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Building a Second Brain Summary

In the age of digital overload, it’s crucial to have systems that help us filter information and prioritize what matters most. “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte offers a solution: storing reference and planning data outside of our minds. By doing so, we free up our mental capacity and concentrate on important tasks that require our attention. However, we should be mindful not to hoard information but instead carefully curate knowledge that aligns with our top priorities. If the information doesn’t contribute to future creations, it’s not currently useful.

Building a Second Brain Notes

Introduction The promise of a Second Brain

• The content we are consuming right now likely only has a few ideas that are relevant and actionable at this point in time. However, there are also likely other ideas within that content that could be actionable in our future.
• Knowledge and content is not shrinking. The people who can learn to harvest and leverage knowledge and content will be more aligned to be high achievers in the future.

Part 1 The foundation

Chapter 1 Where it all Started

A personal turning point

• Tiagos story is that of undiagnosed affliction. His process of taking action and collection and curating every price of content on his affliction lead him to be able to manage and control his pain.
• Being able to take pride in being the only person in the room to remember and important detail about a project is something I relate to.

Another shift discovering the power of sharing

• Human capital is the knowledge and knowhow embodied in humans. This is an asset worth five to ten times more than physical capital.

Chapter 2 What is a Second Brain

• Information is an essential component to building anything. We need to know things in order to build them.
• As a society we spend so much time ingesting information and trying to remember where everything is that we lose track of being creative, building relationships, or focusing on our own well being. Information and reference storage is better offloaded to machines that were designed to handle that very thing.

The Legacy of Commonplace Books

• A Commonplace book was a place that educated people used in the industrial revolution era to collection and reorganize ideas to contribute to creative works and social settings

The Digital Commonplace Book

• Technology enables us to create a modern Commonplace book that is easily searchable and organizable to make information collection and recall much faster

Rethinking Note taking: Notes as Knowledge Blocks

• We must break notes down so that they aren’t disposable but instead easy to repurpose and reuse endlessly

Chapter 3 How a Second Brain works

The Superpowers of a Second Brain

Second Brain superpower #1 Make our ideas more concrete

• It is important to be able to get ideas or thoughts out of your head into a form that you can interact with them. Otherwise it becomes easy to lose that information in your minds limited resources.
• An idea or thought that you have now might not immediately be actionable. If you don’t collect it somewhere you might not remember it when it could be actionable in the future

Second Brain superpower #2 Reveal New Associations Between Notes

• Because the second brain allows for notes to sit together from seemingly different sources we are able to make connections from distinctly different ideas

Second Brain superpower #3 Incubate our ideas overtime

• It is not likely that our best ideas or ways to handle a task or project will be able to be pulled out of our brains in a moments notice. Instead with a second brain we are able to pull from months or even years of notes of ideas.

Second Brain superpower #4 Sharpen our Unique Perspectives

• Being able to develop and support our perspectives requires comfort and familiarity with information that supports these perspectives. Having a weath of information allows you to comfortably support your ideas with a backing of material to show why you have these perspectives.

Introducing the CODE Method: The Four Steps to Remembering What Matters

Capture: Keep What Resonates

• There is so much content out there to consume and not near enough time to keep up with it all. We must assume the role of curator in our own content libraries to ensure that the content that we end up consuming answers a need or interest that is important to us.
• Adopting a curator mindset allows us to free ourselves from FOMO because we have meticulously set up a system that allows for only the important bits of information to reach us.

Organize: Save for Actionability

• Tiago suggests organizing notes by actionability within your current set of projects. This makes me wonder if content eventually gets lost in the archive and is difficult to surface

Distill: Find the Essence

• It is important to be able to boil down an idea into it’s core concept. This is because later when you revisit a note it is much easier to read a summary than to read several pages of notes to get the core idea again.
• We take notes of books so that when that information again becomes useful we don’t have to re-read the whole book again

Express: Show your Work

• We all have a creative side. Being able to express from the ideas we have is the ultimate way to put the information we gather to use. Otherwise we are just data hoarders.

Part 2 The Method: The Four Steps of CODE

Chapter 4 Capture: Keep what Resonates

Building a Private Collection of Knowledge

Creating a Knowledge Bank: How to Generate Interest from Your Thoughts

• Knowledge and experiences are all assets that can be further analyzed or grown over time

What not to Keep

• Sensitive information you want to keep secure
• Files with special format
• Very large files
• Files you want to work on collaboratively with others

Twelve Favorite Problems: A Nobel Prize Winner’s approach to Capturing

• What you capture can be decided using a test against your twelve favorite questions. Does the content help you in answering any of those questions?

Capturing Criteria: How to avoid keeping too much or too little

• Curation of content involves digging into the individual sections from a source and finding the golden nuggets in the information. You don’t have to save an entire article to get the peices that will mean the most to you.

Capture Criteria #1: Does it Inspire me?

• Keep a collection of quotes, ideas, and stories that give you a boost when you need it most

Capture Criteria #2: Is it Useful?

• Much how a carpenter keeps around scraps, tidbits of information may not immediately be useful but they could have value in a larger project

Capture Criteria #3: Is it Personal?

• Thoughts and memories are unreplaceable

Capture Criteria #4: Is it surprising?

• If information doesn’t challenge or add to what you already know then there is no point in collecting it since you already know what is being provided

Ultimately Capture what Resonates

• Intuition is a powerful inner voice that can help us make good choices. When we listen to this inner voice it will help us determine which pieces of content are worth having around.

The Surprising benefits of Externalizing our Thoughts

• When we processing something into our own words more of our brains activates to understand what we are putting down.

