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

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Forte explains that the first two steps of using your ESS are to record information and sort it into relevant folders where you can utilize it (these are the condense and organize steps of Forte’s CODE system for saving information). These steps are part of the expansion mode of the creative process—they’re designed to gather relevant information that gets your creative juices flowing and sparks new ideas. Forte concludes his chapter on distillation by offering a few guidelines to help avoid the three common pitfalls when highlighting your own notes:

Ever draw a blank trying to recall a crucial detail from an article you recently skimmed? Or maybe you’ve played hide and seek with a file you were pretty sure you saved? Ring a bell? Regardless of what you create, Forte’s recommendations on how to complete a project can be broken down into three strategies. Strategy #1: Discard Useless Information and Create Task BundlesOnce a current goals subfolder has accumulated enough information to provide you with sufficient context on the topic and an idea of where to start, it’s time to sort through your material and outline all the tasks you must complete to finish the project.

As a memory aid to help you remember things (e.g. facts, important dates, project details), and retrieve them easily in the future.

There are three stages of progress Forte often observes—and even encourages—as people set out on their Second Brain journey. Those stages are remembering, connecting, and creating. A space where you can dump, categorize, pull up, and squirrel away all those fleeting thoughts and lightbulb moments.

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.”

People from all walks of life have benefited from a Second Brain

Building A Second Brain is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks.”

As months and then years passed, I began to lose hope that I would ever find relief. I started taking a powerful anti-seizure medication that temporarily relieved the pain, but there were terrible side effects, including a numbing sensation throughout my body and severe short-term memory loss. Entire trips I took, books I read, and precious experiences with loved ones during this period were wiped from my memory as if they never happened. I was a twenty-four-year-old with the mind of an eighty-year-old. Whether you’re starting a blog, a business, or even a movement, your Digital Brain is your treasure trove. 5. Sharper Thoughts, Clearer Patterns The fourth stage is evaluation: You ensure that your idea and the information informing it are valid. The fifth stage is verification: executing your idea and bringing it to life. These two stages seem to loosely correspond to the steps in Forte’s convergence mode. The evaluation stage is similar to Forte’s refine step, which is intended to help you identify valid information and discard the rest. Step five, verification, is identical to Forte’s final step, create. Set up an integration to automatically send highlights from your reading apps (such as a read later or ebook app) to your digital notes. Tools like Readwise or IFTTT make this easy. 7. Practice Progressive Summarization Immersing yourself in a digital reservoir of associations, triggers, and inspirations can act as the spark plug for your creativity, eliminating the unpredictability. 4. From Knowledge to GoldmineKalau versi analog, ada yang disebut commonplace book, alias buku yang dipakai untuk mengumpulkan semua pengetahuan dengan cara menuliskannya. Nah, second brain ini bisa dibilang commonplace book versi digital. 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.