Building a Second Brain to Organize Your Digital Life with Tiago Forte
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and each week I sit down with the world's best experts to learn the strategies, tactics, and frameworks that have shaped their success. There's a common expression called drinking from the fire hose that sums up the way many of us experience information in today's world.

There's just way too much content to consume, whether it's videos, movies, podcasts, articles, blogs, books, it keeps going. And what do we do with all of this? How are we supposed to remember and use all of this information? David Allen, creator of Getting Things Done, is famous for saying your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them. But how do we do that?

So today I'm talking with Tiago Forte, who's got a way for us to get those ideas out of our brain and into a reliable system for retrieval, what he calls a second brain. Tiago has become one of the world's foremost experts on productivity, teaching cohort-based courses on building a second brain for years. And now he put that information into a new book that I loved called Building a Second Brain, a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

We're going to talk about the four steps to having a highly effective second brain, why it's important to become more of a maker than a consumer, why the most common way people categorize information might not be best, why you might not need to change the tools you're using to get started, and a whole lot more. So let's get started. Tiago, welcome to the show and thanks for being here.

Thank you. Good to be here, Chris. So I already know that I'm a suboptimal note taker, but I did just scroll through my Evernote history this morning, and it looks like I've been doing it wrong since about July 4th, 2010. So needless to say, I am very excited about this conversation, as much work as might be on the back half of this to try to put in a better system. Let's talk. That's kind of how this all started. In the early years, it wasn't about building a business. It wasn't about writing a book, even having a course. It was just...

One very specific problem, which is what do you do with all this stuff in your Evernote inbox? That was like the very, very first problem I was trying to solve. But before we get started, I just have to ask, you worked with Kevin Chen on your studio, correct? Yeah.

Yes. It looks great. For anyone unfamiliar, the Kevin we're discussing started this company called Dream Studio Course. They have a course and optional hands-on support to help you build your home office into a studio that looks like Tiago's. It looks and sounds incredible on video calls or meetings. In fact, I'm about to swap offices with another room in our house.

And I'm going to use the course that Kevin created to make my setup 10 times better. So if you're watching on YouTube, hopefully you'll see that upgrade in the future. And if that's interesting, you should definitely check it out. DreamstudioCourse.com. But I want to start by sharing one of my favorite takeaways from the book. You said, to be able to make use of the information we value, you need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self.

So I think we're going to talk a lot about the tactics, but to kick us off, I'd love to talk about the why behind a second brain and what it might unlock for those future selves. Yeah, there's sort of three stages that people move through. In the first one, they're just trying to solve a problem, and that problem is called information overload. It's like a crisis. It's like a survival thing. They are just trying to keep their head above water. They're getting more emails, messages, seeing more social media posts,

listening to more podcasts than they can even make sense of. It's like you said, drinking from a fire hose and it is affecting their mental health, their ability to focus, their attention span, even their relationships, their career prospects. It's like a real problem. That is the beginning point, but not the end point. That's just like the gateway. That's like the doorway that leads to everything. The other two stages, basically they move on from there to just wanting to do their best work.

Once the background noise and the static of information overload starts to subside, well, what do you do with this newfound freedom, this newfound bandwidth? You want to do work that is more persuasive, impactful, original, effective, effective.

Like whatever dimension you're measuring the quality of your work on, you want to increase it. And that's where having notes starts to become not just a way to offload stuff from your mind, but then to selectively re-onload, like take back some of the knowledge, some of the ideas that you actually want to use to create things, to build, to write, to speak, to create. And then eventually you,

When they really start to leverage and start to feel this second brain almost as like a cognitive exoskeleton, I almost think of like a mech warrior. You get up in it, you put your feet in the boots, and then you put your hands into the exoskeleton arms, and you're like, oh my gosh, the power. Then what they really start to do is to advance their most important projects and goals.

Like things that they say they've been wanting to do for a long time, goals that they've said they've been working on for years but not really making any progress. They start to make serious progress on those things. That's the arc, the three-part arc that I see people move through as they build a second brain. Probably.

I promise this whole thing isn't me reading a quote. I actually just have two, but I'm going to read the second one. And I think this sets the framework up for all this. You said the consumerist attitude towards information that more is better, that we never have enough. And that what we already have isn't good enough is at the heart of people's dissatisfaction with how they spend time online. Instead of trying to find the best content, I recommend instead switching your focus to making things, which is far more satisfying. There's a lot to unpack there, but if I take what you just said and that and

I have to wonder how much of this is valuable as a superpower for bloggers and podcasters and creators, or how much of that creation is something that applies to anyone in any profession? Such a good question. I think those groups you mentioned who I'll just call content creators are the leading edge. They're the leading edge. They're the ones that they hear about a system like this one. They go, oh my gosh, this is what I needed yesterday. They're more aware. They're more sensitive to what this would do for them.

But I guess my assertion, my hypothesis is that it's going to spread.

That those are just the early adopters, those are the frontier people. But that essentially the category of content creator, I think in the near future is going to be meaningless. Everyone is going to be a content creator. Even the category of like freelancer entrepreneur is going to start to become meaningless, right? Like even people in big organizations are going to need the agency, the autonomy, the sort of self-determination that today entrepreneurs have. I guess that's my view of the future is a lot of these categories that we fit into today are going to dissolve.

