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This is a guest talk by Tiago Forte on the PARA method – a methodology for organizing your digital information across every platform.

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Transcript

0:00 My Story begins about 2 500 years ago with a man a philosopher named Aristotle you may have heard of him Aristotle one day had a kind of bright idea

0:20 he said he claimed he asserted that knowledge all human knowledge all of it could be classified could be organized according to its substance its quantity it’s quality it’s relation its place its time position State action and passion

0:43 a sense reading about Aristotle’s theory that it was a weekend project and you know what we’ve all been there we’ve all been there we’re working on some difficult project and we think okay I’m really stressed out and overwhelmed let me just take a weekend get organized quote unquote get all my stuff together

1:00 and then I can start on Monday nice and and clear and clear-minded little did Aristotle know first of all there’s no there’s no indication that he succeeded that he that he actually succeeded in creating uh this kind of universal classification this Universal

1:19 taxonomy for all knowledge but little did Aristotle know he was kicking off a millennia’s long Quest by many many thinkers and philosophers and writers and scientists to create a universal taxonomy a taxonomy is simply a it’s a classification system for not

1:42 just animals or plants or elements on the periodic table but for all knowledge for everything basically a couple thousand years later there were definitely many people in between who tried but a couple thousand years later Francis Bacon the scientist and

2:00 philosopher said you know what let me take a crack at this he was probably also having a tough week he needed a nice little weekend project to get organized and he said you know Aristotle was a smart guy but uh it’s too complicated that’s all too much to think about

2:19 really there’s just three categories memory which is basically history reason which is philosophy and Imagination which is the Fine Arts okay simpler a simpler system that he had a few hundred years later

2:37 ranganathan who was a mathematician and the father of Indian Library science said you know what let me take another shot at this we’ve tried many times before but let me introduce these sort of more abstract categories that can be more Universal

2:56 like personality matter energy space and time let’s try to classify all human knowledge according to these five criteria okay then he actually introduced a more sophisticated system called faceted classification

3:12 that was designed to classify our more plentiful complex modern knowledge but none of them succeeded no one was really able to pull off this feat to organize the world’s information and

3:30 make it universally accessible and useful right it was sort of a a hopeless Quest until Google came around in the early 2000s the early 20th century and made this their mission if these words sound familiar this was Google’s original

3:48 original mission statement this was the reason that Google came to be was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful and in one sense Google succeeded finally where so many others had failed and they succeeded by taking a

4:06 completely different approach than anyone had taken before instead of creating a fixed set of categories a fixed hierarchy where all knowledge was organized into and instead of using manual human efforts you know lesions of organizers or Librarians or filers to individually

4:26 with human manual effort decide where each and every piece of knowledge goes they used a completely different approach they used technology graph databases and um and crawlers and indexing and different uh different kinds of

4:45 technology that made it possible for computers which work night and day and never sleep to do that organizing for us and to do it in a way that’s constantly evolving and changing and most importantly that can be searched with a single question or a single word and instantly find your answer

5:06 okay so in a sense this little search box was the answer to a millennia’s long Quest and it’s really changed the world hasn’t it think about so it’s kind of already part of our day-to-day life but think about how natural and easy it is for us to go to Google anytime we have a question or

5:26 even just want to find something or find you know a resource it’s almost an unconscious habit Google has especially changed the world of information right so much of what in the in the past would have been involved in you know referencing and classifying and

5:44 cross-referencing and then creating indices all manually is now just accomplished with this simple little page that is free but but but there’s always a but there is

6:03 a realm of information that Google has not transformed that search engines cannot even really touch and that is the world of personal information okay think about personal information that is not necessarily authoritative is

6:24 not officially verified is not even public and yet it’s still important to you it’s relevant it’s personally relevant to you and your life okay think about how much of your day you spend interacting with personal information

6:42 at first glance it might seem like that’s a small Niche you know like oh I think Google pretty much takes care of everything maybe there’s a few things here and there that a search engine can’t find but I want to suggest to you that actually per this this seemingly small category of personal information is actually vast

6:59 it’s actually multi-faceted and complex and it’s actually fundamental to living Our Lives I’ll give you four examples so when I say personal information I mean the simple little bits of documents and data that you use to run your life

7:18 your to-do list right Google can’t really search your to-do list can’t really index that your calendar your agenda your contacts your notes all things that are extremely relevant to you personally but that aren’t really um subject to search engine technology

