Can you remember these 7 random things and recall them by the end of this piece?
- a tape measure
- the Boston Celtics
- a hammerhead shark
- Coventry University
- a walnut
- 10,000 Maniacs
- Sir Ben Kingsley
To be honest, your brain is great at having ideas, not so great at keeping them. On average, we can remember around 7 things; after that, we get a bit fuzzy.
And when we try and keep everything in our working memory, it can make focusing on the task at hand really difficult.
Often we have these nagging little tasks we think aren’t worth committing to paper. You know, pick up the dog’s meds, take out the bins, plan your food shopping for the week. What we do is sort of write them on mental sticky notes and then paste them to the front of our brain.
Now, imagine having all of those right at the front of your vision as you go about your daily life. It’s just not feasible. What we really need is some sort of second brain, so we can keep this one clear and operational, while the other one handles the storage.
Luckily, we have just the system for that. This is Undo, so you know I’ve got your back.
Information overload
If you know a thing or two about autism, you might be familiar with the metaphor of the Coke bottle. It’s used to explain why kids can behave perfectly at school and then suddenly have a meltdown when they get home. I promise this is relevant.
So, Ali is 8 and she goes to what I, as a Brit, would call primary school. In her backpack is her lunch and a bottle of Coke. Her brain is like that same bottle of Coke.
Before the first lesson, Ali sees a bigger kid push over a smaller one. They’re in a different class so it doesn’t feel like there’s much she can do about it, and if she stops to help the kid, she’s going to be late. The Coke bottle is shaken.
Then Ali get to her classroom and the new kid who moved here this term is sitting in Ali’s usual seat. She hasn’t spoken to this new kid before, and doesn’t want their first conversation to be a hassle, so she looks for another seat. Again, the bottle is shaken.
There’s a break and then the next lesson is history. Everyone’s working on their own private craft projects, so the teacher puts the radio on while they’re working. Ali loves history but this noise is all a bit distracting and she doesn’t want to mess up her work. Shake the bottle.
Later, someone cops a look at her lunch and asks if they’ll swap her chocolate bar for their granola bar. Ali has got in trouble for saying no before, so she takes the swap even though granola tastes like the bottom of her hamster cage. Shake the bottle.
The final class of the day is French, and Ali’s been eagerly waiting for last week’s homework to be marked. It comes back with a B-, which, given the amount of work it took, is like a knife to the heart. Shake the bottle.
All day Ali has been working hard, listening, paying attention, and being a maybe slightly above-average student. Nothing particularly horrible has happened… it’s just another day at the office. But it’s Thursday night which means spaghetti and meatballs night. That’s Ali’s favourite.
The final bell rings and Ali’s dad meets her at the gates. As they’re walking back he asks how her day went. “Fine” she says. And then, matter-of-factly, Dad says “Ooh, I just got a new air fryer so we’re going to have chicken nuggets and chips for tea tonight. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”
Ali’s in a low-pressure environment now so the cap is off the bottle, and all that fizzy Coke pours out and she has a meltdown in the middle of the road.
Now, like I said, you don’t have to be autistic to recognise some of those signs. If you’ve ever noticed a sense of overwhelm or a sudden feeling that you “just can’t even” today, it might be that you’ve filled up your bottle with so much stuff that there’s no room for air and the whole damn thing goes off like your own personal Hindenburg.
Storing too much in our heads is not good for us. But luckily there’s a man with a name straight out of an action movie, who can help us clear the gunk from our bottles so we don’t explode when one new task lands on our desk.
Meet Tiago Forte
Tiago grew up in a creative household. His Brazilian mum is a talented singer, and his Filipino dad a professional artist. One of four kids, Tiago was exposed to creativity and technology from an early age, and quickly found that collecting and organising knowledge can be a captivating practice.
Like our Coke bottle kid Ali, Tiago was a fairly average student, a bit of a daydreamer, and a little clumsy. I think we’d have got on well at school.
When Tiago was 13, his parents took the kids out of school and packed everyone off to Brazil for a year of cultural immersion. Of course there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the school board, but for Tiago, school was just a distraction from the stuff he wanted to learn, that felt more important to him.
At university he started a business fixing computers, then went on to work at an Apple Store, helping frustrated people discover what they could create with their Macs. He went off to teach English in Ukraine, and to show others how they could organise themselves.
Going into corporate work, he found himself getting overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff on his plate, so picked up, read, and then began teaching the book, Getting Things Done by David Allen which I keep teasing and I promise we’ll cover in great detail soon.
