welcome to my talk on building a second brain capturing organizing and sharing knowledge using digital notes my name is tiago forte and I've come here from Mexico City where I live to share with you an exciting new trend a new movement that I think has the potential of radically transforming how we work the first imagine for a second it's Monday morning you wake up refreshed from a nice relaxing weekend you have breakfast with your family make some coffee and as you head into the office you're determined that this will be a good week you're gonna be focused this week you're gonna be self-disciplined you're really gonna do the best work that you're capable of doing you arrive at the office go into the workspace you sit down at your desk open your computer and suddenly you're faced with this a morass of files and folders some of ambiguous origin spread chaotically across dozens of different locations and different amps and you feel a little discouraged but you make the best of it after all you don't have time to sit there organizing your computer do you do you go through your day and you go through your week but in the background there's a friction every time you use a device one of your mobile devices or your computer there's a cost someone asks you for a document and it takes you ten or fifteen minutes looking through different archives looking through different folders to find it you go to save a document and you have this creeping suspicion that no matter how diligent you are in deciding what's a title it and where to save it when the time comes when you actually need it it will somehow have mysteriously disappeared or you're in a meeting and someone references a source that you know is incorrect but you can't find the correction during a meeting so you have to follow up with them later when it's makes less of an impact as these little frustrations and these little obstacles crop up as you use your technology during the week they slowly start to chip away at that focus chip away at that motivation and you find yourself more tired more stressed and more frustrated from having to use computers and having to use these devices does that story sound familiar to anyone here's the basic challenge there's more information than ever that we need to successfully do our jobs it's like every binder on that shelf has become an app on our phone so it's available to us all the time and it's constantly changing but in the past we had a librarian to actually make sense of and manage all that data now we have to do it ourselves it's like we each have a part-time job as a reference librarian but we're not paid to be librarians we're paid to do our jobs and so the information accumulates it accumulates in the background like a slowly gathering storm and we never know when it's going to break down when we're gonna lose the files that we need when we're gonna be overwhelmed with all of this stuff that we're accumulating to put some numbers on this general feeling of disease the average employee in the United States consumes a hundred and seventy four newspapers worth of information every single day that takes almost 12 hours per day consuming some form of media and it's equivalent to a hundred and thirteen thousand words every single day and it's increasing 2.6 percent per year so imagine whatever your challenge is with information overload today it's gonna get worse it's gonna get worse every single year and the amazing thing is despite all this time basically all day long interacting with information we still can't find what we need when we need it a report recently out for Microsoft says that the average employee spends on spend seventy four hours every year so shame for misplaced files documents and other items 74 hours per year just trying to find stuff that we know we have I first started thinking about this problem noticing this problem in 2013 I worked for an innovation consulting firm in San Francisco and we would be paid by some of the largest companies in the world to research new trends we'd spend weeks and weeks studying self-driving cars or drones or self tracking or our smartwatches and then we package up all this valuable knowledge that we had gathered into a presentation or into a report hand it over and more often than not after a quick review the client will just stick it in a drawer or stick it in a folder on a computer and I noticed that despite all the investment that was made in terms of time and money and energy in creating this knowledge it didn't seem like anyone was able to really get us full about you not the client and not even us the knowledge that we were gaining was not persisting and being revisited and utilized over time it was just kind of fading into the background of our memory the past five years working on this problem in my own company I've come to realize that this problem the problem of knowledge management is the fundamental problem facing businesses today every CEO that you talk to will will proclaim that human capital is their biggest asset conservative estimates by economists indicate that the total value of human capital is five to ten times larger than the value of physical capital like buildings and roads and bridges five to ten times but human capital I mean the knowledge and know-how stored in human brains this includes their experience their wisdom it includes their training in their education includes the shortcuts and the heuristics and the rules of thumb and the things to consider and the things to remember all this tacit knowledge that humans accumulate everyday just by doing their day-to-day work now companies what I found is that companies understand this problem but what we've learned from decades of experience is that top-down knowledge management creating knowledge capture programs and knowledge incentives they just don't work and I think the reason they don't works they don't work is that knowledge is inherently personal it's not a commodity that can be extracted or standardized or mass-produced as soon as you try to separate knowledge from the person that knows it it loses its context it loses the context of where it came from why it matters when it applies what it might actually mean so for these five years I've really focused on a new form of knowledge management a new take on it which is called personal knowledge management personal knowledge management is about keeping