7:38 think about your personal memories your photos there we’ve made a little bit of progress we have things like Google photos and apple photos and Flickr right but still kind of manually intensive uh even more so with videos and even more so with think about all the

7:57 messages you’ve exchanged the emails the stories the experiences that are your personal history your personal background that might not have any importance to anyone else in the world but they do to you think about your personal perspective okay not the content you consume we can

8:15 search that but your interpretations of the content you can see your opinions about the ideas you’ve you’ve read about your theories your beliefs your hypotheses about how the world works or your your organization works or how your health works or how relationships work okay your takes even

8:36 if they’re not fully vetted fully proven fully authoritative finally your personal knowledge we live in a knowledge driven economy or in this knowledge era of human history supposedly what about your ideas your insights your

8:56 expertise your lessons your tacit knowledge you know it’s kind of amazing if I asked you what do you know about X and instead of X insert whatever topic you have the most expertise about okay at first you might think of what

9:13 you have expertise about and think yes I am an expert in that I do have that expertise but can you tell me what it is can you name the top 10 most important insights from your field can you tell me what is your particular approach to your your discipline or your area can you

9:31 tell me the biggest lessons you’ve learned from your successes or failures from your career so far most people I’ve found absolutely cannot so we’re left with this very weird situation where if I want to know about a topic

9:49 it’s easier for me to search the entire internet what everyone else thinks experts leaders or even just random people spouting off whatever it’s easier for me to find out what they all know about some area of expertise then it is for me to find out what I myself know

10:09 about my own area of expertise isn’t that odd isn’t that so strange that personal knowledge seems to be the sort of this final frontier of making knowledge universally useful and accessible over the past couple decades since about

10:28 the late 90s a field has arisen a new discipline has been created called personal Knowledge Management or PKM to resolve this this lack this shortfall okay started in libraries actually at UCLA you’re not

10:47 far from where I am um and spread all around the world there’s now conferences and journals and academic studies and research and all sorts of things happening with personal Knowledge Management my contribution my part of this field is to popularize it my mission is to make more people all

11:07 over the world discover PKM how it might help them and how to actually put it into practice PKM also has a historical Legacy and it’s a historical Legacy that is almost as old as our as our efforts to

11:27 classify all knowledge it’s called commonplace books the word commonplace comes from the ancient Greek and it was during political assemblies or courts of law or other meetings it was the record-keeping mechanism it was a book or scroll or something where the

11:45 records were kept one common place were all decisions and records and ideas and actions were recorded and the amazing thing about commonplace books is it keeps popping up in history again and again and again and again every time there is a period of change

12:03 or uncertainty every time there’s a there’s an epic where people need to just make sense of what is happening to them there seems to be this practice of keeping a private book or notebook or Journal such as the one you see here where it’s not about necessarily what is

12:22 factual of course you can write facts in there but it’s also your opinions your ideas your theories your pictures that inspire you stories that move you memories you want to revisit it’s really like an extension of your mind to more accurately reflect the information really it comes down to information to

12:41 content that you find valuable enough to keep and to revisit over time okay so comment Place commonplace books have have Arisen in Japan and China during periods of intense change and uncertainty uh in Eastern Europe uh during periods of uncertainty most

12:58 famously in Europe especially Northern Europe and Western Europe this practice really profoundly shaped uh so much of the way people thought during the Renaissance the enlightenment the Scientific Revolution the Industrial Revolution and I think for that very

13:16 same reason it’s being reinvented again today we again live in a period of intense change and uncertainty we don’t know what’s going to happen all of our grand narratives about history about nation states about the future and the past are all breaking down and in a way we’re having to individually on a

13:35 person-by-person level at a person-by-person level make sense of what is happening to us and around us so in a funny way we’re back to that Original Classic Quest but with a little twist

13:54 okay you know in one sense it’s easier our Quest our mission has become a lot easier instead of trying to organize the world’s information especially at the rate at which the world is producing it we’re just trying to organize an individual’s just our own information and instead of trying to make it

14:13 universally accessible and useful to all people in so many different situations and backgrounds we’re just trying to make it personally accessible and useful just for us just for ourselves so in a way this is a much smaller easier scope right it’s much much

14:31 smaller in scope but in another way and this is what I’ve discovered is it’s way harder in a very strange way paradoxically it’s harder because when you deal with an individual you absolutely have to go into that person’s psychology