What I'm confident of is that we're going to need to intake information, filter and curate it, the parts that actually enrich our lives and make us better, and then use it to either

Tell a story, send a message, create a document or a product or service. I have this quote in my book, too. I think the process of creation is actually timeless and fundamentally human. The medium changes like today is podcasting. Tomorrow it's YouTube. The next day it's TikTok. But all humans are creators. All humans are inherently creative, I think.

And eventually we're all going to use technology to do that more effectively. It's funny, as you were talking, I was just thinking, okay, before I was officially a creator as a podcaster, I can think of all kinds of things from, I put together a slideshow at my

grandparents like 50th anniversary. It's like that was something that was a collection of memories and emails and stories that I'd been collecting over time, but no organized way. Or I've had professional jobs where you've given presentations about things that you've become an expert on. When I was an investor, I became the ed tech investor because I'd invested in a handful of education tech companies.

And like there were blog posts, there were articles that only later I had to go back and back. Where was that thing that was so interesting? Because the partners were like, hey, can you talk about that industry? So it made me realize there's full time creator where creating content is the sole thing that is your income. And then there's I have a job to do X, Y or Z. But within that job...

I'm creating content, whether it's a sales pitch or whether it's a presentation to other employees. I started realizing that even when I wasn't a creator per se, I actually was in many areas of life and it would have been way more beneficial for me to have thought

Where is this note? Where is this line from this book that I read? Where is this blog post or email going to go so that I can make the most value of it in the future? Sometimes known and sometimes unknown. Couldn't have said better myself. That's exactly how I think. If you've ever given a presentation, made a PowerPoint, presented it to a few people,

To me, right in that very common situation that almost everyone has faced, all the elements are there. You had to capture, you had to organize information, you had to distill it into a message, a point, an argument. You had to express it. You had to present it. Even if that was the only context that you ever use any of this, if

If your presentations to other people were 10 times more effective, wouldn't that make a difference? Wouldn't that lead to better outcomes in whatever you happen to be doing? I can't imagine it wouldn't. It has to. I really try to remove the emphasis on, yeah, like you said, full-time professional content creators. Those are very few in numbers and I wouldn't even recommend it to most people.

But we are all expressing ourselves. That's the fundamental thing is self-expression. A big concept in the book is this code framework that you just glazed over very quickly. But can we maybe walk through those four steps and maybe just start by just defining how you think of the definition of a second brain so people can have that before we step through it?

- Sure, yeah, code is really the heart and soul of the building a second brain world. It describes the creative process. That's really what we're talking about here is your creative process and making it digital and technological. Code was a discovery. Like I remember I was in my apartment in Mexico City where I was living with my wife at the time

And I wasn't even trying to like fit it into an acronym or into a word. I was just like on a big sketch pad. I was just like writing different words and moving them around. And then I suddenly saw code just pop out at me. And I was like, oh, wow. Like it seemed to emerge. And in my work, it basically describes what is universal about the creative process. A lot is particular. There's a lot that changes person to person.

But any creative medium, any creative profession, any creative output that I see in some shape or form does four things, which are the four letters of code. Capturing information, which just means writing it down, documenting it, organizing it, which simply means adding some structure, some prioritization, some container. Distilling, which just means boiling it down, refining it to its essence, to the takeaway, to the action steps, to the punchline, and then expressing it.

Through writing, through speaking, through designing, through art, through music, some form of putting it back out into the world as your own interpretation. I have a bunch of questions on each of them. But if we start in Capture, one of the things that I found fascinating when I first came across your work, I was like, oh, I am sure Capture.

The Tiago is going to have a, if you want to capture, you've got to use this tool. And I was, I would say pleasantly surprised that you said there's not a perfect app or software system that works and people shouldn't even necessarily maintain everything in one place. That makes me think, okay, well, that's great because I probably have some already and it doesn't mean I'm doing it totally wrong, but I think it can also be hard for someone listening to say, okay,

okay, I want to do this. I want a second brain. What should I do? And it's kind of like, well, you can kind of pick and choose. So maybe we start off with someone who's never really thought about this. They've got a couple notes in Apple Notes or a Google Doc here or there. And they're like, okay, I want a place to store information that I can access and benefit from through creative processes in the future. Where do I start if I haven't even thought through this process in terms of tools? It doesn't have to be a specific one, but...

It seems it almost would be easier if you were like, the answer is download the building a second brain note-taking app. And here it is. I wish I could just say, you just download this app. Now you have a second brain. You don't even need to read the book. Maybe one day we'll get there. But yeah, with capture. So I think the main thing here is people for some reason, always think about captures doing something new. Okay. What is the new, new thing I'm going to do? But everything that I recommend that I teach, it's empirical, right?

It doesn't come from academia. It doesn't come from a theory. It doesn't start with sort of a concept. It starts from coaching.

I just coach people, sit with them, talk with them, see what they're already doing that works. And we sort of make small tweaks and changes bottom up instead of me coming in with this top-down framework saying you need to follow the framework. And so what I would really recommend people do is just please look at the content you are already consuming. If you changed nothing, how could you simply capture, save, and

the 1% most insightful ideas, quotes, takeaways, thoughts from what you're already consuming. Like no change. Like what are you doing? Do you read books? Do you read articles, podcasts, audio books, conversations with people? You are consuming everything.

