← Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
How to remember everything — Tiago Forte and his Second Brain
00:27:08
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- [00:01]
Mark Stedman
Welcome back. You're watching seven Random Things, the TV game show where all you have to do is remember seven random things. Alex, you're up next. Can you remember these seven random things? A tape measure, the Boston Celtics, a hammerhead shark, Coventry University, a Walnut, 10,000 Maniacs, and Sir Ben Kingsley. Your time starts now. 20 different TV streaming services and still nothing on. Anyway, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Your brain is is great at having ideas, not so great at keeping them. On average, we can remember around seven things. After that, you get a bit fuzzy. And when we try and keep everything in our working memory, it can make focusing on the task at hand really difficult. Often we have these nagging little tasks we think aren't worth committing to. Paper, you know, pick up the dog's meds, take out the bins, plan your food shopping for the week. What we do is sort of write them on mental sticky notes and then paste them to the front our brain. Now imagine having all of those right at the front of your vision as you go about your daily life. It's just not feasible. What we really need is some sort of second brain, so we can keep this one clear and operational while the other one handles the storage. Luckily, we have just the system for that. This is Undo, so you know I've got your back. I'm Mark Stedman and this is Undo, investigating the modes and methods that keep us organized so we can focus on on the stuff that matters. One quick note before we crack on. Undo is supported entirely by you. So if you like what I'm doing and haven't already made a contribution, you can help keep the show running@patreon.com undo podcast. Thanks. So how well do you remember those items from the top of the show? Let's see how many you can hold in your brain while we talk about the problem of overwhelm. If you know a thing or two about autism, you might be familiar with the metaphor of the Coke bottle. It's used to explain why kids can behave perfectly at school and then suddenly have a meltdown when they get home. I promise this is relevant. So Ali is eight and she goes to what I, as a Brit would call primary school. In her backpack is her lunch and a bottle of Coke. Her brain is like that same bottle of Coke. Before the first lesson, Ali sees a bigger kid push over a smaller one. They're in a different class, so it doesn't feel like there's much she can do about it. And if she stops to help, the Kid. She's going to be late. The Coke bottle is shaken. Then Ali gets to her classroom and the new kid who moved here this term is sitting in Ali's usual seat. She hasn't spoken to this new kid before and doesn't want their first conversation to be a hassle, so she looks for another seat. Again, the bottle is shaken, there's a break, and then the next lesson is history. Everyone's working on their own private craft projects, so the teacher puts the radio on while they're working. Ali loves history, but this noise is all a bit distracting and she doesn't want to mess up her work. Shake the bottle. Later, someone cops a look at her lunch and asks if they'll swap her chocolate bar for their granola bar. Ally has got in trouble for saying no before, so she takes the swap, even though the granola bar tastes like the bottom of a hamster cage. The final class of the day is French and Ali's been eagerly waiting for last week's homework to be marked. It comes back with a B, which, given the amount of work it took, is like a knife to the heart. All day, Ali has been working hard, listening, paying attention, and being a maybe slightly above average student. Nothing particularly horrible has happened. It's just another day at the office. But it's Thursday night, which means spaghetti and meatballs night. That's Ali's favorite. The final bell rings and Ali's dad meets her at the gates. As they're walking back, he asks how her day went. Fine, she says. And then, matter of factly, dad says, oh, I just got a new air fryer. And so we're gonna be having chicken nuggets and chips for tea tonight. That'll be nice, won't it? Ali's in a low pressure environment now, so the cap is off the bottle and all that fizzy Coke pours out and she has a meltdown in the middle of the road. Now, like I said, you don't have to be autistic to recognize some of those signs. If you've ever noticed a sense of overwhelm or a sudden feeling that you just can't even today, it might be that you've filled up your bottle with so much stuff that there's no room for air and the whole damn thing goes off like your own personal Hindenburg. Storing too much in our heads is not good for us. But luckily there's a man with a name straight out of an action movie who can help us clear the gunk from our bottle so we don't Explode when one new task lands on our desk. And that man is Thiago Forte. Thiago grew up in a creative household. His Brazilian mum is a talented singer and his Filipino dad a professional artist. One of four kids, Thiago was exposed to creativity and technology from an early age and quickly found that collecting and organizing knowledge can be a captivating practice. Like our Coke bottle kid, Ali, Thiago was a fairly average student, a bit of a daydreamer and a little clumsy. I think we'd get on well at school. When Thiago