Tiago Forte – Building A Second Brain

Course Curriculum

A comprehensive curriculum on harnessing the full power of your ideas

Unit 1: Introduction to the Course

• What to expect: schedule, roadmap, communications, and the 3 pillars of the methodology

• Why organization and collaboration are the two missing links in most people’s creative process – and how adding them in can double your creative output

• Idea Management: the new path to produce 10x results with 1/10 the effort

• The secret of Strategic Laziness: the real story of how great thinkers work

• Take an 11-point quiz to score your current note-taking skills

Unit 2: Organizing for Insight

• How to turn your digital notes into “thinking tools” that allow you to access brainpower you didn’t even know you had

• Feeling unorganized? How a simple technique called PARA will enable you to organize your entire digital life in minutes

• The 8 must-haves for any digital organizing system, and how to apply them

• A little-known distinction – between micro-projects and areas of responsibility – that can completely revolutionize your productivity

• Banish Information Overload using the Magic Number 4 – a helpful constraint to preserve your working memory

• Discover the incredible power of an up-to-date Project List, with in-depth feedback and guidance on how to create one for yourself

Unit 3: Digital Cognition

• The 4 essential requirements that any good digital notes app MUST have

• How to amplify the single biggest opportunity for making new connections without spending more time or effort: Productive Randomness

• Learn how a simple principle from Information Science called “stigmergy” explains how to effectively manage information

• A new way of working using “slow burns” instead of grueling slogs – people who miss this are doomed to suffer from Information Exhaustion

• What the Feynman Method can teach us about “punching above our intellectual weight”

• Find out how the best note-takers throughout history built up their intellectual capital using compounding gains

• Transform raw material into knowledge ammunition: how to use digital notes to form a valuable body of knowledge for a side project, career advancement, or new business

• Identify your personal learning priorities using the Feynman Method, a simple exercise created by a Nobel prize-winning scientist to permanently improve your reading and learning for years to come

Unit 4: Progressive Summarization

• Have trouble finding your notes when you need them most? A counter-intuitive technique called Progressive Summarization will help you distill them down for easy retrieval

• Understand the pros and cons of organizing your notes by tag, by notebook, or by project, and the best approach based on our 10 years’ of experience

• Don’t have time for more research? Develop the skill of balancing compression and context to increase the return-on-investment of your note taking

• Strategic laziness over rigid rules: note-taking strategies that leverage human nature, instead of fighting it

• How to design individual notes for “glanceability” and instant recognition for your Future Self

• The amazing benefits of designing your own Personal Information Landscape

• Practice Progressive Summarization on your own notes, with feedback from instructors and peers

Unit 5: Maximizing Return-on-Attention

• Explore the fascinating science behind “transient hypofrontality”: how to maximize the mental state of flow for higher performance, enjoyment, and learning

• Understanding how to minimize the impact of setup costs (environmental, mental, and emotional) on productivity

• How Intermediate Packets can completely transform your approach to productivity

• Become interruption-proof: placeholding, chunking, and reusability as potent sources of leverage for knowledge workers

• Knowledge Artifacts: how to externalize your thinking and accelerate your learning using concrete deliverables

• Turn your notes into a new Knowledge Artifact especially designed to generate valuable, targeted feedback from your peers

Unit 6: Just-In-Time Productivity

• Learn Just-In-Time Productivity – the new, far more effective way of working that becomes possible once you have a Second Brain

• 5 ways to leverage your ideas to leapfrog your peers, skip the corporate ladder, and become a leader in your field

• Divergence and Convergence: use groundbreaking ideas from the world’s top designers to escape any creative roadblock or dead-end

• Equip yourself with 16 Workflow Strategies – proven thinking tools

• Banish procrastination forever using the Archipelago of Ideas technique to instantly add structure to any creative project

• Learn a new way of adding structuring to your ideas just-in-time, to produce results quickly, efficiently, and right when they’re most needed

• How to massively accelerate your learning using idea capture tools and quick feedback loops

• Select and try out 3 of the 16 Workflow Strategies on one or more of your projects or deliverables

Unit 7: Workflow Canvas

• Step-by-step walkthrough to design your very own Second Brain, customized to your needs and goals

• Get feedback on further areas for improvement, based on the exercises you completed in the course

• Explore dozens of examples, case studies, and downloadable templates to make implementing this system as easy as possible

• Complete the Workflow Canvas to choose the tools, techniques, and strategies to integrate into your own workflow

Unit 8: The Big Picture

• Information Overload? How Container vs. Stream Thinking is the mindset you need to thrive in a world of information abundance

• Understand how to cultivate situational awareness and curation as the key skills required to navigate streams of information

• Strengthen your creative confidence by borrowing principles from history’s most prolific creators and artists

• Identifying and overcoming the most common limiting beliefs we encounter around productivity, thinking, and learning

• The Perspective Era – why the future of work will be dedicated to interpretation and persuasion based on your unique point of view, and what you can do to prepare

• Start with Abundance: a different take on creative output that starts with sifting through interesting ideas, instead of sitting down to a blank screen

• Harnessing the full potential of digital notes: how to integrate Idea Management into your daily routine

• The coming era of Idea Management, and how to prepare yourself to thrive within it