==To be able to make use of information we value, we need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self. We need a way to cultivate a body of knowledge that is uniquely our own, so when the opportunity arises—whether changing jobs, giving a big presentation, launching a new product, or starting a business or a family—we will have access to the wisdom we need to make good decisions and take the most effective action.== — *location: 54* ^ref-27264 --- Other popular terms for such a system include Zettelkasten (meaning “slip box” in German, popularized by influential sociologist Niklas Luhmann), Memex (a word coined by American inventor Vannevar Bush), and digital garden (popularized by online creator Anne-Laure Le Cunff). — *location: 97* ^ref-5937 --- ==—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note.== — *location: 312* ^ref-22467 --- Like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab, our goal should be to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy. — *location: 578* ^ref-60715 >Is this still true? Collector fallacy vs infinite context window --- The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside. — *location: 583* ^ref-17644 --- The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. — *location: 600* ^ref-54078 --- Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?” Surprisingly, when you focus on taking action, the vast amount of information out there gets radically streamlined and simplified. There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which means you have a clear filter for ignoring everything else. — *location: 601* ^ref-52302 --- personal knowledge management exists to support taking action—anything else is a distraction. — *location: 629* ^ref-9074 --- ==Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use.== — *location: 635* ^ref-39354 --- ==This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.== — *location: 637* ^ref-63927 --- The consumerist attitude toward information—that more is better, that we never have enough, and that what we already have isn’t good enough—is at the heart of many people’s dissatisfaction with how they spend their time online. Instead of trying to find “the best” content, I recommend instead switching your focus to making things, which is far more satisfying. — *location: 672* ^ref-16202 --- ==A garden is only as good as its seeds, so we want to start by seeding our knowledge garden with only the most interesting, insightful, useful ideas we can find.== — *location: 692* ^ref-65327 >Argument For limiting input to only what resonates --- Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity. — *location: 804* ^ref-7813 >Discovered this author in a medium post. Probably not a coincidence but reflects synchronous pattern ala Undoing Project, Silo, etc as though there is some narrative continuity in my information diet --- James Gleick, — *location: 807* ^ref-56783 --- in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you. When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note. Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too. With a notes app, you can always save links back to the original content if you need to review your sources or want to dive deeper into the details in the future. The biggest pitfall I see people falling into once they begin capturing digital notes is saving too much. — *location: 867* ^ref-39744 --- take on a Curator’s Perspective—that we are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information we choose to let into our lives. — *location: 875* ^ref-35739 --- if you make reading and learning into unpleasant experiences, over time you’re going to find yourself doing less and less of them. The secret to making reading a habit is to make it effortless and enjoyable. — *location: 921* ^ref-55699 >Avoid any habit that adds friction to exposing yourself to new ideas --- As you consume a piece of content, listen for an internal feeling of being moved or surprised by the idea you’re taking in. This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.” You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates. Just look for the signs: your eyes might widen slightly, your heart may skip a beat, your throat may go slightly dry, and your sense of time might subtly slow down as the world around you fades away. These are clues that it’s time to hit “save.” — *location: 922* ^ref-13658 --- We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8 — *location: 926* ^ref-13587 >Unrelated But interesting --- From the book Designing for Behavior Change:9 Participants in a famous study were given four biased decks of cards—some that would win them money, and some that would cause them to lose. When they started the game, they didn’t know that the decks were biased. As they played the game, though, people’s bodies started showing signs of physical “stress” when their conscious minds were about to use a money-losing deck. The stress was an automatic response that occurred because the intuitive mind realized something was wrong—long before the conscious mind realized anything was amiss. — *location: 930* ^ref-18436 >UBI --- First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 — *location: 995* ^ref-65300 --- ==When you express an idea in writing, it’s not just a matter of transferring the exact contents of your mind into paper or digital form. Writing creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.==V — *location: 999* ^ref-58503 >See footnote book Detachment Gain --- If you’re looking for a more precise answer of how much content to capture in your notes, I recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most. — *location: 1041* ^ref-42460 --- Even if the original web page disappears, you can often use this information to locate an archived version using the Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive that preserves a record of websites: https://archive.org/web/. — *location: 1044* ^ref-11899 --- This is called “detachment gain,” as explained in The Detachment Gain: The Advantage of Thinking Out Loud by Daniel Reisberg, and refers to the “functional advantage to putting thoughts into externalized forms” such as speaking or writing, leading to the “possibility of new discoveries that might not have been obtained in any other fashion.” — *location: 1050* ^ref-3310 --- the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely. — *location: 1110* ^ref-8654 --- Your Second Brain isn’t just a tool—it’s an environment. It is a garden of knowledge full of familiar, winding pathways, but also secret and secluded corners. Every pathway is a jumping-off point to new ideas and perspectives. Gardens are natural, but they don’t happen by accident. They require a caretaker to seed the plants, trim the weeds, and shape the paths winding through them. It’s