14:48 you have to think about and address their fears their hopes their hams their idiosyncrasies their baggage their temperament their preferred thinking style the way that their individual mind works in a funny way it’s actually easy it’s

15:07 actually harder to do all that for yourself because you’re sort of immersed in it you can’t see the forest for the trees uh another reason that it is in a way harder to make information individually and personally useful and accessible so I wrote a book spent many years

15:26 teaching speaking coaching a ton of personal experimentation to write this book right here which I’m holding in my hand and which you can see on the screen it’s called the para method it’s a small book it’s about a third the size of a typical hardcover uh non-fiction book

15:45 and that’s because it’s incredibly distilled it’s really just a 100 Pages or so summarizing and Distilling more than a decade of my experience teaching people to make their own digital commonplace book I’m going to introduce you to it briefly

16:04 and then say a little bit about kind of how it works and why it works so just take a drink of coffee so Pera is an acronym it is four letters Each of which stands

16:25 for an essential category of information in your life and work and I assert I I offer I propose that these four categories everyone has them every single person in the world has them and all of the

16:44 information all of it in any format coming in any medium through any channel or platform in any format for whatever purpose can be saved in one of these four categories the first is Project the first and most

17:02 important these are pretty much the conventional definition of projects short-term efforts in your worker life that you’re working on now there’s areas of responsibility which are long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time don’t necessarily have an end point an end date but something you want to keep track of kind

17:21 of over the long term there are resources basically everything else topics or interests that may be useful in the future anything you’re passionate about interested in curious about any assets or templates or reusable pieces of information that you

17:38 might want to reference again and again and finally there’s the archive which is inactive items anything that is inactive or finished or no longer relevant from the previous three categories so projects that have been finished or put on hold areas of responsibility that are no longer active

17:56 but that you want to keep reference information about resources that you’re no longer interested in but that you want to keep around I’ll go into the archive within each of these top level categories these kind of big buckets

18:14 there is one more layer there is one more set of folders or tags or links or whatever is the organizing mechanism that you use which is one specific folder or tag or link or whatever it is dedicated to each of the individual projects that are

18:34 currently active right now folder dedicated to each of the areas that are active in your life right now a folder for each of the resources that you’re keeping information about and as you work with those three categories and you finish things and things go out of date you’ll put them in the archives

18:53 okay so two levels four top level categories and then a larger number of subcategories each one of them related to not just an abstract kind of uh like an abstract category like the ones we saw at the beginning of

19:11 my talk you know you know space and time and personality and all these things but actual things happening in your life right now real things that you actually have to move forward and keep track of when it comes to personal information

19:33 the the the the biggest constraint the biggest bottleneck is your time and energy okay when you’re dealing with say a library or a database you might have full-time technicians full-time I.T people you know Librarians uh Specialists who are can can dedicate

19:53 hours and hours per day that’s their job to keep it all organized when it comes to your personal information you don’t you don’t right energy and time bandwidth basically is the overwhelming constraint when I when it comes to personal

20:09 information and knowledge so in my work teaching and coaching people what I found is that for each piece of information you really only have time and energy to ask one question one question at most even that there’s times where that will be difficult and

20:28 you’ll have to kind of you know put things on hold for a while but one question is where we max out that’s the most we can afford to spend thinking about each piece of knowledge that comes across our our our mind

20:46 I’ve tried many questions some of the questions that you saw from Aristotle and Francis Bacon and ranganathan and others many other questions have been proposed but I think when it comes to the level of the individual that this is the best one this is the single question you can ask that yields the biggest results which is

21:05 how and when will I use this next and I know that’s kind of cheating because it’s sort of two questions but the reason it works is that really there’s only four answers to make this question to make answering this question even easier I’ll make a multiple choice for you there’s not an

21:22 infinite number of choices there’s just four either it’s a piece of information that is relevant to one of your current projects and I put those kind of at the top of the pyramid because that’s the most important those are things that are short term they’re active they’re alive right now there might be actions you

21:41 need to take today or in the next hour or tomorrow or this week related to your projects they should come first second a piece of information could be relevant to one of your areas if not it could be relevant to your resources and if not it can go in the archives or

21:57 simply be deleted what you’re looking at on the screen is called an information hierarchy it’s one of the oldest and most persistent patterns in in really all of information and what it tells us is that there is a little bit of information that is most important which is the top of the