the individual at the center of their own knowledge putting them in the driver's seat instead of trying to take their knowledge away from them actually giving them tools and new ways of thinking and new methods to make most effective use of what they already know and think about it how much time every year do you spend reading how much time reading books and blog posts and articles and reports and emails how much time do you spend listening listening in meetings listening to podcasts and audio books listening to seminars how much time you spend watching watching videos watching movies watching courses watching webinars where does all that knowledge go where is it we spent all this time learning and so little time actually saving and cultivating and preserving the things that we've learned instead of we become Infowars we start force-feeding ourselves as much information as we can get our hands on hoping that one more article one more podcast one more evaluation will give us one factor that one insight that will make the difference meanwhile everything that we already know is slowly fading getting hazy er and hazy er in the distance personal knowledge management isn't just about creating more value for companies it's about creating more value for people giving them access to the value that they've already created through everything that they know and everything that they've learned now here's the secret will you bring knowledge down to the level of the individual make it small scale and local it's no longer a technology problem it's not a problem that's going to benefit from Big Data algorithms or from artificial intelligence it's not something you want to scale or you want to automate at the level of personal knowledge management it's fundamentally a human problem it's the mindset of the of the actual person who has the knowledge it's their mental models it's the tools they have it's the methods and the techniques this is fundamentally a matter of training people of training people to relate to have a different relationship with their knowledge than they've had in the past I want to share share with you some of the most powerful takeaways and practical methods that you can use in your own work these methods come from an intensive online course that I teach called building a second brain in this and two other related courses I've taught more than 20,000 people how to go through this process how to actually capture and organize and then start sharing their personal knowledge there's three essential ways that you get value from a second brain there remember connect and create the first one is to simply save ideas and insights in your digital notes on your computer in a minute I'll just I'll show you what that looks like exactly but one of the first and most kind of basic stage of personal knowledge management is just remembering offloading the detailed memory of specifics from your biological brain which is not really well-suited to that to computers which do that very well the second value that you great that you get from a second brain is connecting things instead of just consuming consuming knowledge you start making connections noticing patterns and associations and this is just organizing your knowledge to reveal those patterns and relationships and third is you start you can create things you can share content that you created to provide value for others so let me tell you a little bit more about each of these and share three ways of doing each of them when I say building a second brain you might think of something like this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy that is fascinating but has nothing to do with your day to day reality but this is really not what I mean when I say building a second brain what I mean is something more like this how many of you have some kind of notebook or notepad where you jot down notes of any kind it's a technology that's been around for maybe centuries right you have a small booklet you jot down ideas things that occur to you quotes that people said things to do things to remember reminders all these little things that kind of pop up in your brain throughout the day now for this first way of using a second brain remember imagine if you got that no notebook or that notepad just as you currently use it and you made it digital you made it digital where it was backed up to the cloud so you couldn't lose it it was synchronized to your different devices so if you created a note on your desktop computer it would be available within minutes on your smart phone it was searchable so you could search across hundreds or even thousands of notes in seconds you could tag it you could create links you could share it all the benefits that technology provides applied to your notes and I know when I say your knowledge that can seem a little bit abstract what is my knowledge where is my knowledge and really I don't mean something super abstract I mean actually the two facts I call them artifacts that you already create and they you already use in your day-to-day work okay these are things specific tangible things that represent what you know or remind you of what you know so a few examples you may have paper documents reports evaluations memos letters mail that have that contain ideas or insights or facts or statistics that you may want to you may want to keep imagine if you could scan those and the technology has gotten very good for this and keep them in a centralized digital form that you can always find them when you need them you might have voice memos voice memos e recorded on your phone or on a recorder those could contain ideas that you might want to revisit at some future point if you read books either paper books or ebooks you might have notes those highlights you may have little comments that you've added you may have bookmarks that is a form of knowledge you could have text documents Word documents Google Docs maybe you use the Notes app on your phone that's another source of knowledge that you can bring into your second Brin you could have handwritten notes the technology has gotten so good that you can write something longhand scan it into your computer and it will be searchable the computer can actually understand what you've written by hand you might have other kinds of finals presentation files database files PDF stored in on your computer on Dropbox on box these are