was 13, his parents took the kids out of school and packed everyone off to Brazil for a year of cultural immersion. Of course, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the school board, but for Thiago, school was just a distraction from the stuff he wanted to learn that felt more important to him. At university, he started a business fixing computers, then went on to work at an Apple store, helping frustrated people discover what they could create with their Macs. He went off to teach English in Ukraine and to show others how they could organise themselves. Going into corporate work, he found himself getting overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff on his plate. So picked up, read, and then began teaching the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, which I keep teasing and I promise we'll cover in great detail soon. Soon after coming down with a chronic illness in his 20s, Forte started using his note taking and organizational skills to build a database of knowledge about his medical situation. He'd take those skills into his corporate job, being the go to guy who could seemingly remember everything. Eventually he realized where his true value lay. Not in consulting with brands or teaching English as a second language, but in helping people clear out their working memory and store information in a reliable and tidy place. The Second Brain method is surprisingly simple and consists of two acronyms, code and para. Okay, technically the second one is more of an initialism, but you can pick me up on that in your Apple Podcasts review. So CODE stands for capture, organizer, distil and express. Let's go through them one by one. Capture everything. If email has brought one useful thing into our lives, it's the concept of the inbox. Okay, inboxes existed on corporate desks for decades before we made it digital. But now this is something we all experience. Like we talked about in episode nine, the inbox is not a final resting place for information. It's the first port of call, a waystation we can store stuff temporarily to so we don't lose it until we're ready to Put it in its proper place. Your second brain needs an inbox somewhere you can capture all the stuff that comes to you, either from the external world or from your own brain. Oh, that burrito looks good. I should pick up the ingredients next time I'm at the supermarket. And that reminds me, I must buy toilet paper when I'm there. You can do this in an app or in a notebook you carry with you. Although we'll get into the importance of keeping this digital later, the point is to capture it there and then, because you won't remember it. You think you will, but you won't.
- [08:26]
Ed Robertson
The Earth began to cool the autotrophs began to drool, Neanderthals developed tools we.
- [08:30]
Mark Stedman
Built a wall we built a pyramid Math, science, History, unraveling the mystery that all started with a big bang I.
- [08:37]
Ed Robertson
Said, I'm supposed to have this conference call today, but I didn't write the song, so I'm probably just gonna ditch it. She said, oh, what's it for? I said, that's the guy. Chuck Lore. And she said, chuck Lorre?
- [08:47]
Mark Stedman
Yeah.
- [08:48]
Ed Robertson
I said, yeah. And she said, google him.
- [08:50]
Mark Stedman
Yeah.
- [08:51]
Ed Robertson
So I did. Got in the shower, wrote it in the shower. I actually called my wife in and said, can you write this down? I had, like, lather in my face. She wrote it down. I recorded it in my bathing suit and sent it 10 minutes before the conference call.
- [09:04]
Mark Stedman
I'm not a Big Bang Theory fan, but I am a big Bare Naked Ladies fan. If you've got beef with that, catch me outside. And this just gives a quick snapshot into what can happen to a good idea if you don't have a way to capture it as it happens. Organize for actionability. Once you've captured that shower thought, the next thing to do is to organize it. This is probably done later in the day, maybe with a biscuit and a cup of tea, because, you know, I'm all about that cozy life. The idea here is to create a simple structure using tags or folders like labels in Gmail, to categorize your notes and things you found online. If you can't find a good place to store what you found, consider whether it's actually something you need to keep hold of. At least that's the Second Brain method. Personally, I'd like to have a bucket of stuff that's mildly amusing or interesting or something I might want to dive into out of curiosity when I'm escaping another, more important task. By way of example, I keep a folder on my Dropbox account called Joy, which. Which is permanently accessible offline and has currently a video of a bird dancing to iPhone ringtones, a cat making a phone call, a charming voice note from a friend, a musical adaptation of a cat drinking milk, a 25 year old song about computers in the style of the Village People, and a gif of my dad dancing on a TV game show. Undo FM Secondbrain is where you can go if you want to see that particular war crime. The point is, you want to organize for easier access in the future. Like Merlin Mann said back in our inbox zero episode, you don't need a whole byzantine system of nested folders, just a simple tagging system you can remember. There's a little more to organization, which is where we get into the para thing, but let's stay within code and onto the next one. Distill down to the essence, it's one thing to quickly capture