Even if you're the most anti-tech person ever, you have no social media accounts, you're a recluse, you are consuming gigabytes of data per day in some way. Capture that. Start there. And honestly, most people can stop there. It's like the sheer volume is already so high of consumption, you can just focus on capturing the 1% and never add.

any consumption ever. In fact, most people should reduce it. It's interesting because I've heard you talk before and someone might listen to this and say, oh man, so Tiago's probably sitting there and throughout an entire day generating 10,000 notes of everything. And I actually feel like

you might capture less notes than many people doing this. So how do you decide what is relevant enough or important enough to store? Because like you said, if we're all being exposed to gigabytes of information a day, it could be very easy to take that book you read and store a thousand quotes. It could be very easy to take every post you read and store that.

Which I think, honestly, looking back at my old Evernote, I was scrolling through it. I was like, gosh, every time I read an article, I would clip the whole article and I would just save this article to Evernote. And then I just had a database of articles. I didn't know what they were for. And I think I was probably overzealous in my storing of information in an early day where like, oh, I didn't even know this was possible for some reason. I guess in 2010, maybe I thought the article would be gone in the future. So yeah, how do you decide what is relevant to put in a second brain? Because I guess...

The storage capacity is infinite, so you could put everything. This is the real issue. For the kind of person who is prone to this kind of behavior in the first place, they far more likely are saving far too much. They're digital hoarding.

They're doing the digital equivalent of like those hoarding TV shows where you can't even open the front door because there's pizza boxes and just like crap piled in every spare place. What's interesting is in the physical world, there's clear negative impacts like the ones I just mentioned. In the digital world, you can actually convince yourself, no, this is good. I'm creating value. I'm acquiring real evergreen assets. You're not. You're just like stockpiling a resource that the more you stockpile,

When it comes to information, the less valuable it is because you can't find anything. What is the point of a thousand terabytes of data if you can't even make use of it, if it's all just an endless sea of stuff? And so most of my techniques and my rules of thumb that I teach people are how to capture less, how to capture less, be more discerning, more picky. Most people don't have a high enough standard. They read something that sounds halfway interesting and they save it.

I try to save, and this is the end of a long journey. I went through a period of hoarding and I think that's actually probably good. Try to capture all this stuff. See how that goes for you. When you discover, as I did, that it's hurting more than it's helping, you start to become so picky where I'll be reading a book and I'm like, is this a life-changing idea? Does this quote shatter my conceptions of how the world works?

That is a high bar. But the great result of that is I'll read an entire book, I'll think the book is great. Five stars on Amazon, I'll have like five quotes from it. That's how it should be. The quotes are not everything that was even a little bit good in the book. The quotes are just like a bookmark. They're the digital equivalent of like having a book on your shelf. I have one over here where there's like a little post-it and you go, hey, I think there's something in that book because you can always go back to the book and then have all the details there.

All the notes, the quotes that you're saving, the only problem those are trying to solve is discoverability. It's helping you rediscover and even remember that you once read a book about this. On my same computer as I'm working, I'll just do spotlight, open up the Kindle app,

up, go straight to that book, open the passage that I'm looking at and go right back to where I read that book like five years in the past and pick up where I left off five years later. One thing I obviously think I did poorly was saving articles. I imagine if you're reading a blog post that's really life-changing, let's say, it would be save the quote, not the whole thing. And you can link back to the quote. What are the tools, whether they're

platform agnostic, meaning where the information is stored, but they're just collection tools or platform tools that you think are maybe in the consideration set for people to know about. I've tried countless capture tools and I've settled on just a few very simple ones that have just stood the test of time.

It comes down to paper notebooks. There's some use cases that they simply can't be beat, right? But then the second one, which is also the key to the first one, is a mobile app, right? After I take those notes on paper, at the end of the day or the end of the week, I use the Evernote mobile app, which has OCR, optical character recognition, snap a photo of that page, and now the paper notes have now become digital notes. So that part is essential. The notes app you use has to have a mobile app. I'd say probably 30% to 40% of the total notes I take are...

are opening on my iPhone, going into the mobile app, just typing an idea, typing a thought I had, typing something I heard in a conversation. A third one is if you can automate, especially like long form reading is really powerful. I use an app called Readwise. Do you know Readwise? I do. It's funny because I sometimes have read all across different platforms and it's not the best until you're like, Readwise is actually the first reason I said, you know what? I should just only read in the Kindle app.

It's amazing. I mean, nothing like this existed when I started. Now it's a virtually completely automated solution. It's like a connector, like a bridge for anyone who doesn't know. I'm reading on my Kindle on any device, by the way. Sometimes I'm reading on the Kindle app on my phone, Kindle app on my iPad or an actual Kindle device. I have three Kindles anywhere that I make a single highlight within minutes that highlight.

is routed. It's imported from the book into my notes with no further action on my part. It's like a miracle. It's amazing. And then that read wise also works with the fourth one I was going to mention, which is a read later app.

which is really, really key. This is a kind of a surprise for people. You do not want to save anything to your second brain that you haven't consumed, that you haven't actually paid attention to, read and digested. And the reason for that is when you encounter it later, you don't want to come across a thing you've said and be like, what the heck is this? I've never seen this in my life. You want to have a preexisting familiarity. So what you want to do is almost have like a little

waiting room, like a little holding area before things get to your second brain. And that is your read later app, something where you can keep a reading list of everything you say you want to consume for later consumption. One of the ways I've done this, and I just implemented half of it this morning. The first half was just bookmarking things on Twitter. If I found something I wanted to follow up on, but I didn't want to read now. Now I have bookmark it to follow up on it and then like it.

