The Importance of Making Your Notes “Glance-able”

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Highlighting is a universal language of distilling important information. Applying the practice of highlighting to digital notes is recommended. It is crucial to make notes glance-able, as in a busy workday, there isn't enough time to read lengthy excerpts. Being able to grasp the main takeaway or headline of a note in about five seconds is essential. If notes are not glance-able, people will move on and lose the benefit of note-taking.

In the modern age, people are bombarded with more information, and are more personally responsible for managing that information, than ever before. How do you stay on top of your schedule, work responsibilities, financial obligations, and the spigot of media that runs full force 24/7 while not only avoiding becoming overwhelmed, but actually using all that information to generate better ideas, advance your career, and generally improve your life?

My guest would say that the answer lies in having a mind outside your mind. His name is Tiago Forte and he's the author of Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Today on the show, Tiago explains how a Second Brain is an external resource where you can store all of the most valuable checklists, thoughts, notes, ideas, and insights you acquire and generate. He explains how the Second Brain supercharges the historical practice of keeping a commonplace book, and how it improves your productivity and well-being by getting stuff out of your head, off your bandwidth, and into a place where you can actually put it to use. Tiago then walks us through this system of "Personal Knowledge Management," including the tools you can use to capture information, the question to ask yourself to decide what to capture, and why he recommends organizing what you capture around action instead of subject. And Tiago explains how the ultimate goal of having a Second Brain is to take what you put into this treasury and synthesize it into better ways to live, think, act, and express yourself.