My Experience with "Building a Second Brain" #2
The Second Brain concept resonated with me especially thanks to two methods. The method of knowledge processing (C.O.D.E.) and its management method (P.A.R.A.). I encountered both methods partly in school and partly during my studies. Later, I intuitively figured out knowledge management, but I never had a methodical introduction. This is exactly the work that Tiago Forte has accomplished in his Second Brain concept and its associated methods. To my knowledge, he is one of the first to develop a consciously humanistic approach to dealing with our society's information overload.
Over the last 12 years, I spent a lot of time trying to understand various apps and their operating concepts, hoping that if I understood them, I could use the software as a knowledge management tool. I failed repeatedly: Either a function was missing or the operation became so complex (for example through the use of tags) that I lost track over time and lost the desire to use them. Most often, it ended with me trying another new software or returning to individual Word files and folder structures. With the fatal consequence that I produced a fragmentation of my work results. All my work from my school days, my studies, projects, and research work are stored in different apps, different folders and file types, partly physical, partly digital on various hard drives. (Perhaps this is why I'm fascinated by the topic of "not knowing".)
However, dealing with the various apps and their usability has also proven to be a great wealth of experience over the years. Through this, I have developed a versatile understanding of software logic in terms of operation and usage, which I can now incorporate into my consulting and training work. What I always lacked over all these years was an intuitively applicable method for my personal knowledge management.
When I participated in Building a Second Brain in September 2020, Tiago said in the first session that there isn't "the" app for personal knowledge management. Rather, he thinks it's about using a method that makes it possible to combine different apps with each other. With this statement, I suddenly realized that this was exactly the change in perspective I had been missing in recent years. This was a first key experience for me!
Tiago uses two methods: C.O.D.E., which stands for Capture - Organize - Distill and Express.
And P.A.R.A., which stands for Projects - Areas - Resources and Archive.
The last post My Experience with "Building a Second Brain" #1 ended with the three basic steps Collect, Connect and Create. C.O.D.E is the evolution of these three basic steps.
Capture, Organize, Distill and Express are four work steps that describe a method of knowledge processing. When used consistently, one researches and processes information into personal and contextualized knowledge. In short, one has learned. SOSA is a method that we should actually know from school or our profession. What's new is that these work steps are consistently implemented with digital media (1). In our information society, this is a game changer.
Capture
We all know it - you see a great poster, take a photo, and it ends up in your photo collection. You discover an interesting article in an online magazine and save it in your browser or Pocket. You have an idea or an exciting thought about a topic, but you're out with friends, so you try to remember it or note it down in some app. You collect and try to organize the information. When you need it, you remember that you saved it somewhere, but don't know where.
Apps I use to capture information
Pocket: I save articles in Pocket to read them later. What I particularly like about Pocket is that I can save articles from various services and later read them in a reader-friendly format while being able to highlight interesting passages. I can export my text highlights later and use them in new contexts.
Evernote: I save important articles in Evernote. Evernote saves a screenshot of the article, which guarantees that the article will still be available to me even if it's no longer online. Another advantage with Evernote is that I can save articles that are behind a paywall. And I have the ability to share each individual page, which in turn allows me to connect individual articles in different contexts.
Hypothesis I use for marking articles, websites, or information that I need for my work. Together with Readwise, it forms an important research and workflow in my "Second Brain". This workflow can be read about in my guest post: Collect – Synchronize – Synthesize: a Workflow for Knowledge Workers
Files, Texts, Images, Graphics etc.
Files, such as articles that I download as PDFs, I store in a file folder. I read the PDFs in a normal PDF reader and mark important passages using the highlighting function. I link the read and processed articles during my work step of distilling. My files are in the cloud, which means the individual documents are available to me at any time and I can easily link and/or share them. (2)
Photos
In my personal life and on my personal work devices, I'm in the Apple ecosystem. Here it makes sense for me to use Apple Photos.
Sketches and Handwritten Notes
I use Microsoft OneNote in the educational context. I have implemented and managed almost all of my teaching materials in OneNote over the last five years. Additionally, I use OneNote in my current work for project documentation. You can get an impression of my work in and with OneNote in my public documentation of my professional development materials: The ICT-SchoolBox (Info: The materials are no longer being updated). Furthermore, I really enjoy using OneNote for handwritten notes and sketches; in my opinion, OneNote is one of the best electronic notebooks that works across platforms (Windows, Mac, Android).
Organize
The organization and management of my collected information takes place in my data storage, RoamResearch, and Notion. After learning about P.A.R.A. (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive), I completely organized my data management according to this structure. You can find more information on this topic in this post: My Experience with "Building a Second Brain" #3
RoamResearch I use for loose thoughts and spontaneous notes. Starting with the current date and bidirectional links are very helpful for quick, spontaneous thought sketches.
Notion is the central place where I manage my work and knowledge. Notion's combination of text and database is my knowledge hub for my daily work.
Another advantage of Notion is the ability to publicly share individual databases or pages. Two examples: The concept for Connect Your Memory and the ict-schulbox.ch, which is the further development of the training materials from the OneNote linked above.
Distill
My daily focused work takes place in Notion: meeting notes, project drafts, professional development materials, presentations, and texts are all created in Notion. I manage my work in a database whose content I can display differently according to my needs. This allows me to pick up content from different contexts, connect it in new ways, and distill it.
This work step holds the greatest potential for networked knowledge management. Here, information from completed projects can be linked to new tasks.
Express
A task, project, or work area is completed in this work step. I complete most results directly in Notion, where they move to the archive. By consciously completing and archiving, I organize my completed work results in a way that allows me to retrieve them at any time and reuse or share the gained results with others.
Conclusion
I have been using C.O.D.E. for about nine months now, and already after this short time I notice,
- that I better structure and complete my work using the four work steps.
- that I find and reconnect collected information and results more easily.
- that it's easier for me to share created results because they contain more diverse media, are more structured, and are more results-oriented.
It may sound euphoric, but in the last fifteen years, I have never had such a strong feeling that I actively manage my collected, organized, and distilled information and results.
(1) This also makes clear why it makes no sense to compare analog media with digital media. Jörn Muuß-Merholz illustrates this wonderfully with his Penguin Media Metaphor.
