Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
Who else can relate to this? I have 200-300 tabs open on my computer because I found a great website that I know I will need someday in the future. Every time my computer restarts I pray to the computer gods that my tabs will restore upon restarting. My best friend is CTRL + SHIFT + T to restore my accidently closed out tab.
Is there a better way? Can the information that I learned be stored in a more efficient manner?
According to Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, you can!
Did you know that out of a five-day workweek a worker spends one whole day searching for information? So how can we increase productivity? By making the information easier to find. Tiago Forte, the author, suggests a file system: Short-Term Activities, Long-Term Activities, Information, and Backup.
Of course, he uses other terms so you will have to buy the book for the more sophisticated terminology.
So what did I think of this book?
Building a Second Brain was overly verbose, wordy, with a lot of repetition. Personally, all that I needed to know is that people spend an incredible amount of time searching for information and a better way to store it. However, the factoid that I provided earlier (about the average worker) is just one sentence in an entire chapter. The file organization chapter is the only other chapter that I found helpful.
But did this one chapter change my life?
Yes. On the open tabs that I have on my computer, I started to save them to PDF along with a Word document with the web address. Then, I saved those files to the filing system that the author suggested. I was able to finally close out of my 200-300 tabs! Also, now the information isn’t buried. You know when you finally need one of those tabs and now you have to sort through them all? I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders when I finally closed out of my tabs.
However……
I am not sure that the average worker is the most beneficial person to read this. I propose that people with direct reports are the ideal target audience for this book. Why? Let’s take a look.
- Back in the day, I worked in public accounting. At every office for every client, we were supposed to use a standardized filing system. For example, every client would have a Tax Returns, Provisions, and PBC (Provided by Client) folder. However, people rarely complied with this filing system. Why? Was everyone out to “get” the company? No. People were overworked, and they couldn’t care less about the filing system. Also, sometimes the Shared Drive was extremely slow or inaccessible, and it was much easier and faster to work from their desktop.
- There was one gentleman that I worked for that was constantly (and unfairly) passed over for a promotion. He worked nearly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and he had vast in-depth knowledge of the company. Guess where he stored all of his files? On his desktop. This was intentional.
So why do I think corporations might be the best target audience? To ensure compliance with the filing system, they need to make compliance part of their employees’ performance metrics. Otherwise, people will let it slide.
Also, corporations need to rethink how and why they promote individuals. If someone is hording information and stating, “Promote me. I know what the others in the team don’t know.”, that person should not be promoted. Corporations should stop rewarding information hording. Instead, the corporate response should be, “Why doesn’t the rest of your team know what you know? What steps have you taken to improve the team?” Information hording is not a leadership trait; it is actually quite the opposite.
Finally, I wanted to touch on something that the author missed (in my opinion). He referred to how you know so many things and you want to remember them all. However, Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist and author of Remember, gave a great example of clarifying what you really know in the first place. Imagine that you are running late for a very important meeting. You pull your car into the first available slot and run into the building. When you come out of the meeting, you can’t remember where you parked. However, you never took the time to look up and see the sign that says that you are parked in Level 3. You can’t remember something that you didn’t know in the first place!
This is a good reminder that sometimes we need to slow down. If you speed read something at 6X speed, how much of that book are you really going to remember? If you quickly skim an article online for 30 seconds, are you going to have any truly valuable takeaways?
Overall, Building a Second Brain has life-altering advice; however, it is difficult to wade through all of the other non-useful information to get to the useful stuff.
Need your next read? Check out the most anticipated books for the last half of 2022 here!
*Thanks, NetGalley, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and honest opinion.