stuff that's relevant to a project. Let's say planning your next holiday. You could sift through photos and reviews of different resorts, but after a while one poolside hotel kind of looks like another. The first worldiest of problems. But you get my drift. Here's where you want to start making executive summaries. Really, they're just short paragraphs that give you the basics of what you need to know now. So when you sat there with your cup of tea and your biscuit at the end of the day, or your glass of whiskey and some crackling vinyl, again, I am a cloth cap in human form. When you're doing your shutdown routine, spend a wee bit of time bringing a few notes together and writing a quick summary. So the next time you come to look at that bundle of images and links for that trip, you can quickly remind yourself where you left off. Now, we don't talk a lot about AI here, but this is one area where I think it's immensely useful. I believe that if you can afford to pay a creative person to do creative work, you should do that. And in all other instances, AI can give you access to stuff that might otherwise be beyond your reach. And one of the things AI is really, really good at without you having to give it lots of training is summarization. If you've got a recent iPhone, you might have noticed you can get AI summaries of web pages in your browser. You can do the same thing with ChatGPT. Just give it a link and say summarize this and it'll give you what you need to know. If, like me, you live your life in notion, you can use the inbuilt AI tool to summarize everything in your note so you're not having to waste time getting yourself back up to speed. Express your unique ideas and experiences. Once you've got your notes or your knowledge, what are you going to do with it? This is what I love about Thiago, and it's one reason I think he's one of the good ones, another being that all of the info is available for free on his website. If you think about the Coke bottle analogy or that story from Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies, those bubbled up from my brain, which is pretty cluttered but very good at making connections. Those two things aren't connected, but my brain wanted them around because it knew they would be useful. Admittedly, they would have been safer in a second brain, but for now we'll just have to deal with the squishy organic one that I've got. One reason I think it's good to keep things around that you think are interesting, even if they don't relate to a specific project now, is that you might be able to draw a connection to them later and express them in a unique way. After all, everything we make is merely a synthesis of things we've picked up from other places. The Beatles were combining skiffle with R and B. Hip hop is a mashup of Jamaican dancehall mcing and turntable skills. Baa Baa Black Sheep is basically Mozart's Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with a few extra notes in it. So the Second Brain method isn't just about organizing for the sake of it, but organizing so that you can make something out of it. Be that a song, a blog post, a recipe, or a tabletop rpg. God, all of this stuff. Okay, so I mentioned we have two acronyms to tackle. We're going pretty long here, so I won't dwell on this too much, but how you organize your data is in the Second Brain methodology under one of four buckets which make up the word para. Projects in true GTD style, a project is something with a deadline. It's a collection of things that need to be done by a specific time. A project could be a work thing, like compiling a report or something personal like moving house or robbing a bank. Areas the first A in para is for area of interest. An area is like a project, but it doesn't have a final date. As an example, this episode of Undo is a project because it consists of multiple tasks researching, writing, editing, uploading, and obsessing over how many people downloaded it. Very important work. Whereas Undo itself is an area because I'll stop when I'm dead, or when I run out of ideas or you stop listening, in which case I'll probably collapse like a bad souffle. Resources the R in para stands for resources, and it's probably what one of your notes will turn into. You can create resources directly from your brain, or you might gather them from the Internet by taking clippings or screenshots. Sometimes, if there's a particular great bit of a podcast I like, I might clip it and add it to my list of resources for later. I also use the Notion Web Clipper extension for my Mac so I can add interesting links to my inbox with a couple of clicks. Archive the final A in para is for archive. After your notes, projects or areas have outlived their natural usefulness, shove them up the archive. I think Forte advises you do this fairly aggressively so you're not cluttering up your resources with stuff you don't need anymore. But you definitely want to keep your archive as well structured as your resources. After all, you don't want to spend an afternoon trying to find find that one elusive link to a thing you swore you put in here somewhere but now can't find. Depending on your system archiving it could be as simple as dragging it to a different folder or ticking a box, which gets us to a point I want to hang a bit of a lantern on. Unlike some methods like getting things done or bullet journaling, the second brain approach is pretty digital first. Now, whatever app you use is up