22:15 pyramid which you see as projects then there’s a little more information that is less important but still important which is areas then there’s the rest of all everything else the mass of other stuff that may be worth keeping but is really much less important and that’s the

22:34 bottom half of the pyramid the few reasons that I think this works so well and there are reasons that this approach this method is so simple that it can be used from third grade

22:53 classrooms I know of at least one third grade classroom that’s using it to you know organize their class supplies and their arts and crafts all the way to Executives at major companies whole entire teams and departments at Fortune 500 companies governmental agencies leaders

23:12 it’s really a methodology that applies to an extremely broad range of people the first reason is that it’s just so simple with the intention of minimizing your cognitive load this is really the the most important point

23:29 you do not have extra cognitive load or in other words decision making capacity or in other words bandwidth to spare do you pretty much I don’t know I don’t know about you but I feel like just managing my my work and then my life and my household and my family just basically

23:46 adulting takes pretty much a hundred percent of my bandwidth pretty much every single day so the Simplicity is not for its own sake it’s not just an aesthetic thing to look cool it’s about minimizing the amount of decisions you have to make second it’s actionable

24:07 okay we are not full-time knowledge classifiers we are not trying to build a Library of Alexandria we are trying to move forward tangible projects and reach specific goals both across our working career and our personal lives

24:24 the information that we organize should be or should be should should be structured accordingly to support those projects and goals and third it’s Universal going back to that original Quest that Aristotle kicked off

24:43 okay it’s Universal but not quite in the sense that he thought it’s not Universal in the sense that it works for you know all of humanity but it is universal across an individual’s systems okay every device you use you probably use many devices every platform you use

25:00 I find most modern knowledge workers use a dozen or so different platforms if you really include them all not to mention the people you work with think about all the places where you organize and share knowledge that multiple people have to access a shared Google Drive a shared notion doc a shared click up space

25:19 okay these four categories are so easy to understand and really they use terminology and Concepts that everyone knows everyone knows what a project is everyone knows what a responsibility is a resource and an archive we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here we’re trying to create a common set of terms that you always understand across the

25:38 various domains of your life and so do others to finish off here I want to take a sharp turn this talk so far has been pretty conceptual I’ve tried to keep it I’ve

25:57 tried to keep it pretty simple but I know organizing stuff can always be a little abstract so I want to I want to finish by telling you where this all came from this is something I don’t think I really talked about before and it explains why para is the way it is and specifically why I am such a huge

26:17 believer in projects why projects are this overriding um priority in our in our in our information but also in our lives okay why I think projects are so important and why I think you should

26:34 consider them to be so important these photos are from my service in the Peace Corps from about 2009 to 2011. I served as a Peace Corps volunteer a Peace Corps if anyone doesn’t know is a U.S government

26:52 organization that was founded in the 1960s and it basically since then has sent uh Americans of all ages abroad to developing countries to serve serve in various capacities democracy building health

27:10 education my role specifically was in education I was assigned you don’t get to choose where you go you are simply assigned I was assigned to a small town called kupiansk in eastern Ukraine far Northeastern Ukraine my day job was to be a teacher so every

27:30 day I would pack up my stuff put on my very very warm clothing especially in the winter and head over to school where I would teach grade teach grades third through 10 third grade through 10th grade English teach them what I knew on these ancient chalkboards like the one you see

27:51 on the left how to improve their English skills which was really a Gateway for them to uh to better jobs better Futures better living standards to working in Europe or in other countries and to being successful and accessing the internet

28:10 so my day job was teaching English but my real passion was a program that I started called PVC which stands for Project screen change probably no surprise and what I would do is go to Summer Camps summer camps are a big tradition in Ukraine everyone during the summer

28:28 all the young people going to the countryside to the rivers to Lakes to the the seaside and they have these summer camps some of them would be English summer camps and what I would do is recruit uh small groups of especially promising teenager students they were in high school such as the ones you see in

28:47 the photo on the bottom there and what I would do is teach them what we would call basic life skills or project management or productivity skills really basic stuff things that we we probably learned just as part of our normal schooling things like how to make a goal

29:06 how to organize some materials how to make a budget how to make a timeline how to call someone and ask for a donation these these kind of basic organizing both in the sense of organizing information and organizing a community