And then I just set up a Zapier Zap that if I like something, it will auto import it into a database in Notion where I store a lot of my personal information. I was like, getting ready for this interview. I set this thing up this morning. I hit the like button. And then all of a sudden I was like, ooh. And I was like, now I need to go process all the old ones because a lot of my likes are things that I want to follow up on and go back and see in the future. So second process, I can't remember the browser. There's a Chrome extension. I want to call it like

twittler or something that lets you basically download your likes on twitter or your tweets as a csv for importing somewhere so a lot of these tools work great in the future but they don't work great for history so that was one that i found i wouldn't say it's like the most professional product but it worked for exporting my likes into a csv so i love that yeah readwise is something that i feel like i need to adopt after thinking more heavily about this

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Is your second brain Evernote or is Evernote a component of it? I think it's an interesting distinction between is one place the brain or is the brain the concept that has many pieces? Your second brain is the complete ecosystem of apps that you use. I think that is an important distinction. There's never has been, never will be one app to rule them all. It's just simply not realistic. And I don't think ever will be. In fact, over time, both on an individual level,

level and a societal level, I think we're using ever more specialized tools as technology advances. You want to use the right tool for the job. Every tool is just a download in an app store way. So I think we're going to use more things over time, not less. So the technical definition, I almost think of it like a solar system. The sun is your notes app.

That is the central, like the neural center. That is the gold mine. That is where like the long-term repository of the most interesting, like high potential ideas. But then orbiting the notes app might be any number. You might have task managers, cloud storage drives, drawing apps, voice memo apps like Otter AI. There's a whole...

kind of ever evolving cast of characters. But I would say your notes app is like the central one. You just mentioned Otter, which is fantastic app, like open it up, turn on transcription. It basically records and transcribes everything you're talking about. Obviously, maybe depending on your state, but I would encourage you to let everyone know that you're recording them and you might legally be required to, but it's been really valuable in a lot of cases for me. Are there other apps that you found that maybe not everyone knows about that are like, look, you might not need this,

But Readwise Otter, worth sharing because it kind of is an unlock that most people haven't tried before.

Yeah, there is. We have on our website a free, I think it's called the Second Brain Resource Guide, that has this little embedded Airtable database with like all the apps that we like. And it's by category. So you can filter like show me only read later apps, show me only database apps like Airtable. You can kind of filter it. But let's see a few that I use. Otter is a great one. Air, A-I-R-R for capturing snippets of podcasts is another excellent one. I really like Miro, which is a mind map.

It's a mind map app that also has collaboration features. So like once you've created your mind map and you want to just share it, it's like two clicks. Let's see what else. Procreate. I really like to draw, but I like to draw digitally so that I can save it. Procreate is like the most powerful full feature drawing app for the iPad. I think it works primarily with the Apple Pencil. I think if I made the full list, there's probably like 25 apps.

apps that are in the knowledge management category that I use, which is kind of wild. That may sound like a lot, but go through those multiple screens of your iPhone, look in the applications folder of your computer. And most people listening to this are probably not far off from that.

I'll definitely link to that page in the show notes for sure. Are there any tools you found that make it easy to search across these? I've got Evernote. I've got Google Drive. A friend of mine started this company and then very quickly ended up getting acquired somewhere and it didn't go anywhere. But it's like, gosh, I got these Dropbox files. I've got Apple Notes. Is there any way to find things amongst all of them?

So this is one of the longest standing kind of needs. And what's so interesting about it is there's been a number of very strong contenders. There was one called Found.

that I really liked is basically you hit a shortcut on your keyboard, this panel slid in from the left side of your screen and then you could connect. It was like Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail, Dropbox, you know, at the time all the things I was using and then with one search, it's kind of like spotlight but for your entire digital life. But they got shut down

Then there was another one called CloudHQ that got like acquired. It's like there's been this series of things. I think the issue with it is it's so dependent on other apps. It's the webbing. It's the missing links between them. That is what this tool is adding. I think for that reason, they have trouble raising funding. They have trouble building a real business behind it. It kind of stays as this like background utility tool.

that is super useful for a small number of people that actually care about things like knowledge management, but it never quite seems to take off. The one I just looked up with a friend of mine started was called Command E. And that was like his vision was like building an Alfred or a spotlight search for everything. And then they required by Dropbox. And it says they might relaunch soon. I hope they do. I will say one that's worked not across everything, but

But I found that the Apple Files app on the iPhone, you can actually, I think, sync to Google Drive and Dropbox. So in the Files app, you can authorize the Files app to load into Google Drive and Dropbox. I can't remember how well the search works because if you want to attach a file on your iPhone, it's like you go through the Files interface and the Files interface can interface with other services and search amongst them. Right.

But it doesn't search within Notes and within Evernote and within all these things. So there's not a perfect solution. If anyone listening wants to start that company, let me know. I would love to be involved. It sounds like Tiago would love this to exist as well. How do you feel about in this kind of new world where you said in the future, we'll have people that, you know, you're not going to call yourself an entrepreneur because everyone will have that component of their life or a creator.

Merging business and personal knowledge. Do you keep separate personal and work email, separate personal and work notes, or have they all merged together become kind of one second brain or two? Yeah, they're mostly merged together, but there is what I would call sort of a porous border.