time for us to put more intention into the digital environments where we now spend so many of our waking hours. — *location: 1117* ^ref-41059 --- PARA can handle it all, regardless of your profession or field, for one reason: it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is. The project becomes the main unit of organization for your digital files. Instead of having to sort your notes according to a complex hierarchy of topics and subtopics, you have to answer only one simple question: “In which project will this be most useful?” It assumes only that you are currently working on a certain set of projects, and that your information should be organized to support them. — *location: 1144* ^ref-35782 --- forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process. This makes the experience mentally taxing and thus less likely to happen in the first place. — *location: 1290* ^ref-33539 --- separate capture and organize into two distinct steps: “keeping what resonates” in the moment is a separate decision from deciding to save something for the long term. Most notes apps have an “inbox” or “daily notes” section where new notes you’ve captured are saved until you can revisit them and decide where they belong. — *location: 1292* ^ref-59219 --- ==In this sense, notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.== — *location: 1488* ^ref-62975 --- Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fading away. — *location: 1501* ^ref-34551 --- The most important factor in whether your notes can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful. — *location: 1504* ^ref-14800 --- Discoverability is an idea from information science that refers to “the degree to which a piece of content or information can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system.” — *location: 1505* ^ref-38725 --- Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,IV instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools. — *location: 1596* ^ref-63537 >This feels important --- Ken Burns, the renowned creator of award-winning films like The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, has said that only a tiny percentage of the raw footage he captures eventually makes it into the final cut. This ratio can be as high as 40- or 50-to-1, which means that for every forty to fifty hours of footage he captures, only one hour makes it into the final film. — *location: 1683* ^ref-8869 >Jeremy's 50% rule --- You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. You have no idea what your future self will need, want, or be working on. — *location: 1717* ^ref-59352 --- The most common question I hear about Progressive Summarization is “When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something. — *location: 1708* ^ref-59423 --- ==The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it.== — *location: 1719* ^ref-37500 --- Even in our daily conversations, the ability to be succinct without missing key details is what leads to exciting conversations that leave both people feeling enlivened. Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities. Notetaking gives you a way to deliberately practice the skill of distilling every day. — *location: 1734* ^ref-43903 >Distillation is key to making evidence actionable. Also strength of LLMs. Better term than summarization. --- When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.VIII — *location: 1742* ^ref-60268 --- The challenge we face in building a Second Brain is how to establish a system for personal knowledge that frees up attention, instead of taking more of it. — *location: 1863* ^ref-41645 --- ==If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear. If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again.== — *location: 1870* ^ref-23290 --- Once you understand how incredibly valuable feedback is, you start to crave as much of it as you can find. You start looking for every opportunity to share your outputs and gain some clarity on how other people are likely to receive it. These moments are so important that you will begin changing how you work in order to get feedback as early and often as possible, because you know it is much easier to gather and synthesize the thoughts of others than to come up with an endless series of brilliant thoughts on your own. ==You will begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.== — *location: 2110* ^ref-16790 --- One of my favorite rules of thumb is to “==Only start projects that are already 80 percent done.==” That might seem like a paradox, but committing to finish projects only when I’ve already done most of the work to capture, organize, and distill the relevant material means I never run the risk of starting something I can’t finish. — *location: 2173* ^ref-8004 --- Through the simple acts of capturing ideas, organizing them into groups, distilling the best parts, and assembling them together to create value for others, we are practicing the basic moves of knowledge work in such a way that we can improve on them over time. — *location: 2211* ^ref-30225 --- Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.”2 He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.IV — *location: 2317* ^ref-39389 --- Stephen Covey’s classic advice to “begin with the end in mind.” — *location: 2459* ^ref-59898 --- ==This is where the Curator’s Perspective I used when I first captured the content really pays off—because each and every note in my Second Brain was deliberately chosen, I am able to search through a collection of exclusively high-quality notes free of fluff and filler. This is in stark contrast to searching the open Internet, which is full of distracting ads, misleading headlines, superficial content, and pointless controversy, all of which can throw me off track==. — *location: 2556* ^ref-24072 --- The practice of conducting a “Weekly Review” was pioneered by executive coach and author David Allen in his influential book Getting Things Done.III He described a Weekly Review as a regular check-in, performed once a week, in which you intentionally reset and review your work and life. Allen recommends using a Weekly Review to write down any new to-dos, review your active projects, and decide on priorities for the upcoming week. — *location: 2654* ^ref-51153 --- ==The more you outsource and delegate the jobs of capturing, organizing, and distilling to technology, the more time and energy you’ll have available for the self-expression that only you can do.== — *location: 2858* ^ref-28682 --- For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. — *location: 308* ^ref-6668 --- Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” — *location: 406* ^ref-7628 --- Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4: You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” — *location: 800* ^ref-7447 ---