🧐 Are we approaching a point in the evolutionary process where our brains are not evolving fast enough? A point where our brains have actually become the “limitation” and the “bottleneck”?
🐈 Think about it this way. Cats are much better at remembering maps of places than we are. Chimpanzees are much better at remembering numbers in a sequence than we are. If you’re skeptical, watch this video to see just how bad we are against chimps when it comes to memorizing something by looking at it for less than a second.
💰 The good thing is, we as humans, are very good at outsourcing things we aren’t good at, or don’t like to do. Like hiring a cleaner to do our chores, ordering takeout when we don’t feel like cooking, or taking the car to a car wash. This outsourcing to others probably played a huge role in making us a dominant specie on earth.
🧠 Even today, we know our brains are bad at math so use calculators and computers for that instead of trying to do it all in our head. We rely on google maps instead of trying to know the map of an entire country in our brains.
Tiago Forte, in his book, “Building a second brain” argues that we need to do more of this outsourcing because “our brains are for having ideas, not for storing them”.
His system has 4 important steps, conveniently named CODE.
- 📸 Capture: Anytime you come across a piece of information that might be useful in the future, or you might want to remember or quote it to someone else later, capture it. I came across this cute shelving unit idea on Pinterest so I saved it for when I have my own home. The same goes for the rent vs. buy calculator I found online that lets you decide if renting is better than buying in the long term, taking into account inflation, mortgage, and all. I saved the link to the website in my notes about buying a home because I might be looking into buying a house next year.
- 📁 Organize: Saving this relevant information is useless if you cannot find it when you need it. It’s useless if I won’t look at my note about renting vs buying when I’m actually thinking about buying. That’s where Tiago recommends organizing things into PARA. PARA is, projects, areas, resources, and archives.
- A Project is any ongoing work that has a foreseeable deadline. You can have multiple projects going on at any time. This is the most important unit. I had one folder per project where I would save everything related to that project. My example projects included visa application, Skillshare CV course, CAQ application, Paper 2 for Ph.D., Buying a Bike, etc. Everything related to the project goes into its folder so I don’t have to look for my documents at 10 places when I am uploading them for visa application.
- Areas are broader aspects of your life that don’t have any deadline. Health, Finance, Home, YouTube, and Hobbies are all areas, and anytime you find a useful resource or a note related to any of these, chuck them in the relevant folder.
- Resources: Anything you might want to reference in the future. Personally, I don’t use this a lot. Everything goes into the project’s own folder when I want to reference it. But this is good for storing things you might want to reference again and again in the future. Like branding guides, ID documents, etc.
- Archives: Any finished projects, any resources currently not in use, and any area no longer relevant. Basically, everything not in use right now goes here.
- 👩🔬 Distill: Every time you come across a note, use progressive summarization to make it a bit more readable and better each time. Turn a 500-word article into a couple of sentences so that next time you don’t have to read the whole article to get the main idea. Highlight key parts of your notes, then bold key parts of those highlights, and then write a 1,2 lines summary from those bold parts. I only do it when I reference some notes, basically just making them slightly better each time I use them, like organizing all the rent vs. buy websites I found and writing which one is good for what.
- 🎙Express: Here’s where the output of your hard work lies. You use your existing body of knowledge to “express” yourself. Like I’m referencing my book notes and summary of my highlights and bolds to write this blog post. You express this by quoting a relevant fact to a friend in a conversation or sharing an important resource about rent vs. buying with a friend in a conversation about mortgages.
I’m building my Notion template that makes it easy for you to capture and organize the information useful to you. I find it useful to have visual reminders and sticky notes on the side to remember what goes where so I have included those as well. It’s also helpful to have a weekly, monthly, and yearly routine to review your emails, notes, folders, and quick captures (more on that later), so I have added helpful goal-tracking templates as well. I’ll let you know when it’s ready and available.
Take Care!
Sadia ❤️
❤My Favourite Things
🎬YouTube Video:
I really enjoyed working on this video about burnout, and I really hope it helps some people. If you’ve been feeling tired, or uninterested in your work, do check it out.
📕Book:
I’m listening to “The Sandman” on Audible. I watched the show and didn’t like it much, but the book is better.
📝Quote:
Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form. Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively. from Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
I see that you’ve made it to the end. If you liked this blog post, check out the other stuff I talk about on my YouTube Channel. Don’t forget to subscribe!😉