There is a little bit of separation. It's not because there's anything so sensitive or anything. It's just so that I can be in a different state of mind. What I really think of is the areas of responsibility, which is one of the organizational categories I have. I'm in such a different state of mind when I'm looking at the areas of the business, finance, legal, marketing, operations, etc.

versus the areas of my life, which are like the dog, the kid, the wife, health, personal finances. They're similar in that they're like the departments of the business versus the departments of life, but I just want to be in very different places. The only thing I do is I just add a little FL, which is Forte Labs, the name of my company,

as a little prefix before the business areas. And that just serves as a signal to me that if I'm in personal life mode, I just ignore those. And if I'm in business mindset, I just ignore everything else. That brings me to another question, which is about the way you organize this. I think one of the things that makes my notes and I saw, I think it was you and Ali Abdaal were talking about your systems. And I think you were going through his second brain, which included a bunch of folders on Apple notes. And I was like, Oh my gosh,

I'd never even crossed my mind to create folders. And that led me down this, okay, my new thing is I need to start organizing better. And you mentioned how a library is often organizing their books by subject and that that's probably not the most optimal way to organize the information you're collecting. Talk me through the optimal way or at least a optimal way to organize information you are collecting. And I guess that's the O.

Yeah, this is the O. So my solution, my recommendation for how to do the O, organize, is called PARA.

It's P-A-R-A. I'm a big fan of four-letter frameworks, as you can see, which is really the heart and soul of the building a second brain methodology, like how this all started. The first thing that I created, the first technique that really did well was Para, which is a solution to how to organize at the time Evernote and since then has expanded to how to organize really any digital place, any digital location. We can get into those letters if you want, but the main principle is what you said, which

For some reason, I think it's because of our exposure to libraries or to school where you organize things in notebooks like history, English, French, like by subject. When we enter the professional world and we go to organize information, that's what we do. A big insight that I had was that that is pointless. There's really no point to that. Like, what is the point to categorizing hundreds of things you've read about psychology, psychology,

Psychology is far too vast. It makes sense in a library. Like there's a few rows on the shelf that are psychology. But in your personal life, that is far too broad of a category to be useful. You have to be more narrow. You have to be more use specific.

And it turns out the context of use that is most relevant to most people is projects, project-based work. That's the future that we're all heading towards as a society, as an economy, is project-based work. So I say organize your notes and files digitally according to your active projects.

The A is areas. Would an area be a place where you're not yet sure if there's a project like my kids? It's like, I don't necessarily have a project. I know one of the things that I enjoyed reading was you gave an example of your second brain. I'll even link to this in the show notes as it related to sleep training. And it's funny because in preparation, I was researching this. And while I'm reading it, my wife's texting me and she's like, we need to start sleep training our second daughter. And I tried to play it off. Like I was like, oh, I'm actually reading about sleep training right now. It turns out I'm actually preparing for an interview, but I'm doing two things at the same time.

Would parenting be an area or would you try to create a project like sleep training or can you start with one and then branch off within it? That's exactly right. Projects don't really emerge from nothing. They don't just like appear out of the blue. They tend to emerge from areas of like interest or activity in your life. You have just things going on. You're kind of paying attention to some aspect of your life or your job or your business and then a project emerges.

right you realize oh we need to do x we need to accomplish x and that's the moment that you need a little bit more structure you need a little bit of scaffolding to actually produce an outcome and that is when a project emerges like you said from ongoing areas of your life i don't want to spend too much time on everything because there's an entire book and it's really good so just hit quickly maybe on resources and archives i actually have a question about archives but i feel like if we're going to mention all three we should just at least explain the other one so resources and archives

So projects and areas, the P and the first A of PARA are all about your life. Those are completely mapping to what matters to you right now. The resources is kind of everything else.

It's like almost like miscellaneous. Everything you are just reading about, learning about, topics you're exploring, things you're keeping an eye on, trends. It's like I'm proactively saying all of that matters. Keep it. But it is third place. It is third priority after both your projects and your areas. So it could be topics, coffee, gardening, artificial intelligence, productivity, just anything. And then the archives is like the cold storage. It's like the basement.

Anything from the previous three categories that is no longer active, that is no longer relevant, don't delete it. You have effectively infinite storage space these days. You never need to delete anything, but you don't want it cluttering and confusing your active priorities. So just demote it all the way down to archives, which you never look at unless you specifically want to see something. I was going through Evernote and I was like, gosh, what are all these notes? Over a thousand notes. What are they? And I came across, I think it was like

Maybe 2014, which is a window of time in my life where someone asked me to join a fantasy football team, which was a huge mistake for someone who loves spreadsheets and optimization. And for two years, every time football season rolled around, I was like, I could not consume enough content. I didn't actually care about any of the teams, whether they won, whether they lost, it didn't matter.

But I was interested in every aspect of fantasy football. I'd be sitting down with my father-in-law who loves football, not for fantasy sake. And I'd be like, oh, this is so awesome. And then he'd be like, yeah, that's great. And then like the next minute, the other team would do something. I'm like, this is awesome too. He's like, I don't understand what's going on. You're rooting for both teams. I'm like, I just care that this guy catches this ball. Everything else in the game is useless. That needs to be in the archives, which is all I could think of scrolling through Evernote was that I didn't

have it organized in any place. And at the time it was a project and now it needs to be set off in cold storage. Is there a process by which you go through all of this, maybe weekly, monthly, annually to try to decide, okay, this needs to move around? Is there a way you maintain things before going on to any other projects?

