#second-brain

Day 3/90 In 2018, I embarked on a long journey to learn how to organize time, tasks, and information. Over the past five years, I wrote about Personal Scalability, System Resilience, Time Management, and my Second Brain. More recently, I have sent out an update to my Time Management post in Morfternight #68, my weekly newsletter. I don’t think this is a journey that will ever end. On the one…

Here’s how I think—Building blocks and pattern recognition

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes Building with blocks Blocks are everywhere. Look around you! Every piece of software used to create and manage content moves to a block-based structure. Roam too. The most common is the paragraph. I keep them short and on point. One idea, one block, is an efficient system for two reasons: First, one can reference blocks in multiple places.It means that you…

Here’s how I gather all external inputs with Roam Research, RoamJS, and Telegroam

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes Daily notes are at the center of everything. In 2020 I discovered Roam Research and its focus on the daily notes page. It is the tool I had been looking for for years. We too often see, between our calendar, our notes, and our tasks, a separation that doesn’t make any sense. They are not parallel streams. When I have a meeting, I take notes and create…

If you truly want to get things done, throw away your to-do list and start using that calendar

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes Why is a to-do list bad for you? Simply put, it is disconnected from reality. On a list, all tasks have the same size. True, you can deploy a sophisticated tagging system to mark their difficulty or how much time they need. Even so, though, especially when digitally managed, lists can grow indefinitely. A to-do list that grows faster than you can remove things…

How to use Readwise to maximize the value you extract from reading

“It’s very hard to google a feeling.” I have to agree with this statement. Tiago Forte shared it during the Building a Second Brain course I took last year. The point is to help people understand what content found online is worth saving somewhere. Data, information, and anything that doesn’t deeply resonate with you is not worth hoarding. You can search for it when you need it. Keep the…

A reading routine focused on what matters (to you) with Instapaper and Alfread

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes Information’s lifespan is widely variable. My first line of defense is my triage process. Despite my ruthlessness, I still save to Instapaper way more content than I can read. More importantly, a lot more than what I should read. Some of the content I save seems important but is perishable; sometimes, I make mistakes. Instapaper’s primary focus is reading, so…

Here’s how to handle information overload by setting up a triage workflow with Feedly

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes “Too much information kills information.” I remember wondering if that was true in the pre-internet world. Of course, we had books, newspapers, a few TV and radio channels, but accessing information was limited by multiple constraints. You had to buy books and newspapers, go to the library, or turn on the TV at a specific time to watch the news. I remember…