29:24 or organizing an effort or a project and we would then use those skills over the course of a few days to plan and execute a community service project instead of keeping it abstract we would immediately put it into action doing a trash cleanup or painting a mural or

29:43 fixing a playground or raising money for an important cause something that contributed to their local community this was kind of a A New Concept for many of them because in post-soviet countries so often in the case is that the state is supposed to do all those things

30:01 the the old centralized Soviet state was responsible for picking up trash and for maintaining buildings and for keeping parks and all these things in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union that is no longer the case and what we were really doing is exploring what it meant to to just step up and contribute to your own Community

30:20 using whatever Knowledge and Skills and resources you had at your disposal and you know these little projects were trivial okay they didn’t exactly change Ukrainian Society doing a trash pickup

30:38 or a painting a mural on the side of a building or whatever it was those things are trivial but what wasn’t trivial what was actually incredibly profound to me was seeing the change that even such a small project could have in these kids

30:56 remember this was just a few days it all had to happen during a at most week-long summer camp but executing these small community service projects I began to see these kids completely change how they saw

31:13 themselves I began to see sometimes in real time almost the look in their eyes as they as they realized that this light came on this awareness that they were leaders that they had everything that they needed to make a difference

31:31 they didn’t have to wait they didn’t need permission they didn’t need some authority to to ask them to do it or to choose them I’ll never forget this brainstorm that we made my one of my groups was telling me Oh there’s nothing we can do you know we don’t have any money uh and you know

31:49 it’s just too hard and oh that that you know problem that part of town has been has been a mess just since we can remember that nothing was possible and we just did a simple brainstorm on the chalkboard using Post-its on one side of the chalkboard we did a brainstorm

32:06 of the projects that we could do basically the needs that the community service had what were the needs what were the projects that we could execute if we could do anything on the other side of the chalkboard we did a brainstorm of resources every kind of resource they had access to any tools any supplies any donations

32:26 any money even if it was just a little bit also resources like knowledge what did they know what did they know how to do what was their knowledge of their Community even relationships who did they know in their Community who might be able to help who had a special skill a special tool had a pickup truck

32:44 at a wheelbarrow even and then the magical moment was when we looked at these two brainstorm clouds and we just began to match them we began to match every need with a resource by the time we were done almost every need that we could think of had some

33:03 kind of resource already existing in the community that they had access to that could either solve it or at least make a big difference stop sharing that after a couple years in the Peace Corps I came back to San Francisco

33:24 to start my kind of professional career and not long after I arrived I started doing the coaching and the teaching and sometimes for free sometimes with friends sometimes running workshops in the co-working space for my my fellow co-workers

33:41 on what I was learning about productivity about personal Effectiveness about how to organize knowledge and to my surprise I I saw the exact same phenomenon at work in the lives of these high-powered in many cases Elite professionals as I saw in my Ukrainian students

33:59 some self-doubt some uncertainty some questions about whether they were really capable whether they were really able to make the change often in their own careers or on their team or with their customers that they wanted to make and so I took the very same approach

34:16 what is a project how could you in a matter of days or weeks at most create a plan create a goal assemble some resources take some actions and what I kept finding again and again and still fine to this day

34:33 I don’t know of an of a better mechanism or a faster mechanism to change your identity to completely transform how you see yourself when you look in the mirror to to Really radically Elevate what you believe you’re capable of doing than a

34:51 simple project that observation that fact is so important it’s so powerful that what I recommend if you take away one thing from what I’ve said today is that you organize your entire Digital Life all the resources and knowledge you

35:09 have access to around the completion of those projects and goals that is the heart and the essence of para and that’s it thank you amazing give it up for thiaga everyone

35:26 thank you fantastic I think hearing about that last part to really really brought home the origins for us as well that was uh I know that resonated a lot with folks I think we have time for questions and

35:43 I’m sure there’s a bunch so uh if you could raise your hand using the zoom raise hand feature and uh we’ll get some questions for Thiago around the Peace Corps around Pera and everything in between yeah Amy nice to see you did you keep in touch with

36:02 your students um I’m sure a lot of if you’re thinking about them a lot right now I am yes yeah it’s been a it’s been obviously such an understatement but a really hard not just past few years but if you go

36:19 back to 2014 2015 you know it’s sort of the the initial stages of what of the war we’re seeing today it’s been an incredibly difficult decade most of my students have left uh thankfully actually they’ve left either eastern Ukraine and gone to

