.
Two days ago, an email from Productivity Game arrived in my inbox. It contained a summary video about Tiago Forte’s book, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential.
Although I don’t pay attention to most productivity books these days, when I started to watch the video, it validated my own approach to moving through my day optimally by offloading and organizing a lot of what goes through my brain to a repository. Forte’s process isn’t exactly like mine, but it’s similar.
Forte’s article refers to his guidelines as building a second brain and uses an acronym, CODE, so we can more easily remember his capture, organize, distill, and express process.
I’ve written before about how I use an Evernote note taking app on my phone and laptop to organize my life and optimize my thinking. Check out In Praise Of Note Taking and Life Hack: Write It Down. As Forte points out, writing things down allows you to tuck them away someplace so you can think more about them later.
Forte’s CODE concept starts with capture. Capture is the word I’ve historically used for this too.
Much of what we come across is useful and interesting, like how-to articles that could make us more productive, podcasts with people sharing hard-won lessons, or inspiring photos of travel destinations we want to visit one day.
But we can’t store every bit of this information stream. Here are four criteria to help you decide exactly what nuggets of knowledge are worth keeping.
He then offers four questions to ask yourself when deciding if a bit of information is worth capturing. Does the information inspire you? Is the information useful? Is the information personal? Is the information surprising? Turns out these questions are helpful, and I plan to adopt some version of them when I’m deciding what information to capture.
When taking my own notes throughout a day, I have a single Evernote note file into which I dump everything that comes my way. Ideas. Article links. Names and contact information. Random to do items. Important dates. Everything. By not having to decide where to place the information, I reduce the cognitive load that the decision requires and I’m more likely to log the information.
The only exception I make is if information can be easily logged in its inevitable location. For example, if I can immediately enter a name and phone number in my phone contacts, I do it. Same for important dates, appointments, and reminders in my calendar. I might enter a quotation I like in the file on my laptop in which I store all my favorite quotes. But if there is any time or effort friction whatsoever for entering the information, I enter it in the single all-purpose notes file.
Next, Forte suggests you organize the information that you’ve captured. I’ve often used the words review and prioritize for this phase of the process, but perhaps organize is a better description. He suggests organizing the information by placing it in folders with folders being a high-level bucket into which you drop information that relates to the folder description.
The four folders Forte suggests are projects, areas, resources, and archives. Projects is what it sounds like, projects you’re working on currently. Areas is a word I’ve never used before, but I like it. These are areas of long-term responsibility such as managing finances. Resources is also what is sounds like, information you can usefully reference in the future. Archives is something I’ve never done, at least not consciously, but now that I’ve been exposed to the idea I probably will. These are items that you want to keep just in case you want to look at them later or use them in the future.
The archives are important because they allow you to place a folder in “cold storage.” You can access that information in the future — maybe you take on a project similar to one you previously completely — within seconds.
I tend to categorize (category being my term for folders) the information I capture under five types: body, mind, service, people, and stuff. These are the five categories under which I’ve decided all of life’s tasks, objectives, and information can be logged. That said, now that I’ve read Forte’s four folders idea, I might modify my own approach because I think it might have advantages my current system does not. We’ll see.
Distill is the word Forte uses for the third step in his process. I’ve often used the word synthesize instead. Same idea. This is essentially streamlining and connecting the dots because the various types of information you’ve captured and organized, often resulting in a more meaningful note.
Boiling things down to their essence and deleting the unnecessary fluff allows you to better decide if a distilled note or set of notes you’ve taken is useful. Forte suggests you ask yourself “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self? and that’s an insightful question that gets at the meat of deciding how captured and organized information can serve you best going forward.
That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention.
Finally, Forte points out that all of the capturing, organizing, and distilling is only relevant if you use it to express yourself by creating something useful or inspiring for yourself or others. Ultimately, sharing with others gives the entire process a larger-than-ourselves purpose, but we must not discount using this step to make ourselves better people and our lives more fulfilled.
Best of all, you’ll act more deliberately, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its potential to make you better.
So, my own capture, review, prioritize, and synthesize process is likely to be augmented with some of the things I learned in the article. I’ve added Forte’s book to my future reading list too. Whatever process you use, make it your own. That’s so important. You can read how I or people like Forte do what they do, but none of it is useful unless it works for you. Do what works. Always.
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