Inside Ryder Carroll’s Second Brain | Roam & Bujo

writer Carroll is best known for inventing bullet journaling a practice which transforms any notebook into a place for mindfulness productivity and note making but what you might not know is how Ryder combines this system with this one is digital world I need something to help me remember all the things that resonate with me my second brain is just a way of making sure that my good ideas remain tucked away somewhere that I can access them Thiago sat down with Ryder and got him to reveal all the ways he structures his second brain the physical and digital system that guides his personal and creative life but first what is a bullet Journal I like to think of it as a mindfulness practice that's disguised as a productivity system so I kind of have this rule where anything that comes into my mind goes right into the notebook and then I can figure out where to put it later every time you ask yourself where does this go you have the answer you just bring in your notebook and it's always compatible it's this idea of not having to worry about where your thoughts go and then the paper notebook is just the the physical manifestation of that philosophy yeah it's basically the tool we use to execute a way of thinking a bullet Journal is created by recording your notes as bullets in any blank journal in bullet Journal we have different kinds of bullet points right we have tasks events and nodes but that way I can very quickly skim the margin of the page to see like what do I have to do what are the action steps here what are things that I want to look into it's a visual guide to help me quickly engage with the content that I'm writing faster you can add bullets under topic headers such as your daily log the place to record whatever Matters from that day you don't plan your bullet Journal ahead of time instead you let it happen organically and right on whatever page is next in your Journal part of like the whole methodologies like you just turn the page and begin right then instead of pre-deciding all the sections which may or may not be correct you're almost making it linear to make that decision of where to put it easier let's say the example of you you're reading a book just for curiosity just for personal reasons and you find something that you want to write down what does it concretely look like when it comes to reading a book specifically I create this thing called a collection which as its name suggests is a place where you collect related information in this case it would be notes about this book so when I sit down with a book I will turn to this collection and then that's where I'm going to start making my notes in Bujo we have this thing called the index where basically you write down all the names of your collections so later on I can be like okay on page 35 is where all my notes about this book for the way that I do it each book is one collection if it's the first note that you're taking on a book are you turning just to the next available blank page and starting a new collection for that book right there yeah you're basically spinning up functionality in your own notebook it's like okay now it's I'm going to create a collection for monitoring how much water I drink I'm going to spin up a collection for the book that I'm reading it kind of gives you this way to elevate what is always just some text on a page into a more permanent kind of Evergreen long-term thing something that we can also continue throughout notebooks like some people will have collections for like their mental health for example so they can monitor how they're feeling or where their thoughts are going and you can see where that was like two three years ago collection is something that can persist over time for writer's work process he takes notes in his bullet Journal while making highlights directly on Kindle when it comes to work I literally just sit down with my iPad Kindle app have my notebook next to me and get to work what happens when Ryder is reading this book that's what ends up in my notebook what does my mind generate when it interfaces with this information there's like a collision the Collision of this author's mind with writer's mind yes there's like a spark that happens right there this allows him to take digital notes that can move on to the next stage of the process as well as physical ones which may or may not move on to the next stage I delineate between taking and making notes the notes that I take which is like highlighting that I'll do in my Kindle I read everything on Kindle I highlight a lot I know I I highlight way too much I have a highlighting problem but I also ruthlessly edit my highlights after true to form when he's reading for the joy of it and not just reading something for work writer will choose physical books over digital ones every time there's something much more sensual about them I like the way they smell I like the way they feel there's also something about the progress that you're making and also I have a background as a designer so actually seeing the way that what font phase they picked and the way the books laid out the weight of it there's just something about the physicality that I love you differentiate between reading modes I think this is super important there's like so many reasons to read situations in which you read moods or states of mind that you're in like you have completely different almost setups when you're in bed winding down I'm guessing it's more reflective more open-ended when you're like you're like trying to find something you're like seeing hunting for the solution to your problem it couldn't be more different not everything in writer's world is analog there's a digital side to things too just digital lives in digital I feel like that's a simple rule trying to make it analog and then digital is not I don't want to do that round tripping that doesn't make sense URLs and things like that when they're links to things that I have to check out I'm not writing a URL my notebook if I run into an article I used to copy and paste the link to the article in my daily note actually thanks to your class now I actually right click and put it right in a matter so thank you for that that was an optimization links bookmarks all that kind of stuff we'll go into Rome I love photography and I also use photography as a way to take notes in some ways like oh I want to remember this moment all photos would go into Apple photos into my camera roll what I've started doing recently and the jury's still out is I actually open the notes and app and then one of the ways to log is by taking a picture so I don't import anything I just take the picture right away this is a photo as note more and more often writer will get his most creative ideas on walks where he'll dictate voice memos to himself a lot of my thinking happens when I walk so I will figure out the topic of what it is that I want to explore and then I just start talking about it as I'm walking at some point my rambling will actually turn into something coherent I use a program called Otter and Otter allows me to dictate and it transcribes automatically and then I'll say keywords I'll be like highlight or Focus or something so then when I search it later I can see where it started making sense and I can just like delete everything before that that's brilliant they're like voice tags how does that highlight get into Rome which I think is your note-taking app of choice that goes through read wise for someone who doesn't know what read wise is I always I struggle with this myself how