Your Turn what would this look like if it was easy?

Chapter 5 Organize: Save for Actionability

• The benefits to keeping all project relates material in a single folder is that it is easy to move that folder around and remember the pieces that were important to that project. I think on just has to remember if you leave content in that folder how it might relate to other projects later.

The Cathedral Effect: Designing a space for your ideas

• Designing our digital space is just as important as designing our living space. Our digital space has to inspire us to do our best work. It has to make us comfortable. We have to know our way around at a moments notice.

Organizing For Action: Where 99 percent of note takers get stuck

• We must be wary of any system in which we spend so much time designing and organizing that we don’t have any time left for creating.

How PARA works: Priming your mind and notes for action

Resources: Things I want to Reference in the Future

• Resources will hold information regarding interests that are not currently actionable in a project or area. This can include subjects you are intrigued by

Archives: Things I’ve completed or put on hold

What PARA looks like a behind the scenes snapshot

Where Do I put this? How to decide where to save individual notes

Organizing Information like a kitchen–What am I making?

• We don’t organize all dried fruit, fresh fruit and frozen fruits into the same place. That is how many people approach note organization. Book notes don’t all belong together just because they are from a book

Completed Projects are the Oxygen of your second brain

• PARA changes the structure of the content you ingest and focuses on what you can immediately do with that content. If there isn’t actions that can be taken it should be archived.
• Even with a intuitive folder structure eventually all folders have some useful and some unnecessary content

Your Turn: Move Quickly, Touch lightly

• Don’t make the process harder than it needs to be. Difficulty causes indecision and procrastination.
• Focus first on creating folders for the projects you are currently making active progress on.

Distill–Find the Essence

Quantum note taking: How to create notes for an unknown future

Discoverability–The missing link in making notes useful

• Because our future selves may need information in an instant we need to plan our information structure in such a way that it it quickly found and quickly understood.

Highlighting 2.0: The progressive summarization technique

• Tiago suggests not bothering to provide a summary for every processed note. Only do this when you are revisiting your note many times and spending time reprocessing the highlights and bolded passages.

Zooming in and out of your map of knowledge

Four Examples of Progressive Summarization

Picasso’s secret: Prune the good to surface the great

• My culling process for photography is a form of Progressive Summarization

The Three most common mistakes of novice notetakers

Over Highlighting

Highlighting without a purpose in mind

• Don’t create a progressive summarization backlog. Only go through and progressively summarize a note when you have a specific creative project the knowledge can apply toward

Making Highlighting Difficult

Express Show your Work

How to Protect Your Most Precious Resource

• Our most precious resource is our attention

Intermediate Packets: The Power of Thinking Small

Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output

How to Resurface and Reuse your Past Work

Retrieval Method 1 Search

• Search works and a first level but cannot help when you don’t know what you are looking for specifically or you are looking for saved images

Creativity is Inherently Collaborative

• By sharing our work with others we are able to discover the work or expertise we have that resonates most with other people. Often times our most valuable work is not what we think it is

Part 3 The Shift Making Things Happen

Chapter 8 The art of Creative Execution

• When we take an approach of constant collection of ideas we are able to bring them together to build a better project that we would if we tried to build it from scratch

Divergence and Convergence: A creative balancing act

• In the early stages of exploration we diverge from a starting point. We branch our and collect information from various sources. When we are ready to hone that information into something concrete we converge and focus in on development

The Three strategies I use to bring creative work together

• As a recovering perfectionist I relate to the point Tiago makes about having trouble moving into convergence mode on my own. I always imagine there are more resources I can access to reinforce and idea before trying to express it.

The Archipelago of ideas: Give yourself Stepping Stones

• This is a method of outlining using sources and ideas you have around an idea.

The Hemingway Bridge: Use Yesterdays Momentum Today

• This method entails closing out a creative session with a clear idea of the next step. If you are writing a blog make sure that you know where you will pickup with when you return to continue writing.

Dial Down the Scope: Ship Something Small and Concrete

• When you are getting hung up you can dial back and produce something smaller. If you dial back save all the scraps you have cut from your final draft so that you can use them later for a larger project

Chapter 9 The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers

• There is upkeep to keeping your workspace organized so it becomes easier to enter your second brain and not fight to find content to support a project

The Miss-en-place way to Sustainable Productivity

• mise en place is a habit complete with cue and reward where you set up your workspace so efficiently that the work to product content is seamless because your tools work for you and your mind reacts
• We tend to avoid maintenance on our systems until they are failing and at that point we have to spend a full day setting the system back up or moving to a new system in hopes it won’t fail us like our previous system.

The Review Habit

• Tiago suggests saving all notes for the week into the inbox and then sorting them into their correct para folder and succinctly naming them at the weekly review

The Noticing Habit

• This habit allows us to notice when we have a idea and collect it rather than letting it go away. Similar to how I have been randomly thinking for tasks
• Organize as you go and don’t make your system so rigid that it is difficult to use

Chapter 10 The Path of Self Expression

• Our contributions have shifted from contributions of labor to contributions of thoughts and ideas

Your Turn

We tend to undervalue what we have to offer. However, what we offer is our own perspective which is unique and quite valuable

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Source:

Forte, T. (2022). Building a second brain: a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential (First Atria Books hardcover edition.). Atria Books.

A More Beautiful Question Summary

Questioning is a primary component of success as described in the book “A More Beautiful Question” by Warren Berger. We must be willing to move ourselves away from a perspective of acceptance of what is. Instead we can substitute a perspective of what could be. Each individual can develop core questions that either lead them for a period of time or for their entire lives. These kinds of questions are behind the success of nearly every innovative organization. The questions that are worth pursuing are the ones that keep coming back to our minds over time.