There is, yeah. There's almost like second brain maintenance. The same way you scheduled maintenance for your car to keep it operating, there is similar things you should do for your second brain. There's different ways we could approach it. Some of those are

are on the calendar, like scheduled. Weekly review, I think, is a fundamental practice that everyone needs to just maintain perspective on their week. Something like a monthly review or an annual review where you're like zooming out to the big picture, long-term goals, values, your why, your mission, things like that. So that's part of it. That also predates second brain stuff, right? That goes back 20, 30 years, the idea of a weekly review. Most of the actual maintenance of, let's say, para in your second brain comes down to just how you manage projects.

To me, projects really are the first class citizen. So when do you create that project folder that is going to contain all the project related material? When the project starts.

Then you execute it. When does that get archived? When the project ends. I have these kind of two moments in time. What's so nice about projects is that they beginning and end, right? Areas, resources, and archives are kind of, it's fuzzy, their relationship to time. Projects are discreet. They're like sprints. You start, you do, you end. And therefore, I like to link and

and sort of schedule most of my maintenance activities to when projects begin and when they end. Which by the way, also is how I justify the effort. It's like the return on investment, your ability to justify going in and just reorganizing stuff, that's not a very good use of your time. But if I'm going in specifically to manage a project, suddenly that time is very easily justifiable and is actually part of the project itself.

If someone's hearing this and thinking, I have a horrible organization system, maybe it would make sense in an upfront way to kind of organize everything. But on an ongoing basis, it's like, maybe don't get too crazy about organizing it. But right now I'm like, I get these fantasy football notes. I got to get them to the archives, which doesn't exist yet. Anyone listening to this, you included, I really do not recommend going in and sort of implementing Para by trying to move hundreds or even thousands of files individually.

Just treat the past as the past. Get every single thing, every single note in Evernote or wherever you've kept things. Put it in one single folder called archive and today's date. That is the past. That is everything that happened before now.

And then start over. Start with a clean slate with just the P. Just create a folder for each of your active projects and be honest about what is active, not things you wish are active or that you're pretending are active. Most people really don't have more than about five to 10 active projects.

So create a folder for each one of those. Then from this point, only going forward, start putting the notes that you create into those folders. Where does email fit into this? I have like an email folder that's saved and it's like, oh, someone sent me this thing. It's super valuable. Is your inbox part of your second brain or do you take emails out of your inbox and put them somewhere else? Yeah. So the way I think about this is you have in your life several inboxes.

Email is kind of the most obvious one, but you have a notes inbox. Probably you have a task manager or to-do list where things get recorded. You have even a mailbox, which is just another, like there's probably five to eight separate inboxes. So when you think about a weekly review, often people think, Oh, weekly review, I have to like review and evaluate my entire life. What are my goals? What is my purpose in life? These like huge questions. That's not what it's for. I only do that like once a year. If that.

That is really a lot of time and effort. All a weekly review is for me is just going through my inboxes one at a time, deciding what can be deleted,

what can be archived or just like put somewhere and what needs to be taken action on. That is all a weekly review is and how a weekly review takes no more than about 15 or 20 minutes every time. Let me ask you a very, very practical example. I have a gift card that someone sent me for an online retailer that I'm not ready to buy anything from you now.

Is that something that if you got that in your email, you would leave it as an email in some place or would save it somewhere else? Or what would you do with your own system, which may not be the best for me, but it's an example of something that I'm like, I feel like it's the kind of thing that always sits in someone's inbox and no one ever knows what to do with it. So great example. The first question I always ask, is this actionable or not actionable?

So that is actually actionable. When you think to the future time that you are actually acting on this, it is something you're doing. You're going and spending the gift card on something. What that tells me is there's always one of two places it can go, either Evernote or Things, which is my task manager. So I know that's an action, so it's going to go with Things. And then the key feature of Things that is honestly, it's like the greatest best kept secret is

In like the productivity world by far the most important feature of any task manager is a keyboard shortcut So on things it's control options spacebar it

pops up a little window, like a tiny little window where I can write a task with a link to that specific email in the little comment section. That little tiny thing is life changing because what I write in the task is spend $15 at target, hit enter that goes into my task manager. And then I hit E on the keyboard. The email is archived forever. I never need to organize it, sort it,

do anything. That is now something that I'm going to find again through my task manager, not through email. I'm not sure whether I like that system more or I'm more impressed that the email in my inbox is you've got a Target e-gift card for $15. I feel like we're on like a magic show where you're like, ah, I figured it out. That's actually the gift card that I have sitting in my inbox. Really? Yeah, it's literally a $15 Target gift card. No way. There was a promotion last night. We forgot to buy diapers. My wife was like, hey...

we only have four diapers right now, which is a problem. And so fun hack for anyone listening, there's a product called Shipt, S-H-I-P-T. And you get a free membership as a Chase cardholder. I put in my Chase information. I got a membership through December 2024. And with Shipt, you get free home delivery from Target. And we ordered at like 5pm and we had diapers by 7pm. And the delivery was free. And it was by two types of diapers. So I just bought

two orders of diapers and you get a free $15 gift card, which is why I have the $15 target gift card. So,

Hack for free delivery. I think I have a $15 Target gift card around here somewhere. That's why that came to mind. I don't know if you're buying diapers, but that was mine. So little derail there, but that is helpful. I feel like my to-do process is probably the next upgrade right now. I'm like a keep one note with a list of bullets for to-dos. I haven't really gotten serious about that. I know things is an Apple only app, but I've heard great things.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. I want to come back to one random macro question, which is there's this book called Wayfinding.

