Building a Second Brain

Overview

I've spent the last 4 years fine-tuning "how I work." From Getting Things Done to Kanban to Zero Inbox, I've mixed and matched all sorts of ways to be productive.

I learned that deciding what to work on and deciding how to do it were separate frames of mind. Vision and prioritization work has to happen in a separate time & space than execution work. The mindsets don't mesh well.

I learned that while large aspirations drive huge results, focusing on small, achievable areas is a far more sustainable way to make consistent progress towards "Big Hairy Audacious Goals" (BHAGs).

I learned that I am never just one fact or skill away from success. I may not feel like I know enough, but I must figure out how to press forward.

I learned that even on the things that I do know, I can't do it all. There is not enough time in the day. Finding people to help me is often the best way.

Even as I learned all of this, I felt trapped. I work in creative spurts. I have inspiring ideas, connecting them with past ideas. I try to keep this all in my head, but I can't. The notes are logged, and then lost to time. I have spent years logging, reflecting, and connecting different ideas to help in future projects. But they were not "discoverable." I could not easily find them.

Without rehashing what other authors have so thoroughly covered, I found the dynamic way of organizing my notes around my projects rather than themes to be compelling. Organizing my notes by themes felt like being in a library for a research project, having to go through the shelves to search for a new book every time I wanted to draw upon another source of inspiration or note. There is a lot of lost time to getting up and down from my desk, searching the aisles, hoping to find what I'm looking for. Organizing my notes by project is like finding all of those books at the beginning of the project and bringing them with me to my desk. No more searching. It's all right there at my fingertips.

I've implemented this for a few weeks now, and it's already proven to be very easy. It's not a solve all. But it does remove a constant source of stress that I had in trying to find other work.

This, combined with a recommitment to focus in limiting the number of projects I would complete, has done wonders for being able to "ship." I'm hopeful for the things to come.

Kickoff Questions

What do you want to learn?

I want to learn if there are any areas that I've missed in making projects / goals over the last few years. I also want to learn how I might be better able to structure these goals so that I can pursue them in smaller, bite sized chunks that will help me to make more progress towards my goals.

What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer?

The most important question I want to answer is, "How do I know that I'm working on the right things?" followed by "How do I structure these things so that I'm likely to make progress towards them?

What is most likely to fail?

This isn't a high risk endeavor. But the thing that is most likely to fail is that I miss some insight / angle that I need to capture as a piece of who I am trying to be.

What needs to happen for this project to be considered succesful?

I need to have a template for goals / projects so that I can kick them off correctly. I also need to have a list of my goals at the ready. All of my projects need to be in one place and my goals in one place. I think I have them spread across a few different areas right now.

What are the minimum results you need to achieve, or the "stretch goals" that you are striving for?

The minimum results that I need to achieve are the above. A "stretch goal" that I'm striving for is something that captures *all* of the areas of focus, which include the goals, breaking those goals down into 10, 5, 3, 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 6 week, and 2 week visions, each with their own stages. This also includes figuring out "Who, Not How" and using an Impact Filter whenever I meet with people to get a sense of how I could invite this person alongside me.

Who can I talk to that might provide insights / feedback to the results of this project?

[Redacted]

Post-Mortem Questions

What did you learn?

I learned that I had an 80 - 90% understanding of my goals, but had some blind spots to things that I had considered in the past. I also learned that my way of working on projects was a little too abstract. It led to slipped timelines and overcommitting on work -- working towards the ideal rather than small improvements.

What did you do well?

I remained focus until the job was done, and did better this time than I ever have on pushing out those things that were "optional" to the next phase

What could you have done better?

Too early to tell. I think the next time will be the focus on too many things and not having them shaped. We'll see.

Were the objectives of the project achieved?

They were. I was able to create a series of templates that I can use to decide on what I'm working on, and how that will look.

I did not work on the cascading timeline of my strategy because I realized that it wasn't very dynamic. It was a bad scope. Instead, I reshaped the guidance to be more vision / strategy oriented while only getting into the details of what needs to happen in the next weeks.

What was the return on investment?

The return on the investment was that I was able to create a much better system that I'm likely to use to work in rather than trying to do everything in Amazing Marvin (and never looking at things again). This has also helped me to make connections in ways that I never have before.