A More Beautiful Question Notes

Why Questioning?

• In our education and throughout our careers the skill of asking questions is never taught. Yet the ability to ask the right questions are a common factor in success.

The Power of Inquiry

• A tale of an innovative questioner is the inability to settle with the reality of a situation especially when they feel that there is something wrong with that reality.
• Outsiders are better questioners because expertise intends to prevent individuals from asking innovative questions.

Experts stop thinking because they know

What can a question do?

• The status level is irrelevant to asking a good question. It would help if you didn’t assume that someone else knows more than you. If you have a question, it can expand the thinking of others

What business are we in now — and is there still a job for me?

• Adaptability in the job market and the ability to pick up new skills have become a boon to anyone capable of doing so. However, to do this effectively, one must ask the right questions about what skills will be most fruitful to pursue.

Are questions becoming more valuable than answers?

• As information and knowledge become more widely distributed or available the real value comes from the knowledge needed to form valuable queries
• Due to the vast amounts of information available, we are becoming more ignorant due to our limited knowledge compared to the available information.
• As more information becomes available, we quickly become overwhelmed and find ourselves drawn into fallacies such as confirmation bias because it is hard to sift through new information than to find information that reinforces your current stance.
• Computers are great at answering questions but not at asking them. To become the technology, we must learn the most efficient ways to ask technical questions. By learning to ask the right questions, what-inevitably become better at our jobs.

Is Knowlege?

• As technology advances, there is less information That we have to store locally in our brains. We can focus our limited memory on the essential things to remember. This frees us up to master queries.

Why does everything begin with Why?

Questioning without action is philosophy, and Questioning with step is innovation.

How do you move from asking to action?

• By moving into a what if stage of thought we open our minds to the possibilities that exist.
• The worst thing you can do with a question is try to answer it too fast.
• We have to sit with a question in the what if stage and allow connections to be made. Often times the first solution we come up with is not the best.
• Once we move on to the how-to stage, we are now at the point in the process of putting our whys and what-ifs into action and creating the method with which to solve the problem or answer the question.

Why We Stop Questioning

Why do kids ask so many questions

• Once something has been categorized or filed away in our brains within our limited understanding, that thing is now known. Because it is known it limits our observation further, and we notice less
• In most examples of kids asking questions, if they feel the explanation satisfies their query, they will move on. However, if unsatisfied, they would ask the question again. So a cycle of whys is, in essence, the child trying to get to the bottom of something or not feeling like you understood their question

Why does questioning fall off a cliff

• Standardized testing and curriculum standards have forced schools and teachers to take their focus off unstructured inquiry and focus on providing as many answers as possible in a relevant topic area.
• Most schools are still operating as if in the stages of the industrial revolution and churning out workers rather than thinkers.

Who is entitled to ask questions in class?

• Kids from lower-class families tend to have less support at home to learn outside the classroom. Thus making it easier for them to fall behind. When the teacher is incentivized to get through many topics, they are not incentivized to stop for questions and essentially discourage those students from asking.
• Some teacher fear inquiry because they fear they will be asked something they don’t know the answer to

The Why, What if, and How of Innovative Questioning

Why do we have to wait for the picture

• To ask powerful questions we must
• Step back
• Notice what others miss
• Challenge assumptions (including your own)
• Gain a feeling understanding of the situation or problem at hand, through contextual inquiry
• Question the questions we’re asking
• Take ownership of a particular question

Why does stepping back help us move forward?

• We live in a time when relentless productivity is thought to be the only way. Those who can actually take the time to pause and think about the why questions tend to notice the issues in a plan before they happen. I relate to this because I constantly feel like I am the only on in managers meetings with a focus on realistic productivity rather than relentless productivity.
• You have to be willing to accept the feeling of not knowing things to ask naive questions that inspire innovative answers.

Why did George Carlin see things the rest of your missed?

• Approach life with a sense of vuja de or beginners mind

Why should you be stuck withou a bed if I’ve got a extra air mattress?

• We don’t think to challenge the status quo very often. When we do, amazing things can happen

Why must we question the question?

• Five Whys is a method of repeated questioning to get to the source of an issue
• Anyone can ask a question but to decide to pursue an answer or solution takes a certain amount of imagination, determination and or despriation

How do you build a tower that doesn’t collapse

• The downfall to trying to plan our everything in advance is that you get far fewer opportunities to trial and error
• If you have and idea you don’t have to work on it in solitude. There are people who are happy to contribute. Open source proves this concept

Chapter 4 Questioning in Business

Why do smart business people screw up?

• Newcomers can enter into a low end of a market because they don’t already have an established product and quality expectation that established businesses do
• The thin that brought a business to a level of success likely won’t be what pushes them to the next level

How can we make a better experiment?

• Established businesses need to create a place for employees to experiment and test out new ideas

If we brainstorm in questions will lightening strike?

• When brainstorming sometimes it can be more effective to think of the questions rather than the solution
• Storm 50 questions and narrow down to the top 3. From thee the team can leave the meeting with a direction to research

Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?

• An outsider can never successfully offer solution. They can simply provide another angle at which to view you issues.
• Mission statements when asked as a question provide direction when the organization makes any decision

How might we create a culture of inquiry?

• For interviews ask candidates to prepare open ended an ambitious questions that challenge industry culture or create potential what if scenarios.

Chapter 5 Questioning for life

Why should we live the questions?

• Giving in to uncertainty can open a lot of opportunity

Why are you climbing the mountain?