to you. Personally, I do think Notion is a pretty good system for keeping everything in one place, but you might find you get on better with Evernote or a combination of different Google apps. And unlike some productivity writers who seem to sort of freeze their ideas in Aspic, Forte is constantly evolving and looking at new ways we can use tech to power up our brains, from exploring AI to investigating new apps that purport to do it all. So if you're a staunch pen and paper person, you might find this digital first approach a bit too clinical. And I can dig it. I had my time with pen and paper, and I really like the sensation of opening a bookmarked page and spreading out the day on a physical work surface. It's nice to physically tick off or strike through a task, and shutting the book at the end of the day is a wonderful way to put that day to bed. But those systems lead to too much repetition, and they make us spend time doing stuff when not best suited for. Computers are brilliant at finding stuff quickly and at drawing connections between things. And while I kind of do secretly, or maybe not so secretly, harbor the notion that there is a coming apocalypse and we do need to learn to survive without technology, well, we've got it. Let's make use of it so we can spend our mental energy on ensuring that apocalypse doesn't happen. So it's exam time. How well did you do Remembering our seven random items from the beginning? Here they are in a tape measure. The Boston Celtics, a Hammerhead shark, Coventry university, a walnut, 10,000 maniacs, and sir Ben Kingsley. If you remembered more than three congrats, you're probably a genius and I would like to recruit you into my secret army of ninja nerds. If you remembered none of them, congrats. You're a human and I suspect probably a little bit more healthy in the brain. No offense to my ninjas. If, on the other hand, you cheated and you noted them down at the top of the episode, congrats. You're a winner. I have no way of knowing whether you checked or not, and it frankly doesn't matter. You were able to record those seven random things because you didn't try and rely on your working memory. Now you team up with the ninja nerds and on my signal, release Hell. Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. I've only just scratched the surface with the Second Brain method, but you can get started with links and resources@ undo fm secondbrain, and I thank Thiago Forte for being so generous with the stuff he provides for free, as well as the wonderful books he writes, another of which is staring daggers at me from my bookshelf right now. After this brief intermission, I'm going to tell you how I'm planning to outlive the week from Hell, which is about to be my reality, and how I'm finally actually moving all of my stuff into Notion Shocker. Before we head to the shed, I have to thank Brendan, Captain Caution, and an anonymous writer for their stellar reviews. Great advice and ideas for one who is easily distracted, says the Captain. Thank you for posting every week, says Anonymous. And Brendan gave the Show A solid 6 out of 5. Comments like these help the show grow because they signal to new listeners that they're in the right place. Of course I'd love your Support over at patreon.com undopodcast as it keeps the show running, but if you can't manage that telling people about the show, sharing it with your friends or online is just as valuable. So thank you to everyone who's rated and reviewed the show. Oh, well, that was so much fun. I really enjoyed putting that one together and I hope you enjoy it. Hi, you find me in the shed. It is a glorious sunny day outside the shed, so I should like to get out there into the sun very quickly. So I'm not going to keep you for very long. But yes, there's a couple of things that I wanted to briefly mention. So I've got an upcoming hell week, which notion is. Is really, really helping me with. So I made the decision sometime this week when I started researching more of the second brain thing in greater detail. It's something I've known about for a long while and practiced elements of it. But as I started diving in, I just thought, you know what, I do use notion. I've resisted keeping my to do's in notion for various reasons and I sort of thought, why not actually just slowly start making the move. So porting things over because it means I can design my to do system in a way that fits my brain, which is kind of a theme that I find important with what we're exploring with Undo. I don't think there is one single methodology that covers everything. I think you take the bits that work for you and you design around your own particular brain. And so for me, I want to be able to design my notion database and stuff so that the to do's that I have to do, I can track them in a way that, that feels right to me. So I'm actually using Kanban from the previous episode to keep track of things that are in flux. So I'm not just saying something's done or not done because that isn't the case. Sometimes things, you know, things are on hold and it's nice to be able to see them. And my current task manager, the app Things, can't do that. So I just thought, you know what, let's go all in, let's do it. And so far it's kind of been working for me. I think there are tiny little sort of reminder type things that I might figure out where to put somewhere else. And I might even just use the Reminders app rather than the Things app, just so that