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Building a Second Brain for Productivity
Today we operate from a basis of knowledge, confidence and creativity to pull together insights and build successful products. Here, I want to share how creating a personal note-taking system can act as a catalyst for connecting knowledge and ideas that will save you time, enhance problem-solving and boost creative thought.
Today we consume more information per person than at any other time in human history. We are continually reading, observing, monitoring, conversing and mentally trying to build a knowledge of the world we can use in our daily work and lives. The problem? The disparity between the total quantity of human knowledge and our ability to assimilate and filter it grows unremittingly by the day.
Imagine being able to recall any interesting thing you have read, seen or done. How amazing would that be? Any problem, any piece of creative work or project, boosted by a library of your historical insights, accessible any time. That’s a transformative way of solving problems.
One of the stepping stones to building such a solution is note-taking. However, it’s likely the way you currently take notes is wrong. It’s probably not changed since your school days. In the knowledge workplace, nobody can tell us what’s essential and when or how the information will be needed. Unlike school, the “tests” in our working lives can come at any time.
The failing of taking good notes is invisible in the short term, but in my daily role as a product manager I now regularly find myself referring to notes for everything from feature development, meeting preparation, providing colleague feedback and user research.
Knowledge is hard to come by, and as humans, it’s better to use our energies to focus on solving problems rather than recalling all the information. The following is a guide to understanding what a note is and how to you can use them in a system to help boost your thought process and productivity.
What is a good note?
“A good Note says what is wrong, what is…