things assuming it's allowed by company policy of course that you could save in something like a second brain maybe you have screenshots maybe have photos web pages things little bits of creative inspiration or things that resonate with you or things you might find useful or interesting that you could bring and gather into a second brain and I want to talk now a little bit about specifically what kind of software program you might want to use if you think about the different tools that you already use in your day-to-day work each one is suited for a particular purpose so maybe you use Microsoft Word to write down notes to yourself and you can do that but it's not ideally suited for quick notes really what Microsoft Word is is designed for is formatting and printing it's designed to create printable documents that can be transferred person to person and retain their formatting but this is not the ideal scenario for personal knowledge management here's here's my test if you're walking down the street or you're at dinner or you're in a cafe or on the train and an idea occurs to you something could be far out could be speculative could be random but it pops up in your brain are you really going to take out your phone and within 20 or 30 seconds capture that little bit of knowledge save it and put your phone back I don't think that's very likely to happen with Microsoft Word I think it's unlikely you're going to find the file open it up scroll down ten pages to find the exact right place and then write it there it's just too heavy duty and formal and bureaucratic for something that is so lightweight and in the moment you could also use social media and this is actually great because you can actually get your ideas out there and then have people engage with you and give you feedback which is an awesome way to refine your thinking but social media is not great for the long-term right it optimizes for the the current moment for the now and then before you know it it's often the past and kind of difficult to find you could also use cloud storage such as Dropbox and this gives you certain benefits of sharing and access and multiple devices but again it's unlikely you're gonna fire up your cloud storage app find the exact right file where that little string of text goes scroll down to that place and add it and you can also use collaborative apps like Google Docs and this is great again because you can collaborate with others but still even then it's too heavy duty to open up this multi-page document after a lot of experience and testing the only category of apps that I can really recommend is notes apps digital notes apps such as Evernote these are the only apps that are optimized for creative output they're optimized for creative output because notes are inherently kind of quick and dirty they're messy they're not something you create for public consumption that needs to be really nice-looking it's something just your free-flowing ideas as they happen and then you pulls an idea back into your brain and then you put it back out again and you were fine it and you edit it and you mix and match it it's something that's much more organic and personal rather than something that is for publishing and there's two apps that I recommend which is Evernote and OneNote if OneNote is made by Microsoft it has the same level of support as the rest of the office 365 suite so if you'd like to make remain on office 365 you can absolutely do that just to use OneNote and it has all the functionality that I'm describing today and what these two apps give you and actually there's many other digital notes apps that I'm I can't recommend specifically because I don't know them but most of the ones that I look at actually have these features which are that they're durable every single note you create is automatically backed up on the cloud and on your computer you don't have to sync it you don't have to upload it you don't have to export it it's kind of in one central interface that is always synced to the cloud these apps tend to be universal so I don't have to worry will I be able to save this kind of file in this app they can pretty much take anything videos audio images text and even if it can't open the file itself it will save it as an attachment these apps are centralized I can't overstate the value of having all of your knowledge the Distilled most valuable insights and ideas in one central place so you don't have to go looking for where something is you don't have to you know go searching across all these different formats there's one central interface one window into finding that piece of knowledge and this one is more subtle but really critical which is that you know when you're working on a Microsoft Word document you tend to be focusing on it's possible to copy and paste text between them but it's not very natural with digital notes apps it's almost like you have note cards spread out around your desk you can open multiple of them because each one is quite small you can see them side-by-side create links between them it's not quite as easy to create links between different Word documents or from a Word document to a PowerPoint presentation but with when they're all within one app you can so basically all the information contained in notes is available in visible with one click instead of you having to double click them and open them let me give you a few practical examples of how you might get started with this so let's say you're reading an e-book this works on either a Kindle device or the Kindle app on an I on a on any other device if you're reading something and you come across a passage that you think might be worth keeping you can just put down your finger and select that passage if you tap the button up on the right you can see all of the highlights that you've created from this book and then with just a couple more taps email those notes directly into your Notes app both Evernote in OneNote give you a special designated email address that anything you email to that address gets added to your to your second brain imagine all the highlights the best parts that you've read in all the books from the past few years were available in one place searchable and shareable or let's say you do more of your reading on the web online articles there's a free extension called liner which you can download and add to your browser and once you click