Myth 8: Second Brains are for people who aren’t actually out in the world doing the hard work

This one is important because as much as anything, this is the thing that distinguishes Second Brain from other systems in this genre. And it's that Second Brain is really practical and based off of real world problems and not just some abstract high minded philosophy.

Yeah, you know, you can, you can look up the field, the academic field of study known as pkm, Personal knowledge management, which is a subfield of an even bigger field, which is information management more general. There are academic conferences, there are scientific journals dedicated to these topics. I've read many of them. They are absolutely impenetrable. It's people developing these frameworks that are, it's like computer science mixed with math and anthropology. You know, they'll spend years running studies to figure out why people, how people name their folders or you know, what, what they should name their folders, stuff like this. And I, you know, I'm on the surface, I'm part of that, I'm part of that field of study and there are definitely some good ideas from it. But where my approach to knowledge management came from is from productivity coaching. I started my career in Silicon Valley with a small consulting firm, left that and just as a freelance thing started finding clients to productivity coach. And what that looks like practically is sitting with them in front of their computer, watching them do things and asking them questions. It's almost like studying in the field. It's like a biologist out looking at the primates and taking notes on like, okay, what do the apes do? How do they eat? Stuff like that. Just watching and observing and asking. And this is just a fascinating thing to do because you just, it's such a, there's such a psychology that goes into, oh, why did you open that in a separate window or a separate tab? Oh, why did you save that to your desktop and not your Documents folder? Oh, why did you choose to bookmark that but not this? We actually have all these little principles and rules and rules of thumb and habits that are mostly unconscious that we operate on, but no one ever taught us. We just looked around at what other people were doing or we did what felt most natural or we did whatever the software told us to do. Right. And so where I come from is really just watching and observing what works, often what people do as a hack or a shortcut or in the, just because of the needs of the moment and pointing it out and saying, okay, what did you do there? Understanding what they did and then doubling down on that, okay, that wasn't a hack or a shortcut, that is the right way. That's smart do more of that, or do it across a wider range of circumstances, or do it in a slightly more intentional way. And I think that's something I've had academics from the fields that I'm referring to take my course. And because it's focused on the everyday needs of knowledge workers just trying to get things done, they see it through a completely different lens than they're used to, which is the lens of research.

And talk about how this strategy of starting with practical reality led you to ideas like para, progressive summarization and intermediate packets.

You know, every technique I teach, I have a kind of internal rule of thumb, which is if it hasn't been around for hundreds of years in some form, predating technology, then it's probably not going to stick around. It's the Lindy principle. Right. Technology tends to accelerate what we already do. It actually magnifies existing human tendencies, habits, mental models, all these things. It doesn't usually just create a new behavior completely from scratch. So things like, you know, the easy one is progressive summarization. It's highlighting. It really is just highlighting, just doing it in a more sophisticated way. For example, using different kinds of formatting, which is hard to do in a textbook. I guess you could like highlight and underline. Right. But it's kind of. You wouldn't really do that with a textbook. It's just too much work. Suddenly with a computer, that becomes possible. Para is filing and sorting. Right. Capture is taking notes, writing things down. Intermediate packets is bright, breaking things down into smaller chunks. So it's really just looking at timeless human behaviors, asking how they can be done more efficiently, more effectively with higher leverage in a way that's more timeless and preserved for longer periods and not really. I guess what that's getting at is not trying to change people. This kind of gets back to an earlier point. It's not about self improve. Like self improvement is fine, but like, what if what you were doing was fine and you just kept doing it that way, but using technology to fill in the gaps that you're missing that don't really come naturally to you.

Yeah. When it comes to how we are not inventing, how you're not inventing new behaviors, but you are making existing behaviors easier. I think intermediate packets really stands out. So say that you read a book that you're interested in, you could print out a paragraph and you could scan that paragraph over and over again for every project once you use one. But of course, with the Internet and with digital tools, we just have copy and paste. You could place it in a filing cabinet. And then every single time you need that paragraph, you would have to go back in and you would look it up. Maybe you have a Dewey decibel system, but now you have search. And so we're doing the same things, but we're doing them in ways that are more efficient and that are actually taking advantage of the free tools that we have in our pocket for the most part. And therefore we're getting, getting more out of existing behaviors. And even if the things are very similar, the actual second order effects are quite different in the way that taxis and ubers are very similar, but they're also very different.

That's a great point. Yeah, it's technology changes the trade offs, so it changes the balance, the emphasis. Certain activities end up being. You end up doing them more because technology increases the roi, increases the return or the savings or the impact of those actions. And certain other actions you end up doing less of in many cases because technology replaces it. Right. I mean, one example is I always tell the story of spending actually years organizing my itunes library. I would spend years retitling the songs and doing obscure google searches to try to find which album was this on and typing that up, who's the artist, you know, all these different things. And then one day, I think it was, it was first itunes match, which was this service, like $5. And it would just scan your entire library, read the, you know, the signature of the audio file, and just fill everything in for you. And I just thought, wow, probably 50 to 100 hours or more I spent doing this manual process that if I had just waited a couple years would have been done for me. And then even more so a year or two after that Spotify came out. And then even all the other work of gathering all those songs, remember, you'd have to gather songs. Oh, do you have a hard drive full of songs?

Let's take pride in our iTunes library. I remember my high school advisor had 3,000 songs.

Oh my God, I was blown away.

I was blown away.

It was like wealth. It was like gold coins, right? And now suddenly Spotify arrives. And all these hours I spent, you know, I'd compile playlists, meticulously, just gather all these little playlists, which was fun in some way, but if I had known what was coming, right? And so the balance of where you spend your time changes and that affects the workflow. Like one example is organizing. You don't want to meticulously file because search is getting better and better and better and better. Very soon search will be so Good that the idea of filing and sorting will become just obsolete. Like basically you'll do a search and the software in that instant will completely reorganize your entire second brain collection using a customized classification scheme that it just made up in that moment to perfectly suit your needs. That's coming. It's well on its way. And so you want to minimize the time you spend filing and sorting and putting things in folders. And actually parrot does that. It's just four big categories, projects, areas, resources and archives across your entire life. Any further filing than that is a waste of time.

And I think very crucially, the main takeaway here is from the way that you've developed this in terms of the students that you've had, in terms of the fact that you actually use this system every single day. If it doesn't help you get stuff done, it's not in the system. There aren't things in building a second brain that are. Have survived years and years of editing and refinement that are just there because they're intellectually interesting.

Yeah, there's just no room for it. It's just, you know, you can come up with a bunch of tips and techniques that seem cool, that are fun even to try, but time is the ultimate judge. Time is the ultimate filter. It relentlessly strips away and removes and kind of weeds out the stuff that is not so inherently valuable and easy. I mean, the ultimate standard that I love to think about is it's so easy that it's easier to do it than not do it. Like, it would actually take self discipline to stop doing it because it's just so obviously self evidently worthwhile. And that's why we keep coming back to these three, four, five different techniques that are just so obviously valuable and universal that I'm comfortable teaching them to thousands of people.