• What am I expecting at the top of this mountain?
• Is the climb helping me to be who I want to be?

Why are you evading inquiry?

• Inquiry is hard because it embraces the concept of being uncertain
• Inquiry has to be a part of habit and routine otherwise it just gets lost in our busy schedules

Before we lean in what if we steeped back?

• Taking the time to sit with a questions allows us time to think deeply about the question before we go to take action

What if we start with what we already have?

• We need to accept that some pursuits will never lead to happiness
• Find what you are good at or where you shine and try to incorporate more of that into you life

What if you made a small change?

• People obsess over making sure everything is just right before making a change. Sometimes this leads to paralysis of the analysis. In some cases it might be better to try.

What if you could not fail?

• In many cases failure is not complete or total. It is something we can come back from

How might we pry off the lid and stir the paint?

• Sometimes questions have to be asked a certain way to encourage thoughtful action instead of defensiveness

How will you find your beautiful question?

• Questions worth pursuing tend to stick with you. If is best to take time with these questions. Allow yourself to focus solely on these and let your others go for a bit.

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Source

Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas . Bloomsbury USA.

Flow Summary

In “Flow”, the author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores how to have optimal experiences. We all seek happiness and optimal experiences. The issue is that our methods for achieving happiness are completely wrong. In developed countries we try to achieve happiness through control of our environments and when that fails we turn to physical means of happiness including money, things, relationships, entertainment, etc. These methods are all fleeting and only provide temporary happiness.

The proven path to happiness is through optimizing our lives for experiences. We must find ways to root ourselves into experiences that bring us true joy. These experiences tend to materialize through activities that are challenging that take up nearly our entire consciousness.

A  symptom of an optimal experience is a sense of time loss. As we complete the activity or experience we lose all track of time. A large component to fewer people experiencing these kinds of moments is that we have been taught that anything that requires work must be a burden rather than joyful. If we can shift that perspective with the things that make us feel alive we have a greater chance of experiencing flow more often.

Flow Notes

Chapter 1 Happiness Revisited

Happiness revisited

• Over many years we have still not figured out the key to happiness. Material and physical health have never been higher, and they have not made us happier
• Happiness is not impacted by outside environment
• Optimal experiences occur when we have worked hard mentally or physically and we have a sense of a milestone being achieved
• Flow is the state of activity where nothing external to your activity matters. If just fades into the background

Overview

• There are ways in which we temporarily try to feel like we are in control. These provide a temporary sense of happiness. When that doesn’t work we turn to physical sources of happiness which are even more fleeting

The Root of Discontent

• The universe is developed for chaos. Everything will not always go your way. We must learn to accept that chaos.
• Even as our situations improve we are hit with an increase in wants

The Shields of Culture

• Materialism has increased significantly but our ability to have meaningful experience has not

Reclaiming Experience

• We must separate our reward structure from the social system. The social system reward focuses on continue output of production rather than experience

Paths of Liberation

• The reason why many people are unable to decouple themselves from the social system rewards is that it takes hard work and consistency equal to that of an athlete. This level of dedication is not something many are capable of

Chapter 2 The anatomy of Consciousness

• Those who have mastered their feelings and reactions tend to live happier lives
• Science has not been able to define consciousness yet
• There limits to our consciousness. We can tell when we are hungry but cannot determine the exact amount of blood sugar we have.

The Limits of Consciousness

• We are only able to process a certain amount of information in a given time period. The upper limits of what we can process is 126 bits of information per second
• Because what we can process is so limited we have to be careful with what we allow into our consciousness
• People who are high achievers in their field have determined how to focus their attention so that all of their consciousness is used to address the specific issues or projects

Enter the Self

• Attention impacts self until self drives attention

Disorder in consciousness: Psychic Entropy

• Information can disrupt our goals to the point that it can impact our sense of self

Order in consciousness: Flow

• Flow occurs when information confirms the goals we hold. It occurs without a sense of worry or any feelings of being inadequate
• Sometimes if the goals we set do not get us in a state of flow we know they are not our true goals

Complexity and the growth of the self

• Complexity is often associated with negative. However there are cases where complexity just refers to a many systems machine or process working in harmony
• Complexity requires both differentiation and integration. Differentiation to strive for uniqueness and integration to avoid self-centered egotism

Chapter 3 Enjoyment and Quality of life

• There are two main strategies to improve quality of life
• Change external resources to align with your goals
• Influence others to change their ways to allow you to achieve your goals
• Change your perceptions to make goals easier to achieve
• Lower your standards to allow you to achieve your goals

Pleasure and Enjoyment

• Pleasure helps restore us, but doesn’t inherently increase happiness
• Enjoyment is pushing forward and creating something new
• Enjoyment requires focus, pleasure can occur even when we are not focused

Elements of Enjoyment

• Enjoyment described by individuals, regardless of who or where tends to have similar descriptions
• There are eight components to an enjoyable activity

A challenging activity that requires skill

• A challenge has to be just challenging enough so that we don’t get board or anxious
• We have to have some experience with the activity

The merging of action and awareness

• In flow all of our attention is required because all of the skills we have are needed to keep moving forward
• Work in flow cannot happen without effort

Clear goals and feedback

• Feedback is an indication that an action is or is not accomplishing the desired outcome
• We can respond to feedback to make corrections so that the results will accomplish our goals

Concentration on the task at hand

• Because flow requires our full attention we are unable to focus on any unpleasant aspects of life
• Flow create or implies order

The Paradox of control

• We have a sense of control over the situation
• Possibility versus actuality of control
• The perception of control can become addicting