the liner button on the toolbar it changes your cursor into a highlighter anything that you select will automatically be highlighted and saved permanent permanently to your account you can then hit share and send it to email to Google Docs or to Evernote or one if I had oh I'm gonna head over to one to Evernote and you can see the notes been synced and I can then highlight the specific sentence in the note that I want to highlight and then if I wanted share it so imagine this instead of sending a link to a massive article or even a book to someone and asking them to spend a bunch of their time up front to read the thing you're surfacing the specific paragraph and the specific sentence in that paragraph that you want them to know they're way more likely to actually consume that bit of knowledge more likely to value your input that you've given and if you look at the bottom they can actually click that automatically-generated link that says highlighted source to see in context the full article that you highlighted or they can click the original link and the original source and see a clean version imagine if you were able to send such distilled insights from the things that you read to anyone that you work with or work for or let's say you read PDFs this is a an app for the iPad called PDF Expert but it works very similar to other PDF readers let's say you find something that you want to keep you can select a word drag the little handle bar to the end of the section hit highlight you can even hit the comment button and add a short comment about why you're highlighting this then hit the share button and share it directly to your Notes app I'm then gonna head over to the Notes app and you can see within a few seconds a note was created with the PDF as an attachment they opened the attachment and scroll to that page there's my highlights now you may be wondering how would I even remember that those highlights are there well if you go to the search function and type in something that is found within that PDF there we go it actually searches not just the title of the note not just the title of the PDF but it actually searches within the PDF itself imagine the kind of research database that you could accumulate over time if you just saved every PDF that you read with the best parts highlighted so you didn't have to read the whole PDF again you could go straight to the parts that matter the most and that's remembering using technology for what it's best at remembering precise details over time so you don't have to a second way of using your second brain is to connect so what you'll notice as you're creating these notes is that there are patterns and there's associations and this can happen at different levels they can be very conceptual sometimes maybe you you study a few different companies and you notice that there's a common trend among all of them you can actually create links between notes making that connection explicit maybe it reveals something in the environment something macro economically that you might want to call attention to something that might even influence other investments or making connections can be very mundane maybe you just like to tag all of the notes that have to do with meetings that are notes that you've taken within meetings so that when you want to review everything you've talked to your team about over the past two weeks you just do one search and everything that has that tag applied is surfaced another example is metadata adding metadata which is little pieces of data that make your notes easier to find could include a title you could add an informative title so that you can see at a glance what it's about you could add bold text or highlights as I showed before to kind of really make it obvious what is the main point or the most important point within a within a note you could add tags make explicit the commonalities and the the common relationships and the patterns that you observe across your notes you could add original links often you want to know where a piece of information came from or was original source and many kinds of metadata are actually now automatically created it's things like date created and modified which you can use to sort and filter through your notes a second example is image views we often spend a lot of our day dealing with text text in emails texts and documents text is awesome it's very efficient but when you're really trying to have a breakthrough you're trying to have an insight you're trying to see something that no one else sees visuals can be really really powerful note-taking apps have often a image view you can switch very easily between text view and image view this example comes from Evernote but you can see that making the images larger and more salient I can start to see relationships and patterns between the different notes I could maybe pull two or three of them together can write an email or combine four or five of them to write a report and actually draw on more sources besides what I have in my own mind and a third example is inbound and outbound links you're probably familiar with outbound links which is you put a link a hyperlink in an email or in a document when someone clicks that link it takes them to some external resource such as a web page but imagine if you had little chunks of your knowledge saved in discreet notes you can set you can share with someone send to someone a specific note so for example if a colleague asks me what is my opinion on say petroleum industry instead of you know taking 45 minutes to go search various documents slowly pull together an email send them an email that I know that probably just look at once and then you know we'll get lost in their email archive instead of that I can I can pull together a small collection of notes and share the that small collection with them in a way that they can see for themselves I don't necessarily have to do a bunch of upfront work creating a document when I have these chunks of knowledge that I can snap together almost like Legos and then share with this person to give them what they need think of all the requests for information or the the common tasks that you perform on a regular basis imagine if you had a note that was like a standard template that you could use and again and almost kind of semi automate something that you do often such as running a report or compiling a meeting