36:36 Western Ukraine or left the country altogether in many cases their English skills and their their digital and sort of you know professional skills have enabled them to go further and to find better situations in other countries than they would otherwise thankfully most of them are safe they’ve

36:54 had to leave the country but it’s been just an absolute tragedy and yes I have I have kept in touch with with I’d say a few of them yeah so I was just curious um may have already covered it and apologize I showed up late but um I have a I’ve fully adapted the

37:14 second brain to my personal life now I do run an agency and we have different client projects of course and I try to duplicate duplicate the same methodology for the business but it can sometimes get kind of scattered and there’s some

37:32 gray areas obviously with me running both of them um do you suggest having one second brain for personal and business or do you suggest you’re personal and then you can have your build a similar framework just because when I’m brainstorming whatever if I’m on the treadmill or

37:50 something brainstorming I add resources I’m like okay well this is an idea not yet get to bring it to fruition and while it’s kind of cooking and the framework I want to wait until I bring it into the business side does that make sense because I have two different workspaces in notion and um just try to

38:10 see if you recommend keeping them that separate or how to blend it safely yeah good question so what I would recommend is you can and probably should have both but what’s so important is that you have either part of your second brain or you know one of your second brains that is

38:30 totally private and personal um I sometimes see people think well the ultimate purpose of all this information is to share and to you know is to share and collaborate with others so let me just you know use my company Wiki or my team’s notion workspace or our shared Google drive to just store

38:53 everything and that really doesn’t work because excuse me I think this is why when information ideas first arise they’re often really random they’re messy they’re not policy sometimes they don’t make sense sometimes they’re kind

39:10 of they’re kind of dumb like you you sometimes need to develop them and kind of think them through and and really bring them to a certain level of Polish a certain level of kind of respectability before you share them with other people you don’t want to be the guy on your team that is always just like oh look at this look at that and people are just like what even is this

39:27 this makes no sense to me like you don’t want to be that person okay you do want to reach a certain level of Polish before it gets shared but you don’t want that that’s that certain level of Polish to be a barrier to you capturing ideas in the first place right so you need a private let’s say second brain and that might be an app on

39:46 your phone which is like the most close to the vest private personal place no one else is going to look there pretty much to save ideas in the first place and then later when it’s time to share and collaborate it goes to something more public and shareable um now where that dividing line is is up to you and you have a few different

40:05 options sometimes they’re completely separate apps like for me I have Evernote for my personal stuff and notion and click up for anything that’s for the company uh or it could be within one application itself like maybe you just have some projects that are work and right next to

40:24 them other projects that are personal and then some areas that are work and some that are personal right so they don’t they don’t necessarily have to be completely separate software programs but there needs to be some kind of dividing line so you know that stuff is public this stuff is private okay awesome I appreciate that sure

40:44 I also have a a chapter in my book which is all about using para for teams which anyone interested in that topic can can check out uh so I’m curious about a couple of things uh one when it comes to visibility of uh folders within uh the parent method you mentioned uh going on

41:04 the two levels deep but for me I that has not been the case and I’m not able to um or I’m curious to know how you approach it because the way I do it is I change the name names of the files or I add like an underscore or a symbol to to increase the visibility of things that

41:23 might be like that go too deep into um the para folders so I’m curious to know how are you able to manage everything with only two levels and then I’m also curious about um maintaining para across multiple platforms so if you’re using a to-do

41:43 list or email things like that how do you ensure that you you’re aware of everything that exists for a project across all tools that you use yeah okay so for the first one um the two levels is really a think of it

42:02 like a helpful constraint okay you can do more you know no one will stop you you know no alarms Sirens will go off but think about what you’re starting to do when you have three four five six levels of subfolders upon subfolders and subfolders

42:21 yeah I think there’s a few things that are happening you’re first of all you’re hiding things right things that are buried the deeper they’re they’re getting buried in that hierarchy the the less as you also mentioned the less the chances that you’re gonna you know come across it you’re also creating more work for

42:38 yourself when you go to replicate that structure across platforms right if you have let’s say three levels to your folder structure and you’re using typical person uses three four five six different platforms you’re now having to replicate you know three levels across all those it’s kind of a

42:55 lot of work right so the answer is kind of the answer to your second question which is so much of the that problem the pitfalls involved in kind of like too many layers too many complexity too much complexity uh is solved by keeping projects small