The author Maura O'Connor says that over-reliance on GPS, for example, has made us less able to navigate the world. Do you have any concerns about over-reliance on a second brain and what that might do to our primary brain? Or are there times where it's like, you know what, this is something for not offloading? I don't have concerns. I don't have concerns. When I go back and read in ancient Greek times, pundits basically saying, oh, writing has corrupted the youth. Right.

Their memory is now atrophied because this darned new invention of writing is going to lead to the downfall of society. I'm just like, this has been going on forever and will always go on. The story of civilization is us offloading what used to require our bodies and minds to technology. So I don't have concerns on that front. But for the second part, part of what you're doing with the second brain is simply vacating your first brain of trivia, just trivia.

mundane, mindless details that you are keeping track of. Think about things you're supposed to buy at the grocery store today, things on your to-do list, details of a project you're working on. I think most of the time, most people's minds are just filled with stuff that can be offloaded, that can be remembered far more precisely for far longer by machines than the human mind.

So I'm always thinking if a job can be done by machines, it should be. That intellect is free. I have this vast intellect called software at my disposal. Why not use it? Why not just give away that job? And I find over time that leaves space in my first brain for things that only the human mind can do. That includes creativity, includes intuition, includes relationships.

includes having novel experiences. Like the average person is underwater. The average person has no bandwidth. So if you want to make any change in your life whatsoever, where you have to start is by offloading something because there's no space to even consider a new option until you offload that stuff. It reminds me of...

In grade school, you like memorize things. Let's memorize this poem. I still have a French poem that I could recite in like record speed because I had to memorize it. Is there any benefit for that kind of memorized knowledge or does that find its way departing out of society as technology becomes more pervasive through educational practice? There's ever less benefit.

use cases for that. Sometimes people bring up, "Oh, how about learning a language?" I lived in Ukraine for two years in the Peace Corps, served in the Peace Corps, and I studied Russian because I was in the East, and I did spaced repetition, one of the most research-based, evidence-based ways to memorize something. I had like several thousand Russian flashcards.

And I thought I was learning the language by just, you know, in a systematic way where you like review flashcards until you can memorize them and then you review them less and less. Looking back, I wish I had spent zero time on that.

It would have been such a superior use of my time to just go do things. Go out into the community, go grocery shopping, go to my students' dachas and just like hang out with their babushka. Even in the case of language learning, which might be the prime example of first brain memory, doing,

is superior, I think, to rote memorization. The memorization of the words should better come as a side effect of just living, having interesting experiences rather than trying to cram things into your first brain. I guess that's a great tee up for what are the primary use cases for someone to be thinking about for their first brain? So it's a funny thing because this book is in the self-improvement category or business, but you might think, oh, this is about optimizing, like a word you use a lot.

optimizing productivity efficiency, but I really see it as the exact opposite. When I think about my life, my first brain, myself, I want to be ever less optimized over time. I don't wanna have any structure. I wanna have less and less routine. I want to just follow my curiosity and my passion completely spontaneously with no preconception. But I have responsibilities and things that I have to manage in the world. So it's almost like I spend my time optimizing my second brain

making it this well-oiled machine so that my first brain can be almost like a child. I look at my two-year-old. I'm like, I aspire to be like this kid. He just goes after what he wants and what he loves like 100% of the time.

He's just so carefree, so spontaneous, so enlivened, so present. That's the kind of stuff that I aspire to over time. And I can get away with it because I have my second brain over here. Well, that's a perfect segue. I know you've talked about, you know, we each have two-year-olds. That really changes the way you operate and function. As someone who plays in this space, even if you don't necessarily want to optimize your time in the way maybe I often think about doing it,

Have you found ways or have you approached your day or how you get things done differently now that you probably, I'm guessing, have a big chunk of free time that you used to be able to spend working and doing things that you want to spend differently with your family? How has that changed? Honestly, not much has changed because in a sense, I had already prepared for it.

When I look at what has changed for me having a kid is that the capabilities of this first brain, I don't know how else to put it, but have just seriously deteriorated.

There's no other way to put it. Just my memory, my ability to focus, my attention span, my endurance, all of it. I feel like in the past two years since having a kid is like less than half of what it was. I hate to say that, but it's just true. This is a common thing with smart people. It's sort of like their intellect, their mind is the hammer with which they approach everything like a nail. Right?

Right. Everything is about the intellect. They're just hammering in every problem in their life with the intellect, which is fine until the intellect fails. I had this experience about 15 years ago with a chronic illness, the medication for which seriously hampered my short term memory. Looking back, that was almost like a gift.

I had like a window into what it would be like when my mind failed me. And I had that starting when I was 22. So I didn't have the option of relying too much on my intellect. I had to very early on find kind of an external system. And the result of that is I didn't have to change much once the kid arrived. I just relied ever more on these kind of external systems.

Well, I know you have a second kid coming and I have some unfortunate news for you that whatever deterioration I felt after child one now feels like nothing compared to the second child deterioration. You are very fortunate that you have put together your second brain to prepare for this. But if that comes and you find a way to do anything, let's do a follow up.