agenda inbound and outbound links basically allow you to make explicit the connections between documents that you already know but that sometimes you forget about or sometimes get broken and you know connections can seem like a kind of random thing to put out there but I was reading recently this summary of the research of this man named Eddie opera and the Atlantic where he was telling he was talking about his research over decades on creative people how do creative people have novel ideas and novel breakthroughs and I love that he his research really demystified a lot of what we think of as this kind of mystical thing called creativity down to just recognizing relationships making associations and connections realizing that this thing is like this thing these two things that seem to be two things are actually one thing or this one thing seems to be two things and I think we can actually improve our creativity not as a mysterious internal force but as something that's tangible and practical and real and something that can be shared with others by creating these kind of links between our different chunks of knowledge and the third thing that you can use your second brain for is to create and I know that we're create you might think well I'm an analyst or I'm a director or I'm a vice president why don't what do I have to be creating we often think of creating as like an artist or a songwriter but that's really not what I mean I think there's a really good reason for us all to think of ourselves as creators this is a study that came out in 2013 that looked at which kinds of jobs would last the longest as autumn a ssin computerization artificial intelligence advanced what are the kinds of jobs that will be most resistant to technological change that will still be available for humans and what they found is that it wasn't jobs that required these most powerful or the greatest memory or the most advanced skills it was jobs that required that they used the ability to convey not just information but a particular interpretation of information they found that building maintaining promoting advocating for a perspective particular frame an interpretation of what is happening is what is most valuable and what will be most specific to humans and here's the thing about an interpretation what separates a strong interpretation from an opinion is supporting evidence not just what you think or what you believe but what you can show what you can prove and for that you need examples illustrations screenshots statistics mind maps diagrams book notes quotes these are just some examples of the kind of back up data supporting evidence that you need to be able to actually have your interpretation make a difference have it be something compelling powerful that can change the conversation that can possibly determine whether an investment happens or not or what the terms are or what the are what the agreement is and an interpretation is not something you sit down and you just create it's not just opening a word document and writing down my interpretation my investments philosophy it's actually something that emerges it emerges organically over time from a long process of testing and refining and evolving and developing ideas ideas and arguments and this process I really think is a process of creating knowledge at every step of the way in every intermediate stage as you're refining your argument or your theory you're creating something you're creating artifacts so here's some examples of what it looks like to actually create knowledge in pursuit of an interpretation it starts with seeing seeing things differently and this is can be a while switching environments working from a different location working around different people working on a different team can include getting feedback from users from frontline employees from on-the-ground managers that might help you actually understand what what about business functions on the ground or in your reason's service asking people what they think what they what they believe and actually having a place to store that or it'll be accessible in the future this could include writing taking good notes has been shown to greatly improve recall and retention hi even highlighting it the simple act of highlighting or underlining something you're reading you start to practice the judgement of what matters and what doesn't matter what is the main point and what is not the main point sharing on social media with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn we're all sort of these constant media publishers putting out little snippets of things we've discovered are things we like or things we are things we want others to like that's a form of creating knowledge drawing is a wonderful way there's a there's a few better ways of understanding an idea and trying to represent it visually this could be sketch notes visual notes it can be creating diagrams or drawings trying to show Trenton's trying to show to show what the numbers are saying in a more visual way could include making slides often the process of putting your ideas into a presentation even if you never presented can kind of help you work out the logic of what you're trying to say creating knowledge can be can include performance you could present at a meet-up every city has meetups where you can get in front of an audience and speak on something as long as it's related to the topic of the Meetup you could speak in an event or conference if you really want accelerate your learning on a topic put yourself forward as an authority as someone who knows what they're talking about and your learning will skyrocket even if you don't want to get in front of people you could record a video video consumption is rapidly taking over the internet we of Instagram stories and Facebook and snapchat and periscope and all these new apps every year that allow you to express yourself through video this could include producing things summarized a book that is popular in your field for others who don't have the time to read it interpret or critique a common investment philosophy that you think is flawed in some way translate something to an alternative medium turn a book into an outline outline into an audio recording an audio recording to a transcript there's so many ways with digital information to quickly convert it into different content to different formats that are