(2017-06-06) Forte On Productivity Provocation And Layering Knowledge

Podcast: Tiago Forte on Productivity, Provocation, and Layering Knowledge. For Part 2, we take a deeper look at how he structures his notes and get a peek into “Building a Second Brain,” Tiago’s five-week boot camp for personal knowledge management. Following 2017-05-22-FortesApproachToProductivity.

there are the three pillars of the course that I teach: capture, organize, and retrieve. The middle one, organize, is the PARA system

The first one, capture, is something I call “progressive summarization.”

There’s an 80/20 thing, where a tiny minority of your notes has the great majority of value. So it makes sense to concentrate your design attention on that small minority that’s actually very insightful

the boot camp/workshop called “Building a Second Brain.”

It’s really those three pillars. So we start with organization

The we go to progressive summarization and cover capture

And then we end the course with retrieval, which is a method called “just in time project management,” which is sort of related to the intermediate packet thing. It’s always working towards the next intermediate packet in these short sprints. And building systems and support routines and all this so that you can do that as quickly and with as much acceleration as possible.

It’s kind of like a topology of your knowledge that has peaks. The peaks are where your thinking has gone the furthest, whereas the valleys are where the thinking is still kind of raw and unfiltered

How can we foster creativity within a productivity system?

My definition of productivity is creating as much value in the world as efficiently and as effectively as possible.

having the foundation or the structure — we talked about structure before — already in place, just like a scaffolding gives you these little pockets where creativity can happen.