Insight
Tiago Forte: Organize digital notes by active projects, never broad subjects
“In my view, the central organizing principle of your second brain needs to be, what are my currently active projects? What are the projects that I'm trying to move forward right now? And everything in your second brain should be organized around what you need …”
Insight
Tiago Forte: Never revisit old notes unless you have practical use
“To me, you know, if you take notes on a book, let's say, and you save those in your second brain, unless there is a specific use case for those notes, you should probably never look at them again.”
Insight
Tiago Forte: Distillation is the most commonly missed knowledge management step
“Third, you need to distill them. This is the one that people most often miss. You can't just keep adding, adding, adding, acquiring, acquiring, acquiring. You need to boil it down. You need to summarize the most important points, the most important takeaways.”
Insight
Forte: Biological Brain Capacity Cannot Fundamentally Increase to Match Rising Information
“Suddenly, the amount of information you have to Manage and make sense of exponentially increases and this fleshy biological brain, you know, you can't fundamentally increase its capabilities.”
Insight
Forte: A second brain system transcends any single piece of software
“Your second brain is not dependent on any one piece of software.
It is a collection of different tools that you use, different pieces of software.
Any individual app can be swapped out.
Any single one can be changed, but the overarching system that is your sec…”
Insight
Tiago Forte calls organizing digital files a sophisticated form of procrastination
“Productivity is like the most tempting form of procrastination because you can tell yourself, oh yes, I'm You know, organizing my notes and my files and my workspace and lining up all the pencils. But if that stuff is not moving forward, your priorities, your …”
Disclosure
Tiago Forte spends just 30 minutes a day maintaining his notes
“At most. Yeah, it's just these little, little moments to just save, capture, import, download, and then the job of, like, organizing and retrieving those, I postpone to the future, sometimes the far future, to the moment, whenever that moment arrives, that I a…”
Insight
Forte: Note-taking obstacles are psychological, not limitations of software tools
“It's different, but I'd say the common thread is the obstacles and challenges are always psychological. People think sometimes the problems are out there. Oh, I need a certain note taking app or I need a certain feature. It's not the case. People have been tak…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tiago Forte averages only two short notes a day over a decade
“I've been taking notes for over a decade. I recently went in and did a sort of a little analysis that, on average, over many years, I take only two notes per day. Two notes. And these are not like hundreds of words, like a note can be one image, one photo, One…”
Insight
Forte: Complex and challenging systems do not stand the test of time
“There's nothing in life that is really complex and challenging that stands the test of time.”
Disclosure
Tiago Forte reveals his personal app stack: Evernote, Things, and Notion
“Evernote is kind of the central one.
Usually for most people, their digital notes app is like the heart of their second brain, the center of their second brain.
But then I also use Things, which is a task manager for my to-do list.
I also use BusyCal, which is…”
Insight
Tiago Forte: Documenting Repetitive Tasks Builds Career-Advancing Intellectual Property
“If you get the same question from customers more than three or four times, create an FAQ, right? It might not even be the official company FAQ. It could just be for you. You could just have a document open on the side, like definitive answers to the 10 most co…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tiago Forte's system cut an oncologist's patient note-taking time by 70 percent
“And so he started using his second brain to organize his patient notes, and the impact of that, he told me, is that in a 30 or 40 minute appointment, which is all the time he has, right? 30 to 40 minutes. Instead of spending, you know, 20 or 30 of those minute…”
Disclosure
Tiago Forte names James Clear as a mentor and major inspiration
“And actually James clear is a friend and a mentor. Atomic habits was a huge inspiration for me, so it's not a coincidence”
Disclosure
Forte: Wrote his book across Evernote, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word
“It was Evernote to organize and to kind of track the research, and then I would move it into Google Docs to do the writing.
And then once it was pretty close to final, I would move it into Word because Word has more advanced kind of features and formatting and…”
Opinion
Forte: Readwise is fantastic for automated note and highlight capture
“Readwise is a fantastic tool. I think it's paid. You have to, you know, pay a monthly subscription, but it basically senses any time you make a highlight anywhere on a web page, in a blog post, article, ebook, and it automatically imports those highlights dire…”