easier to share and of course if you really want to test the value of your ideas selling is maybe the ultimate way and this includes actual selling of course sometimes you don't have that opportunity in your role but it could include teaching selling your ideas or selling collaborations selling your boss on devoting more resources to a particular approach selling your team on contributing their skills and their knowledge to something that you're working on every single one of the activities on this slide produces something some sort of tangible artifact that then you can save back to your second brain which continues to get recycled and reviewed in a kind of feedback loop this way of thinking is really well summarized in a quote by the 18th century philosopher John Battista Vigo he said we only know what we make and I think this this attitude is an excellent antidote to the the culture of information hyper-consumption this idea that you should just consume as much as you can if it's true that you only know what you make the only way to know more things is to make more things and I think we would all benefit by shifting some of our effort from consuming to actually producing more things not just to create more value for the business but to provide more satisfaction filming the fulfillment of actually seeing something that you gave birth to from your own thinking and your own ideas zooming out now to the big picture I think most people's knowledge is like a dense jungle the knowledge is there it exists and I'm sure it's very valuable but it's hidden there it's hidden in a morass of files and folders spread across many different locations it's impossible to access and if knowledge is not is is impossible to access it can't really be used as you begin this process of creating digital notes of externalizing and offloading your knowledge from your first brain to your second brain you start to reveal your personal knowledge landscape you start to see the boundaries around what you know and what you don't know which sometimes is even more valuable you start to see there's a mountain over here which represents that you know a lot about a certain topic and over here there's a small hill which means you know a little bit or there's a Valley or a recess which means you know nothing knowing what you know is the kind of self-awareness and sort of meta awareness that is so valuable in industries such as yours which are both simultaneously information hyper abundant and also rely on very subtle judgments and subtle interpretations the question often comes up that's people engage in this process what is my first brain for if the second brain is so powerful and we have the technology and everything what is left for me to do and this can even be a little threatening and I think has been the source of some resistance to knowledge management or knowledge capture in the past is if the company knows everything that I know what's left for me and this is why the focus on personal knowledge management is so important it's not about extracting anything it is about giving each person the tools and the mindset and the and the methods to get maximum value from their knowledge for the period of time that they are with the company and what people often find is as even when they begin offloading what they know onto software onto digital notes it frees up tremendous bandwidth it's like a whole new channel opens up in your mind that before I was occupied with trying to remember and track to dues and details and different pieces of research it opens up to be more situationally aware in a situation where situational awareness is simply knowing which trends opportunities and threats are developing in an environment or in a domain or in a field and I really think that situational awareness is one of the critical skills for surviving and thriving in the 21st century it's knowing what a subject is about or useful for instead of knowing every detail of a subject that matters because once we know what knowledge is worth acquiring we can acquire that knowledge on demand as needed the challenge is knowing which knowledge is worth acquiring once you do you can go to where or who has that expertise and can give it to you rather than trying to have all the expertise yourself situational awareness is the job that I think humans are designed for the humans are meant to have the more of the low value jobs that we hand over to computers the more of our time in their time and energy will be freed up for this kind of higher value strategic thinking and ultimately at the end of the day after the end of the work day what all this is really about is fulfilling the original promise of technology the original promise you remember what it was the original promise of labor-saving devices was that they were going to free us they were going to free us from the drudgery and the mindless routine and the low skill low value jobs that anyone could do so we could be more productive more effective and spend our precious time and our our precious skills working on the most difficult biggest challenges that we can and if we do that I think it'll be making an investment not just a financial investment but an investment of knowledge investing our knowledge in such a way that it starts to produce returns starts to produce a value completely on its own apart from our time and our ending like being there in person to monitor and to manage things by investing our knowledge in artifacts that have their own life and their own existence apart from us we can be free to live the lives we want to live lives that are more satisfying that are less stressful that are more purposeful and more fulfilling and imagine what you could accomplish as a company if you had a culture that allowed that where technology was on a necessary evil or something to fix so that you could get things done but instead was something that actually accelerated people's learning and accelerated their ability to apply what they know to create real real results that is the ultimate purpose of personal knowledge management I want to thank you for being excellent audience as I said before if this is something that resonates with you that you would like to find out more about talk to me after this talk and we'll be happy to tell you more about my intensive online course which goes much deeper called building a second brain thank you