After coming down with a chronic illness in his 20s, Forte started using his notetaking and organisational skills to build a database of knowledge about his medical situation. He’d take those skills into his corporate job, being the goto guy who could seemingly remember everything.
Eventually he realised where his true value lay – not in consulting with brands or teaching English as a second language, but in helping people clear out their working memory and store information in a reliable and tidy place.
Your Second Brain
The Second Brain method is surprisingly simple, and consists of two acronyms, CODE and PARA. OK, technically the second one is more of an initialism, but you can pick me up on that in your Apple Podcasts review.
So CODE stands for Capture, Organise, Distil, and Express. Let’s go through them one by one.
Capture everything
If email has brought one useful thing into our lives, it’s the concept of the inbox. OK, inboxes existed on corporate desks for decades before we made it digital, but now this is something we all experience.
Like we talked about in episode 9, the inbox is not a final resting place for information – it’s the first port-of-call; a way station we store stuff temporarily so we don’t lose it, until we’re ready to put it in its proper place.
Your second brain needs an inbox, somewhere you can capture all the stuff that comes to you, either from the external world, or from your own brain.
(Ooh, that burrito looks good; I should pick up the ingredients next time I’m at the supermarket. And that reminds me, I must buy toilet paper when I’m there.)
You can do this in an app, or in a notebook you carry with you, although we’ll get onto the importance of keeping this digital later. The point is to capture it there and then, because you won’t remember it. You think you will, but you won’t.
I’m not a Big Bang Theory fan but I am a big Barenaked Ladies fan. (If you’ve got beef with that, catch me outside.) And this just gives us a quick snapshot into what can happen to a good idea if you don’t have a way to capture it as it happens.
Organise for actionability
Once you’ve captured that shower thought, the next thing to do is to organise it. This is probably done later in the day, maybe with a biscuit and cup of tea because you know I’m all about that cosy life.
The idea here is to create a simple structure, using tags or folders – like labels in Gmail – to categorise your notes and things you’ve found online. If you can’t find a good place to store what you’ve found, consider whether it’s actually something you need to keep hold of… at least, that’s the Second Brain method.
Personally I like to have a bucket of stuff that’s mildly amusing or interesting, or something I might want to dive into out of curiosity when I’m escaping another more important task.
By way of example, I keep a folder in my Dropbox account called “Joy”, which is permanently accessible offline and has, currently, a video of a bird dancing to iPhone ringtones, a cat making a phone call, a charming voice note from a friend, a musical adaptation of a cat drinking milk, a 25 year-old song about computers in the style of the Village People, and a GIF of me and my dad dancing on a TV game show. (undo.fm/secondbrain is where you can go if you want to see that particular war crime.)
The point is, you want to organise for easier access in the future. Like Merlin Mann said back in our Inbox Zero episode, you don’t need a whole byzantine system of nested folders; just a simple tagging system you can remember.
There’s a little more to organisation which is where we get into the PARA thing, but let’s stay within CODE and onto the next one.
Distill down to the essence
It’s one thing to quickly capture stuff that’s relevant to a project, let’s say planning your next holiday. You could sift through photos and reviews of different resorts, but after a while one poolside hotel kinda looks like another. The first-worldiest of problems.
But you get my drift. Here’s where you want to start making executive summaries. Really they’re just short paragraphs that give you the basics of what you need to know now. So when you’re sat there with your cup of tea and your biscuit at the end of the day, or your glass of whiskey and some crackling vinyl – again, I am a cloth cap in human form – when you’re doing your shutdown routine, spend a wee bit of time bringing a few notes together and writing a quick summary, so the next time you come to look at that bundle of images and links for that trip, you can quickly remind yourself where you left off.
Now, we don’t talk a lot about AI here, but this is one area where I think it’s immensely useful. I believe that if you can afford to pay a creative person to do creative work, you should do that. And in all other instances, AI can give you access to stuff that might otherwise be beyond your reach. And one of the things AI is really, really good at, without you having to give it a lot of training, is summarisation.
If you’ve got a recent iPhone, you might have noticed you can get AI summaries of web pages in your browser. You can do the same thing with ChatGPT, just give it a link and say “Summarise this” and it’ll give you what you need to know.
If, like me, you live your life in Notion, you an use its inbuilt AI tool to summarise everything in your note so you’re not having to waste time getting yourself back up to speed.
Express your unique ideas and experiences
Once you’ve got your notes or your knowledge, what are you going to do with it? This is what I love about Tiago, and it’s one reason I think he’s one of the good ones… another being that all this info is available for free on his website.
