Building a Second Brain to Organize Your Digital Life

#85: Tiago Forte joins Chris to talk about his proven method to build a "Second Brain" to organize your digital life. They discuss the best tools to use to collect and store information, why it's important to become more of a maker than a consumer, why the most common way people categorize information might not be the best and a lot more.

Tiago Forte (@fortelabs) is one of the world's foremost experts on productivity. His cohort-based courses teach people around the world how timeless principles and the latest technology can revolutionize their productivity, creativity, and personal effectiveness. Tiago’s book is Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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Selected Links From The Episode

Connect with Tiago Forte: Website | Instagram | Twitter

Tiago Forte’s Book

Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

Resources Mentioned

Full Show Notes

Introduction to Tiago Forte (00:00)

How it all started (01:49)

The three-part arc people go through as they build their Second Brain (02:43)

Changing the focus from finding content to making things and using technology more effectively (05:04)

The Four Steps of CODE (09:14)

Capture: Saving 1% of the most insightful idea, quotes, takeaways, and thoughts (10:47)

Capture tools (17:00)

Tools to search across all of your saved information (26:09)

Distinguishing between business and personal life mode in your organizational categories (28:39)

The optimal way to organize your information (30:23)

Tiago Forte’s PARA method: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives (33:33)

How to begin implementing the PARA method today (37:32)

Organizing your email inboxes (38:23)

Types of information to offload or to keep (45:32)

Doing/acting vs. rote memorization (47:34)

Thinking about your First Brain: primary use cases (49:04)

Tiago’s acknowledgment hack (52:36)

The role AI plays in our Second Brain (55:18)

Tiago’s Mexico City recommendation (57:36)

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