Over the past three weeks I have been a part of the twelfth cohort to navigate the Building a Second Brain course. This course is designed, in my opinion, to turn us into black belts of knowledge and project management, immensely important in this age of overwhelming information and project complexity.
One of the main benefits of getting on top of everything, and outsourcing a large deal to our second brain (instead of trying to do everything with our first) is a much calmer mental experience - or ‘mind like water’ the martial artists might say.
In a world that creates so much mental overwhelm, I feel there is another challenge for those of us working to grow in our meditation. Being a highly productive and ‘busy’ modern human seems to be at odds with developing mental serenity.
The man behind this project is Tiago Forte. I’ve been following his work for almost six months and am already a huge fan of the way he thinks - clear, methodical, thorough. He summarises the central process of personal knowledge management as CODE; Collect, Organise, Distill, Express. These stages are perennial to the design process. It doesn’t matter which systems or tools we use to do our work, our work always happens along these lines.
“Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop,” which will be pulling on your attention if it’s not appropriately managed.” David Allen, Getting Things Done
In fact, Tiago Forte drew much of his initial inspiration from David's Getting Things Done methodology.
So far so good, I can feel some of the benefits of not relying on my first brain for everything, of closing some of the many open loops of information and activity to free up my ability to think more clearly be more present.
I’ve still got two weeks to go, and a lot more to absorb and implement, and a much longer journey beyond yet. But I’ll share the best with you, especially as it relates to our mission of life mastery - thanks for reading, stay tuned.