I don't forget little things like empty the dehumidifier or make sure you've cleaned out the litter boxes. Although, you know, yeah, if you're forgetting to do that, something's going to remind you at a certain time, the environment anyway, you get the idea. So that combined with the flexibility of a tool on ocean. Now listen, there's no you know, I have no affiliate links. There's no sort of plans for me to be shilling for Notion. I just actually genuinely like it. I'm not going to advocate it above all other things because I know some people are like, I don't want to put my. All my stuff into the cloud somewhere because what if Notion goes down and all that kind of stuff is. That's all fair game. But for me, I, you know, it's, it's ticking all my boxes. And so that's why I kind of advocate for it. But it's helping me because of its flexibility. Because, because. And this is one of the stumbling blocks that people have with a tool like Notion is because it's a blank canvas, it can kind of do anything. So it can feel really intimidating. That flexibility, though, is also what makes it really useful. So a to do can become a project very quickly and it can start having really useful nested things like documents and videos and audio snippets and stuff that you can't put in a normal to do app because they just don't support it. So a simple to do app, like book a hotel reservation for a thing I've got to go to, which is part of my hell week, which I'll describe shortly. Stuff like that becomes a lot easier. We can just put all the stuff in Notion, like, here's my reservation number, here's the ticket number that I need for my train, here's the confirmation number for my hotel, here's the PDF receipt. If there's a problem, I can show them the PDF of the. Of the confirmation on screen. Here's my tickets for the event. All that stuff can live in these different documents within Notion. So it's all in one place and I dig it. So, yeah, this is all kind of powering the next week I've got. So this episode has gone out today. So today is Monday. And then coming up, I'll be. I'm gonna try and do as much work as I can on the next episode this week, but we'll see what happens. And then I'm off to the podcast show in London. So if for any reason you find yourself there, come and say hello. It will be lovely to shake your hand if you happen to be there. And then. So I've got two days there. So I'm jetting up down rather on the train on Tuesday, and then Wednesday, Thursday, I'm at the podcast show. And then I've got a. I've got to take all my bags and stuff with me on the Thursday, because I'm going directly from there to London. Sorry, from London to Brighton to then do a day of filming with a client and then I'm coming home on the train that night because I've only got a hotel room for the Friday, which is obviously a different hotel from Wednesday and Thursday, because that's in London now I'm in Brighton. And so I said I wasn't going to keep it. I'm going to wrap this up. But, yes, I'm going to come home. And then Saturday, I've got a mate who's made a bunch of films and we're going to go and see those. And then I believe this, the. The following day, I've got a memorial service for someone who. Who I met many years ago and who passed away only a couple of weeks ago. So it's going to be one hell of a week. And one of the things that is making that easier and is stopping me from getting too frazzled is the fact that I know and I actually spent a lot of time in front of QI yesterday. I was watching QI and I just spent a bit of time yesterday booking, hotel booking, train travel and all that kind of stuff, and putting all that stuff into notion, so that when I'm at that moment where I'm like, ah, where am I supposed to go next? All the information is in one place. So that's why I'm a really big fan of it. Listen, thank you. I didn't want to keep you too long, but that just about wraps it up. If you've enjoyed this patreon.com undo podcast, if you've been here for the last sort of 19 weeks, you know, there's been a bit of flux, a bit of change. We. I've moved away from acast, who are providing the ads. That means a steep drop in the income, but I'm prepared to take that on because it makes the show worse. Like, having those ads is making a short show less enjoyable for you. And no one's told me that, by the way. That's just my instinct. I haven't actually had any complaints, but for me, I'm just like, no, when we're. When. When some episodes are getting packed with ads and the. And the show's only short and there's so many breaks and we have to put in certain numbers, like, it's not worth it. So that does mean that. Patreon.com undo podcast, the more that you can help towards the upkeep of the show, the more I can keep churning out episodes like this, this was a particularly long writing task. And so, you know, we are talking like a TED Talk level of thing that I'm trying to write every week. So your support, your help really does help sort of keep the lights on, as they say. And there's extra stuff that you get in return for that. But patreon.com undo podcast is where you can find out all about that. Assuming I survive next week, I look forward to having a chat with you again. I may have something different for you next week. We will see. Just, you know, hold your horses. We'll find out. But until next week, have a wonderful time and thank you for listening. And I look forward to being in your ear holes again very soon.