The loss of self consciousness

• When we are in a flow state we no longer have the capacity to be self conscious
• The only sense of self that remains are the components needed for the job

The transformation of time

• Flow experiences tend to have an element of time dilation when time tracking is not a pivotal component of the activity

The autotelic experience

• Flow occurs most often in cases where the activity is the reward. We don’t do it for external praise or rewards. We do it because we enjoy it
• Crime occurs when individuals seek autotelic experiences but do not have the means for them to occur through less nefarious means
• Flow can have both positive and negative outcomes. The goal is to approach positivity and control negativity

Chapter 4 The Conditions of Flow

• Flow instances rarely happen by happen stance

Flow activities

• We must have the right balance of skill and challenge

Flow and culture

• Cultures and time periods offer different levels of happiness through ability to openly pursue optimal experiences
• If life becomes too easy it lacks challenge and meaning
• When a culture embraces flow for some, it is possible that comes that the expense of others
• With greater access to leisure activities we see a drop in optimal experience

The autotelic personality

• There are social and psychological hinderances to optimal experiences or enjoyment

Neurophysiology and flow

• Evidence tends to suggest that the ability to concentrate is something that we can learn
• Those who can concentrate easier also have an easier time achieving flow

The Effects of Family on the autotelic personality

• Families can impact children’s ability to have optimal experiences
• Five characteristics
• Clarity – Clear expectations, goals, feedback
• Centering – perception of interest in the child here and now
• Choice – possibilities to choose from even negative choices with the consequences that follow
• Commitment – trust to set aside defenses and pour entirely into interests
• Challenge – parents dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities
• Ill treated children tend to grow up to be adults who seek pleasure instead of enjoyment

The people of flow

• Even in the face of adversity optimal experience can be found with a perspective shift and an unwavering drive to remain positive and focused

Chapter 5 The Body in Flow

• When we do not use our bodies they atrophy. Opportunities to challenge the body allow us to develop flow opportunities

Higher, Faster, Stronger

• We can create optimal experiences out of physical activities by setting challenging goals and measuring our progress toward those goals

The Joys of Movement

• Dance is a form where flow can happen for individuals on many levels. Flow can occur in dancing even when you are not a professional. Professionals pursue dance perfection.

Sex as Flow

• Sex can become boring if we are not trying new things and challenges to keep things exciting

The ultimate control: Yoga and the martial arts

• Balance between spiritual and materialism
• Yoga in the East has several levels each with a different aim that more easily contributes to flow that that of the West.
• Martial arts in the East are less about physical performance and more about mind and body alignment

Flow through the senses: The joy of seeing

• Flow can occur when we take a moment to be completely occupied with a visual stimulous
• I experience flow when doing portrait photography

The Flow of Music

• Flow opportunities through music can occur in listening or creating music

Chapter 6 The Flow of Though

The Mother of Science

• Memory is required to have a knowledge of arts and science that is passed through generations.
• Rote learning is often considered less desirable. However, the ability to memorize facts or snippets relevant to your work or interests can come in handy

The Rules of the games of the Mind

• Skills and knowledge develop system in our minds that allow us to be comfortable with our thoughts in silence. Without that comfort we turn to outside stimulus to keep our minds from wandering into negativity

The play of words

• Finding flow requires being able to be the source of your own flow. You cannot rely on others to create it for you
• Puzzles, conversation, poetry, and writing are all ways that we can use words to find flow

Befriending Clio

• Understanding history or trying to capture elements of our own history can become a flow experience

The delights of science

• Science is a series of puzzles that anyone with enough interest can enjoy

Loving Wisdom

• Specialization in a broad focus area is inevitable. However don’t let specialization take the original joy out of the activity

Amateurs and Professionals

• Being an amateur is not a bad thing. It means you pursue a activity or knowledge because you love it. You aren’t ready to completely pursue it to the level of professional though.

The Challenge of lifelong learning

• Beyond school if you can continue pursuing research and learning in areas that interest you. You will experience many opportunities for optimal experiences

Chapter 7 Work as Flow

Autotelic Workers

• Generally, work is considered a burden to bear
• Work is more challenging that doing nothing
• Work can be enjoyable
• Perceptions of work enjoyment can vary between generations
• If you can find or create joy you are in a much better place than someone whose joy is derived from vices.

Autotelic Jobs

• A job can be made to be enjoyable if the right environmental factors are present. These factors are consistent with the ones required for flow
• People who don’t enjoy their jobs tend to become less and less productive
• Often those in a position to make a job more enjoyable prioritize the wrong things

The paradox of work

• People reporting being challenged and happy at work but also report a desire to be at work less. This may be due to perspectives that work is a burden and must be negative

The waste of free time

• We long to leave work for free time, but once we have it we don’t know what to do
• Work has structure, goals, and feedback. Free time does not
• Leisure guided toward challenging hobbies or creation provide us with the ability to enjoy free time. Media consumption does not

Chapter 8 Enjoy solitude and other people

The conflict between being along and being with others

• Because we rely on other their approval or disapproval means more to us
• We are genetically programmed to seek out belonging. It is a tribal instinct that drives us to belong because without that we are less likely to survive

The Pain of loneliness

• Many people cannot stand to be alone. When solitude arrives many look for external entertainment
• A healthy, well rounded individual needs to be able to sit with their thoughts and learn to use solitude for deep though or learning

Flow and the Family

• We are more likely to help siblings that cousins due to a greater amount of genes in common and a genetic disposition to preserve the genes
• Relationships require a repositioning of individual goals to function
• Teenagers need parents with hobbies. Tis sets and example and helps prevent teens from getting involved in finding other areas of optimal experience