43:15 keeping projects small think about it like as soon as a project gets big there starts to be problems that you that you can’t really avoid you just have more stuff to manage you have more layers of the hierarchy you have more kinds of data now you have to start introducing you know more sophisticated ways of organizing that inevitably take

43:34 more time take more effort and have to be maintained far into the future but if you keep a project small like my typical project takes place in about two weeks for a two-week project I’ll accumulate maybe five to ten items you know for the average project five to

43:53 ten PDFs text documents photos diagrams uh reports with five to ten items you don’t need you’ll have to organize them at all there’s nothing to organize you just put them in a single list you know you just have them you can look at all of them in one glance see what

44:11 they are what they’re called find exactly what you need and so this idea of micro projects making your projects very small and quickly completed even if the ultimate project is huge right like so my example I always use is writing a book probably

44:28 the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken took me three and a half four years but the way that I conceived of it in my mind and in my second mind was just as a as a long series of micro projects right like the first project was just to find an agent and for two that was actually

44:48 like a month or two long project all I did was try to find my agent didn’t even worry about anything else then that was finished spent another month or two finding an editor that was the only project that I focused on related to my book right I think so often people there’s a big temptation to start this Mega project because you’re excited

45:07 right you’re like let me just start 15 different work streams all at the same time and then I’m gonna I’m gonna make progress along all these fronts 24 7 all at once which works for about three or four days and then the weekend hits and then you just collapse and then you come back on Monday and you’re like what was I

45:25 thinking oh my gosh I don’t have the energy for this this is way too much stuff so what I instead Advocate is for people to just keep that Frontier very small just work on the next step which is usually a project within itself and that way you you almost don’t have to worry about how to organize your you

45:45 know your your support material because there’s just so little of it and then you finish that project archive it away and start over fresh every two or three weeks you’re starting over in a sense rather than trying to organize all the information in one giant hierarchy does that help yep thank you

46:05 uh my question is about uh the management of information across physical media so for example if you want to organize your systems I think you are more more of a proponent of the online uh version but there’s also the

46:25 the whole offline method the old school uh subtle custom and all that we don’t have to go into that my main question is uh for me my problem would be reading a book and wanting to write notes and then um either if it’s a PDF or a physical

46:43 book most importantly having to sort of manage the notes and the file itself in this case if I use like a um on a more academic level if you use like a reference management system you may have the PDF linked with the reference in the system there and or you

47:01 have the file in the folder and then you have the ability to annotate inside that sort of software but also you may have your own note-taking system so for that sort of application you’ll then you also have of course physical books and you want to put all that together and I’ve had really a hard

47:19 time uh combining maybe the note-taking part is probably the easiest but the connection between a physical media and the note like when I find the notes I’m I have to make all these adjustments about where

47:38 did I find this I guess it occurs also with uh if it’s a website old website or something like that what sort of practical ways of solving this have you found because I’ve found that it’s a real bottleneck for me to consume content keep those concise ideas and then link

47:59 them together later and then go back and you know this loop it’s really not working for me right now thank you so much I mean what you’re describing is is the whole the whole issue that’s the whole question that we’re trying to solve here um there’s not there’s not one app that

48:18 you will download that will solve the you know that will resolve the the problem you just described uh we’re all struggling with it I struggle with it often you know we’re trying to create something that is almost a paradox A system that is totally comprehensive and yet also totally easy to use and

48:40 fluid and flexible A system that is personalized and so customized to us but we also don’t want to do much work we want to just download something off the shelf that works from day one we want something that is you know it’s like these all these these paradoxes that I almost think transcend you know personal

48:57 Knowledge Management that’s kind of what it means to be human you know think about the paradoxes of Being Human we want all the knowledge but we also just want to be left in peace and not have to think about everything we want change and progress but we also just want to be comfy and you know and and and comfortable in our nice little home uh it’s like yeah a

49:18 second brain is is almost just it’s not going to solve all those questions for you but I think there is a certain corner there’s a certain there’s a certain like small subset of those issues that it can solve the one that comes to mind because you mentioned this one is reading books

49:36 when I look at a solution like read wise I don’t know if you’re all familiar with read wise they’re a company um that makes a an app called reader so if you search I know it’s kind of redundant but read wise reader and someone I’m sure can drop a link in the chat who’s familiar with it this is