would you describe read wise read wise it's an app that takes content from one platform and pipes it into another platform that's specifically targeted for research and reading so I tag everything as inbox essentially okay so for books I use Kindle for articles I use matter and both of those end up in Rome in my Rome inbox which will then be processed later the read wise app goes to each of writer's digital inputs and automatically pushes them into Rome a digital Notes app preferred by The Gardener style note-taking archetype a lot of our organization is artificial I feel like right we don't think this way we don't think in folder structures we don't think like that at all and it's like especially with creatives like I don't think in folder hierarchies and like that kind of thing I don't either that's kind of what Rome is like I don't need to organize it and that's what I love about it in Rome notetakers create Pages which are linked together by tags and Page links for me the biggest thing is just like the wiki links like backlings and try exclusion and all that stuff like being able to very quickly connect the dots that's why I use it when writer's digital notes come into Rome they're tagged to the inbox page where they can be reviewed I don't have to think about what is going to go into Rome everything goes into Rome and then I have this inbox and then I will hit the inbox tag and everything that's inbox will be there and then I spend time every day processing like I have dedicated time to writing every day and for me processing my roam is considered writing and that's the Inbox and it has processed my inbox as it goes down so for you in Rome in boxes attack those notes could be located wherever they could have come in through whatever means but when you do a search for inbox it's telling you everything that has come in that needs some further processing but how do the notes and thoughts that writer takes in his bullet Journal make their way into Rome we have regular rituals essentially a daily ritual weekly ritual and a monthly ritual which is where we go back and reflect on the things that we've written and then we get rid of stuff that no longer adds any value find home for the things that do during the day I'm just capturing and then in the evening I'm trying to actually figure out where these things have to live and oftentimes I just stay in my notebook because they're for me but if they don't Google Calendar Clarity that kind of thing I find a home for them and then I will mark them as migrated inside my notebook not everything goes in from my notebook into Rome because I can read it later and be like half these notes are not interesting if you're using the lack of time the lack of interest that you may have in something not as these enemies spit every step of the process cut cut cut cut so that less and less makes it towards the end I have to be structured in the way that I input things but I want to do it in a way where I can just freely think I want to make a mess and not have to think about it once everything that needs to be is in room writer will process his inbox and highlights organizing them into their respective pages and projects the way that I process notes is kind of asynchronous in general so I prioritize my inbox based on my interest I have to crank out this r article for something I'm writing and I have five articles in my inbox related to that they are prioritized when I go through highlights the same thing happens many of them don't make sense anymore out of context so I quickly just skim the highlights and just start deleting highlights on mass like no no no no no interesting no no no no no no interesting and I just try to get through it as fast as I can so I'll do like a first pass and then I'll go through the ones that remain and then I actually start doing the um uh what's it called Progressive summarization thank you yeah I love that you have a term for Progressive summarization and not make people have to say that if they unless they want to Progressive summarization is a building a second brain core technique you can use to distill your notes anytime you read a quotation that resonates with you immediately capture it in your second brain then next time that you revisit the note you bold the words that stick out most upon rereading it if you visit the note a third time you highlight keywords out of the section that you already bolted eventually you'll be be able to identify just the most important information in your second brain the phrases and ideas that resonate most with you the way how my Realms set up is that I can actually filter by highlights so my book will only surface the things that I highlighted within my highlights what did I find to be most important so it'd be like five or six things really quickly items are moved from the inbox as needed into specialized Pages where writer starts to distill his creative work in the form of outlines okay this is actually fun depends on where I am in the process of writing so it's like I want to write this thing a video or a article a new course or something like that as we talked about before I'm gathering a lot of information from different sources so the first thing is to actually start to weave that together and because of PKM the best thing is you don't start with a blank page anymore this is like why Rome research is the tool that it is because now I can take all my research and start weaving it together and never have to start with a blank page and I'm like oh here are all the different resources I have I want to talk about this thing want to talk about this thing I want to talk about this thing so inside of Rome I started like pulling in reference blocks and then I start creating an outline from that what does that outline have to have before you move forward with it I like thinking more in a sculptural approach I put way too much on and then just keep on reducing reducing for me it's really just kind of a playground my outline it's for me just take all these different things and try to find a thread once the outline is ready writer brings it to his personal favorite writing app so I'll have an outline and I'll write a lot in it and then finally just the designer in me can't help myself I go into IA writer which is just like the most clean have you ever used it just briefly but not much it's just a delight to write in because it takes away everything there's no interface it's just writing and then I'll write on that until I need people to look at it upload it as a Google doc and then have people there to shreds and then write it again and then publish it hopefully it's almost like the creative process is a loop it's a circle it's not like a Factory oh beginning to end it's like it's this iterative Loop the faster you go through the loop the better like you could slow down and do it more perfectly and refine things but the Improvement is not at any one stage of that Circle it's the frequency the speed at which you're circuiting that process I guarantee no matter what you do you're going to get it wrong the thing is you can't trust yourself until you've earned that trust from yourself and you can't earn that trust without action Rome research works best for Gardener style note takers like Ryder Carroll to find out which of the four note-taking Styles you are and which app you should pick as your own second brain watch this video next foreign [Music]

Channel: Tiago Forte

Views: 94,818

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Id: FeZ4rXHEzrU

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022