If you think about the Coke bottle analogy or that story from Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies, those bubbled up from my brain which is pretty cluttered but very good at making connections. Those two things aren’t connected but my brain wanted them around because it knew they would be useful. Admittedly they would have been safer in a second brain, but for now we’ll just have to deal with my squishy organic one.
One reason I think it’s good to keep things around that you think are interesting – even if they don’t relate to a specific project now – is that you might be able to draw a connection to them later, and express them in a unique way.
After all, everything we make is merely a synthesis of things we’ve picked up from other places. The Beatles were combining skiffle with RnB. Hip hop is a mash-up of Jamaican dance hall MCing and turntable skills. Bah Bah Black Sheep is basically Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with a few extra notes in it.
So the Second Brain method isn’t just about organising for the sake of it, but organising so you can make something out of it… be that a song, a blog post, a recipe, or a tabletop RPG. God I love this stuff.
The PARA method
OK, so I mentioned we have two acronyms to tackle. We’ve going pretty long here so I won’t dwell on this too much. But how you organise your data is, in the Second Brain methodology, under one of four buckets, which make up the word PARA.
Projects
In true GTD style, a project is something with a deadline. It’s a collection of things that need to be done by a specific time. A project could be a work thing like compiling a report, or something personal like moving house or robbing a bank.
Areas
The first A in PARA is for “area of interest”. An area is like a project, but it doesn’t have a final due date. As an example, this episode of Undo is a project because it consists of multiple tasks – researching, writing, editing, uploading, and obsessing over how many people downloaded it. Very important work. Whereas Undo itself is an area, because I’ll stop when I’m dead… or when I run out of ideas or you stop listening, in which case I’ll probably collapse like a bad soufflé.
Resources
The R in PARA stands for “resource”, and it’s probably what one of your notes will turn into. You can create resources directly from your brain, or you might gather them from the Internet, by taking clippings or screenshots.
Sometimes if there’s a particularly good bit of a podcast I like, I might clip it and add it to my list of resources for later. I also use the Notion Web Clipper extension for my Mac, so I can add interesting links to my inbox with a couple of clicks.
Archive
The final A in PARA is for “archive”. After your notes, projects, or areas have outlived their natural usefulness, shove ‘em up the archive.
I think Forte advises you do this fairly aggressively, so you’re not cluttering up your resources with stuff you don’t need anymore. But you definitely want to keep your archive as well-structured as your resources. After all, you don’t want to spend an afternoon trying to find that one elusive link to a thing you swore you put in here somewhere but now can’t find.
Depending on your system, archiving it could be as simple as dragging it to a different folder, or ticking a box.
Which gets us to a point I want to hang a bit of a lantern on. Unlike some methods, like Getting Things Done or Bullet Journalling, the Second Brain approach is pretty digital-first. Now, whatever app you use is up to you… personally I do think Notion is a pretty good system for keeping everything in one place, but you might find you get on better with Evernote or a combination of different Google apps.
And unlike some productivity writers who seem to sort of freeze their ideas in aspic, Forte is constantly evolving and looking at new ways we can use tech to power-up our brains, from exploring AI to investigating new apps that purport to “do it all”.
So if you’re a staunch pen-and-paper person, you might find this digital-first approach a bit too clinical. And I can dig it; I had my time with pen and paper, and I really like the sensation of opening a bookmarked page and spreading out the day on a physical work surface. It’s nice to physically tick off or strike through a task, and shutting a book at the end of a day is a wonderful way to put that day to bed.
But those systems lead to too much repetition, and they make us spend time doing stuff we’re not best suited for. Computers are brilliant at finding stuff quickly, and at drawing connections between things. And while I kinda do secretly – or maybe not so secretly – harbour the notion that there is a coming apocalypse and we do need to learn to survive without technology, while we’ve got it, let’s make use of it so we can spend our mental energy on ensuring that apocalypse doesn’t happen.
Exam time
So, it’s exam time. How well did you do remembering our 7 random items from the beginning? Here they are in order: a tape measure, the Boston Celtics, a hammerhead shark, Coventry University, a walnut, 10,000 Maniacs, and Sir Ben Kingsley.
if you remembered more than three, congrats, you’re probably a genius and I would like to recruit you into my secret army of ninja nerds. If you remembered none of them, congrats, you’re a human and I suspect probably a little bit healthier in the brain… no offence to my ninjas.
If, on the other hand, you cheated and you noted them down at the top of the episode, congratulations, you’re a winner. I have no way of knowing whether you cheated or not, and it frankly doesn’t matter. You were able to recall these 7 random things because you didn’t try and rely on your working memory.
Now you team up with the ninja nerds, and on my signal, release hell.