Enjoying friends

• Because our friends are usually groups of people we have commonalities with we don’t have to change who we are with them
• When teenagers feel cared for and loved at home it empowers them to take control of their friendships
• Friendships in adulthood are harder to come by. They take more work to foster because common interests are harder to find

The wider community

• Those who try to make life better for others without getting control of themselves first will make life worse for everyone in the long run

Chapter 9 Cheating chaos

• Flow is not limited to those who have no outside stressors such as wealth and health
• Even those who are in terrible circumstances can find flow

Tragedies Transformed

• Survivors of tragic events report a clearer sense of purpose and set of goals than they had previously

Coping with stress

• Our ability to cope hinges on three factors
• External support
• Psychological resources
• Coping strategies

The power of dissipative structures

• Being able to find the energy in an otherwise destructive force can turn a bad thing into something good
• There are complexities that we cannot control. If we shift our focus instead to the aspects we can control it gives us the power to take action

The Autotelic self: A Summary

• If we limit our interpretations of the world through the lens of what we already know we handicap ourselves from growth or seeing different perspectives

Chapter 10 The Making of meaning

• Life itself has no specific goal for us. Thus we have to create meaning for ourselves

What meaning means

• Three senses of the word “meaning”
• End, purpose, significance of something
• Refers to a persons intentions
• Refers to ordering information

Cultivating purpose

• Purpose can be established and cultivated on four different levels

Forging resolve

• When we are lead strictly by goals we can get to a point where we lose track of ourselves and what really matters

Recovering harmony

• Animals are driven by instinct. When they are hungry they hunt, when they are tired they sleep. Animals have fewer choices and thus have a much easier time finding harmony and flow
• Human tribes without access to technology have an easier time finding flow because they have fewer choices

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Source

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, Harper & Row.

Four Thousand Weeks Summary

Considering that the average life span of 80 years translates into four thousand weeks, it highlights how short our lives really are. Many of us pursue relentless productivity to make a substantial difference in our limited time.

In “Four Thousand Weeks”, Author Oliver Burkeman addresses our limited lives and how we might use our time to live a more fulfilled life. The constant pursuit of productivity focuses on controlling time. However, because time is uncontrollable and we are unable to accurately predict the future, this attempt is futile. As we get more done in less time, more busy work piles up to keep us busy. There is no escape.

Instead, we should focus less on time and more on experiences that make time fall away. We should spend time doing things we love. Activities or work that allow us to lose ourselves in time. We should also focus on impacting the lives of those we are closest to rather than trying to make an impact on the world.

We can approach our decisions better by realizing we can never experience everything. Fear of missing out is inevitable because there are things that we just will never have the time to accomplish or participate in. Accepting and embracing this limitation again helps us to make decisions that will have the greatest impact on our lives.

Burkeman mentioned that content in life and decision-making can be approached by focusing mostly on the next most necessary or right thing to do. Everything else after that falls into line so that you are only focusing on the things you can immediately impact.  

Four Thousand Weeks Notes

In the long run, we’re all dead

• Living to the age of 80 gives us four thousand weeks of life.
• Productivity is seen by many as a way to get more things done rather than make time to experience more of the world.

Life on the Conveyor Belt

• Because our time is limited, we get frustrated by “wasting it.”
• As we get more efficient at things, we figure ways to fill the extra time with more activities. Constantly chasing the next level. This creates an endless cycle of busyness that never abates

On Getting the Wrong Things Done

• Even as we engage in this busyness, we experience a sense of things we could be doing that have more meaning. However, we fail time and time again to follow that sense.
• Task lists and productivity become a barrier to us getting to that meaningful time.

Choosing to Choose

The Limit Embracing Life

• The problem is not that our time is limited but that we have been trained to misuse our limited time.

Time before Timetables

• In modern days our sense of time has become heightened so much. Our calendars, clocks, etc., constantly make us aware of time and its passing.
• In medieval days task orientation was the only sense of time, and people sensed time accruing more slowly.

The End of Eternity

• In contrast, without time tracking, we are unable to coordinate more significant groups of people to progress industry
• Time has become a resource rather than a medium in which life unfolds.

Confessions of a Productivity Geek

• Productivity tools give us a feeling that we are on the cusp of feeling caught up. However, this never happens.
• The more we try to control time, the more we avoid recognizing and embracing our limitations of ourselves.

An Icy Blast of Reality

• Organize your days knowing that you won’t be able to get everything done.
• Instead of expecting things to be done in a specific time, let them occur through time naturally

The Efficiency Trap

• Busyness is a universal feeling. People in poverty have to work extra jobs to make ends meet. Or stress over having enough. Those into careers work so hard and so long that they rarely have time to see their children. We all have things we want to fit into our lives but can’t

Sisyphus’s Inbox

• As we catch up with everything that feels important, the goals posts will shift, and we will suddenly find or be given more stuff to do that is deemed necessary.
• “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion” Parkinson’s Law
• The fallacy of efficiency is that as we figure out how to do more in less time, people see us as efficient and more likely to get the job done. The problem is there is always a breaking point.

The Bottomless Bucket List

• Because the experiences we can have are limitless, it means we will never be able to experience everything that life has to offer.
• Trying to cram experiences can be just as overwhelming as work.

Why You Should Stop Clearing the Decks

• Having an importance filter is essential for tasks. If something is not important enough to spend time on or is only benefiting someone else, then you are only making their lives easier and not your own
• Don’t focus on clearing the decks of all the small tasks. Instead, focus on the tasks that have the most significant consequence or reward for you.