We're kind of running out of time. So I want to jump on two or three quick things to just close us out while we're still on family. There was something you posted the other day. You shared an acknowledgement hack you use to avoid fights in your relationship.

And I would love to just have you share that because I read it and I was like, I'm going to start doing this. Yeah. My wife and I have done a lot of like programs and courses. We're kind of course junkies. We did a couple's retreat, the first one ever about maybe 18 months ago. And I'm just kind of amazed how many useful tools there are. Which

which you would never hear about. No one ever told me about these things. Definitely not my parents, not my friends. Haven't seen it modeled in culture and TV movies. In fact, most of those sources were sort of negative influences, but we practice this at our couples retreat. You can just go up to your spouse, look them in the eye and say, I want to be acknowledged for doing the dishes last night when I was tired. And the other person can say, Oh,

Look you in the eyes. I acknowledge you for doing the dishes last night, even when you were tired and the commitment that it shows to the cleanliness, safety and health of our family. And you just have a little moment and that's it. And it's done. And as the receiver of that, the assumption is asking for it cheapens it.

They're like, oh, they should just notice. It should spontaneously occur to them. First of all, it won't because they're doing their own things that then they want to be acknowledged for. But somehow asking for it does not in any way. In fact, it even lessens the experience because you're simply asking for what you need and receiving it right then and there. Yeah. So I love that. And it's only been a few days since I've seen it. So I don't have a ton of evidence yet of how it's worked, but I'm very excited to put that into use. Any other things you've learned in those processes in your relationship that, you know, you said you wish that more were shared? Yeah.

So much. So much. The person who ran that couples retreat, his name is Joe Hudson. He's become a great friend and mentor of mine so much so that I helped him launch his own online course because I took his program in this random house in San Francisco and that was the only way to access it.

You had to like be in this one room in this one city. And I partnered with him to launch it to the world. It's called the art of accomplishment. It's a cohort based live course that you can sign up for. But I believe his work, which has to do with couples and relationships, but also emotional fluency and self-awareness is the category that I would put it in. So rich, so subtle and complex. It's all about treating emotions as just important signals of information and

as opportunities to learn and grow rather than as these annoying sort of internal forces to avoid and suppress.

is like the tweet size version of what he does. I'll share that in the show notes. Earlier, we talked about going back to the Greek times about productivity and knowledge management. If we fast forward, what role do you think AI might end up playing in our second brains? And do you think it has a big impact on all this? It does. Yeah. The way I see it is it's going to automate and substitute almost different links in the chain, right? So if you think of the creative process of code as like a supply chain,

It's really a supply chain. There's raw materials, which is like quotes, passages, images that you get from the outside world or the internal world. And then just like a manufacturing line, it gets refined, processed, enriched material.

manipulated in some way to become like a finished product. What AI is going to do, just as all kinds of technology has always done, is come in, get like one at a time different links in that chain that human minds previously had to do, and then just substitute it with machines. And I think, honestly, that will be a boon to human creativity. It will allow us to move faster, spend more time on more value-added things, and ultimately just...

Create better work faster. I guess I'm a huge techno optimist. I threw an episode I did last week into this AI chapter summarization tool. I uploaded the audio and in a couple minutes, it produced chapters. The summaries of those chapters was not something I want to publish.

But it, in two minutes, took an hour-long conversation and gave me the highlights of the key moments of the conversation. And it blew my mind. It was called Assembly.ai, I think. And I was just like, this is crazy. Now, it's not ready to be published. But if I were sitting here trying to think, let's take example, if at the end of the year I want to do top lessons from 2022...

I could in an hour run 52 episodes through, get the highlights of all the summaries of all of them and start to pull things together. So I'm very optimistic, especially as it comes to distilling a lot of content that you have into even quicker things and, and,

And who knows where it goes from there? Incredible. I love that. Yeah. Why should humans spend their time creating chapters? Like, let's give these jobs to machines, please. So the last thing I should have prepared you. So you're going to be on the spot. I always like to ask people, is there a city that you're really familiar with that if anyone listening is going to adventure to sometime in the next few years where you have some recommendations of either a place to eat, a thing to do, favorite place to grab a drink that they can check out?

I do. Yeah. It's become super trendy now about Mexico City. My wife and I lived there all of 2019, just before the pandemic. We thought it was popular then. Now, there was just a New York Times article how Americans are overrunning Mexico City. It is just a gem. The way I describe it is it's the best of...

Latin America, North America, and Europe all in one city. And in terms of where to go, so in a year there, we tried like a stupid number of restaurants. Our favorite one, and I almost hesitate to give this away because I feel like a semi-undiscovered secret. It's actually a hotel restaurant. It's the restaurant in the Hotel Carlotta, which is up there. I forget which neighborhood, but if you just Google Hotel Carlotta, it's up there.

There is a chef there that we actually got to know who makes food that I just haven't experienced anywhere else. It's our number one recommendation for Mexico City. I love it. Maybe I'll leave it out of the show notes. You can only get it if you make it to the end of the episode. And now I'm ready to take another trip to Mexico City and check it out. Tiago, thank you so much for being here. I thought I was going to come in and leave with a lot of work. Now I have a simple job of throwing everything in the archive and a work of just creating a few projects and

and kind of starting anew. So I feel much less overwhelmed about something that I'm very excited to make practice in my life. So thank you so much for being here and sharing everything with all the listeners. - It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. That was a great conversation, great questions.

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.