49:54 practically a perfect solution to reading at least ebooks which is you read a Kindle ebook on a Kindle device or it could be the Kindle app on a smartphone or on an iPad or even your computer you make a highlight by just putting your finger down and making a highlight

50:11 could not be easier you can even add a note like a some con some of your own comments if you want within a few minutes with no further action on your part you don’t have to sync or export or anything just that highlight that you chose will just appear almost magically in your note-taking app and you can use

50:31 any one of a dozen different note-taking apps that they support like to me like what else could you want you know you just did the most minimal amount of effort and it appeared in a personal private secure place that only you have access to which you can then annotate and you can underline and you can even edit and change and do anything

50:49 you want to that is almost like the the 80 20 of having a second brain is to just do that what I just described with your reading uh of course it’s not perfect but I think it’s probably one of the most mature well-developed you know kind of second brain Solutions um are you familiar with that Joan was

51:07 that something that you could try as an experiment yeah I actually tried it and and for some reason it started feeling like I was already doing this I was already reading the thing so and really the transfer seemed like the the easy part the thing that I wanted was to connect them

51:24 seamlessly and also the you’re talking about ebooks which really applies to this and then the problem for me was more about where to put the physical file and the physicality of it because then if you think about downloading a file multiple times uh something gets released in a later Edition and now you

51:44 have two and now you’re not sure which one you use you know those kinds of things I’ve tried read wise and it wasn’t fixing low specific problems yeah when you say physical file do you mean a physical printed book or do you mean like the database file you’re more like the database the database is more massive for me because if I have a book

52:02 on a bookshelf I could always you know it’s it’s more limited data in that sense uh it’s more like localized it’s you know actually occupies physical space but the digital mass of um downloading and and just where to put this file right immediately and then the

52:21 the article has different topics that I’ve discussed as I can just say this is part of a single project it’s probably part of multiple projects and and then I don’t have there’s not a great answer for you there’s no pre there’s no perfect solution it’s just trade-offs it’s just what is more important what is

52:40 less important which downfalls and pitfalls are you most willing to put up with [Laughter] I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that you know and I guess you can take comfort in just knowing I mean I pretty much think about and study this 24 7. it’s just all trade-offs you know I’ll

53:00 I’ll kind of finish saying one thing um you know this thing that we’re doing extracting information from multiple sources compiling it into our own centralized resource to use for our own purposes it’s kind of a revolutionary Act

53:17 you know no one no one wants you to do this definitely the the tech companies there’s a reason that this is a little bit difficult you know Amazon doesn’t want you doing this extracting you know the text from its ebooks Apple you know there’s no way to sync content with Apple notes for example no tech company probably the the government the

53:35 authorities don’t want you to do it either even at work some people might be suspicious like why are you compiling all this data like is that proprietary you know is that the company’s data a lot of people will be suspicious of you they’ll question you there’s something very kind of radical and insurrectionary about just taking control of your own

53:54 data even if it’s just like passages and excerpts from books that you yourself bought it’s kind of wild what I would say though is that it’s worth it that the other side of that revolutionary Act is an incredible amount of freedom and Independence and autonomy that you can then use however you want we’re really trying to break

54:12 free our digital chains you know from the the digital the digital servitude that is so often the case online um that’s what we’re doing with with creating a second brain and doing something as mundane as organizing our files and notes I feel like you’re uh your community can

54:35 stay for another two hours the questions are there and uh and the presentation’s fascinating I think it’s just a testament to uh how many lives this work has touched and how important it is and I think folks especially resonated with uh with some of the stories to show also the humanity

54:53 behind the the projects and behind the the methodology itself so I just want to say thank you for for sharing this with our community and with yours and uh yeah really for putting this on yeah thanks thank you so much Michael uh and Jenny and everyone on the ultra speaking team it’s been a pleasure working with you I

55:10 learned so much uh really shaped how I do how I prepare my talks how I plan them and how I deliver them uh and as a result I’m doing a lot more public speaking so thank you for the work that you do I’ve I’ve been a huge beneficiary amazing yeah thanks so much uh folks that uh that I haven’t met face to face

55:31 thanks for joining um this is part of the ultra speaking Community if you haven’t heard of Us come check us out we’re Ultra speaking.com uh we’ll check if we can share this recording with uh with all of you because I know a lot of you are after it and uh if you have questions I’m sure you can reach out to thiago’s

55:48 team as well so thanks for being here and we’ll see you next time thanks everyone