The Pitfalls of Convenience

• As tasks/errands become more convenient, they tend to lose the novelty which makes them valuable in the first place. When a job takes a bit more effort, it is more memorable and more open to other worthy experiences.

Facing Finitude

Thrown into Time

• By understanding that every decision we make cuts out a near endless supply of opportunities, we embrace the finitude of our choices. Each choice is a vote on the life we want to lead.

Getting Real

• The fact that life is limited is what makes all of our experiences valuable. If you could live forever, experiences would lose their value because you could experience them infinite times.
• As people near almost certain death from a terminal illness, these individuals have a new respect for the sense of time and a newfound outlook on their experiences.

Everything is borrowed time

• We must shift our perspectives from FOMO to JOMO or the joy of missing out. Because missing whatever other experience you could have had is less valuable than the decision or requirement to do what you are doing instead.

Becoming a Better Procrastinator

The objective measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things

The Art of Creative Neglect

• If a particular activity means a lot to you, then you need to make time for it every day. Otherwise, you will never get to it at a later point.
• Schedule time with yourself to make time for this important project
• Limit in-progress items to a max of three. No other task can be taken until one of your other three is completed.
• Avoid tasks that are not in your top percentage of priorities. These tasks just become suckers of your time that you are not very passionate about anyhow.

Perfection and Paralysis

• We cannot let the idea of perfection prevent us from progressing toward the areas we are most passionate about. Delaying progress until you can perfect something surely means it will never occur.

The Watermelon Problem

• Distraction, where we are not actively making a choice, is essentially us giving away bits of our life.
• Distraction has become a bad word thanks to social media and other technology that thrives off our attention. However, distraction is how we live as humans. If it weren’t for distractions, we would overlook beautiful sunsets while out on a walk. Or see that the rustling in the bushes might be a predator.
• Even with distraction, we must be able to focus on our experiences to enjoy them.

A Machine for Misusing your Life

• In social media usage or consumption, our focus is the product sold to marketers. The algorithms of social media are geared to identify the areas we spend the most time. However, these algorithms also identify the topics that elicit an emotional response from us to maintain our attention.
• Over time social media can carve our mood and personality with consistent psychological biases and exposure to topics or conversations that make us upset.

The Intimate Interrupter

The Discomfort of What Matters

• Boredom can occur when we are doing a task that forces us to confront our limitations. If our talents do not live up to what we expect, then we are more easily distractible.
• When much of your willpower is focused on avoiding discomfort or boredom, you limit the remaining will you have to accept the situation.

We Never Really Have Time

• As we add more time to a task, Hofstadter’s law makes that task take up the time you’ve planned and a little more.
• Planning extremely far ahead only makes you anxious about what the future holds.

Anything Could Happen

• Saying we have time for something is more like saying we accept it.
• The only time we are sure about the future is after it has already become the past.
• Much if what we value in our lives occurred due to circumstances outside of our control

Mind Your Own Business

• We can only control the present and our actions or reactions to it. We can plan for the future, but the future has no obligation to follow our plans.

You are Here

• Live life at the moment and don’t focus so much on the future that you are only using the current state to progress your future state.

The Last Time

• Most of us don’t approach life with pure appreciation and attention. We don’t notice that every activity could be out last.
• We pursue endless busyness with the end goal of being able to relax and enjoy life when you could instead have been enjoying life throughout with less busyness.

Absent in the Present

• On the contrary, if you focus too hard on being present in each moment, you lose the point. You are actively in the moment whether you want to be or not. Interacting with a moment without forcing is the goal.

Rediscovering Rest

The Decline of Pleasure

• Our leisure time has become a task in and of itself. When we feel like there is a way that you waste your time off it means we have our priorities set incorrectly.
• True leisure is not dictated by a list of activities. It is a right to be lazy and disconnect from all forms of work or obligation.

Rules for Rest

• We don’t have to expect rest to feel good. In an age when idleness is considered taboo it can be hard to psychologically get past the hurdle and allow yourself to rest.

Hiking as an End in Itself

• Spend more time doing activities without an end goal in mind. Do them just to do them.

Rod Stewart, Radical

• Hobbies allow us to do something for the joy of doing it. A true hobby has no underlying ulterior motive tied to a productive outcome.
• We don’t actually have to be good at a hobby in order for there to be benefits of the hobby.

The Impatience Spiral

Escape Velocity

• The phenomenon where people are still impatient even though daily life has become more and more efficient though technology can be explained by the frustration that a task can’t occur instantaneously. For example, dinner can take as little as 60 seconds to prepare, but this amount of time is frustrating because it is close to zero but not absolute zero.
• Many people report that they do not have time to read but the truth is more that because reading cannot really be sped up in meaningful way it looses the battle to the other distractions

Must stop, Can’t stop

• Living life in the fast lane has become as bad as any other addiction. We pursue speed and efficiency to avoid other emotions or fears. As we speed up we create additional emotional fuel by missing out on other aspects of our lives. This causes us to double down on speed and the spiral continues.

Staying on the Bus

• An exercise in patience and it’s difficulty is focusing on a piece of art for three hours. Avoiding all distractions and only taking time cow bathroom breaks you go through a phase of initial frustration at how slowly time is going by. After a certain point you mind gives in and you can experience the moment and the art with a whole new focus and clarity.

Watching and Waiting

• Often when we are confronted with a problem in an unfamiliar area if we are willing to accept being uncomfortable and sit with the issues and think through the roots we will be able to slowly see a solution come into view.

Three Principles of Patience

• if you can continue to pursue a passion or decision far enough your work or experience will begin to diverge from the paths that others have taken. In the early stages of career development or experience you tend to take a similar path that others have taken and you are unlikely to produce unique work or meaningful experiences.

The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

In and Out of Sync

• Being able to sync up communal schedules with those you care about and spend the most time with is import to a sense of good use of time. When no one else is available when you are there becomes a lack of opportunity for social events.
• Digital nomads suffer for a sense of community when their lives are not connected to the time of others.

The Freedom to Never See Your Friends

• When you hoard you time so much that you give up on important social interactions you move too far to the other side of time management.

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

The Great Pause

• At the start of the pandemic the stopping of the economy caused us to pause and realize a world outside is the fast lane. It allowed us to observe the things that really mattered for us.

A Modestly Meaningful Life

• It is empowering to realize that the likelihood of your life having impact equal to an Einstein is low. Yet regardless of this the activities we pursue with our days can be just as meaningful. We don’t have to make a dent in the universe. We can live a good life pursuing things that we value.

The Human Disease

• We will never be able to be in command of all of the opportunities that come our way. We have to make tough choices because we simply are not able to pursue them all.

Five Questions

• Sometimes we have to be uncomfortable in our decisions because it means we are taking risks. Reasonable risks that have rewards are worth pursuing if the enlarge you versus diminish you.
• Do not hold yourself to standards that are impossible to meet
• Don’t try to be someone you are not. Lean into your skills and values to contribute in ways that make sense for you. Don’t try to contribute the same as someone else
• Everyone is winging it in some way. Knowing that you don’t necessarily have to be all knowing go take action lowers the perceived risk to action.
• Know that seeing the outcome of a project is not required to start a project. We can start things in our lives that will never finish

The Next Most Necessary Thing

• With each moment, if we focus only on doing the next most necessary thing or the most right thing, we will be more content. Accept that knowing the right thing in every decision is impossible as well.

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Source

Burkeman, O. (2021). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Deep Work Summary

In “Deep Work” by Cal Newport We live in an era when distracted work is the norm. Multitasking is viewed as a valuable trait rather than an inability to fully commit to one thing. Most jobs value those who can be jacks of all trades rather than someone who is a specialist or expert in a specific area. Productivity advice looks to optimize our time by allowing us to force even more into the time we have. All of this, along with the many available distractions through social media, contributes to a society with a hard time with long periods of focused work.

Author and Professor Cal Newport proposes a focus on allowing time for deep work. This concept points toward tasks or work that cannot be completed quickly. Deep work requires several long chunks of focused time. When we devote time to deep work, we can become experts in a specific topic rather than a generalist. We can spend time truly researching a problem to develop the best solutions. We can find the time to use our knowledge to create instead of becoming knowledge hoarders. Newport also suggests creating barriers between work and personal time so that our minds can be highly focused and present in the context of our time.

Lastly, Newport discusses the concept of social media as a form of avoiding deep work. Social media provides us with chemical hits similar to drugs. When we are bored and choose to look at social media, it creates an addiction loop that makes it more difficult to sit with our boredom long enough to access deep work. Many of us would benefit from a social media detox where we prevent ourselves from accessing social media completely for a length of time or indefinitely to encourage ourselves to become accustomed to focused work without the possibility of distraction as an outlet.

Deep Work Notes

Part 1 The Idea

• As technology advances, more jobs will be replaced by machines. In the cases of jobs that require humans in many cases, remote work opportunities will allow businesses to hire stars rather than local workers, thus leaving the local talent unemployed and underemployed.
• Those who can work with and understand data from smart machines will thrive as the digital divide increases
• To be part of the group that masters hard things, you must be willing to do it again and again as technology changes
• American culture thrives on the idea of a prodigy rather than on practice
• Trying to learn a skill while distracted by other things like Facebook causes multiple unlinked neurons to activate, which reduces the ability of the ones needed for the skill to develop
• Research has identified a kind of lingering effect from our tasks. As we move from task to task, there is some residual brain power still focused on the original task
• Some higher-level executives live in a highly distracted state because that it where they contribute best to the organization. However, most others should not aim to idolize this style of work as it is not sustainable at other levels
• Trends that “increase” productivity of the business limit individual ability to focus on deep work to learn new things
• We pursue a workforce driven by our inboxes and our meetings because it is easier than other methods of work prioritization. However, when we measure productivity by the number of emails or meetings we do, then the true potential of each individual is lost.
• Efficiency and speed of task completion have led to busyness. We have begun to believe that this indicates success, but in reality, it makes us more replaceable by another person or machine.
• Note to self. I’ve been so wrong about productivity.
• Because the business push is for these productivity areas, it becomes easier and easier for a person who knows how to focus on deep work to learn new skills and become a top performer in their industry.
• Something we generally find is that craftsmen require depth to hone their crafts. They don’t have to deal with email and other distractions. This allows them to become masters over time.
• Contrary to popular belief, the outcomes of large scale are not necessarily as important to our well-being as what we focus our attention on. People with a fatal medical diagnosis can be happy by focusing on what makes them happy rather than the diagnosis.
• Many emails we respond to throughout the day are fairly shallow. So, building a habit of focusing on these shallow concerns ensures these shallow issues will mostly take up our willpower.
• According to the work of Czikszentmihalyi, we are happier when we are in a state of flow. This really only occurs when we do something challenging over an extended time.

Part 2 The Rules

• Our willpower is finite, and we cannot focus on deep work forever. Eventually, it is inevitable to give in to distraction.
• Because our willpower is limited, we must start a new practice or habit of deep focus, utilizing routines and consistency to make it a part of our everyday life.
• The monastic method of deep work is the most radical and shuns almost completely any form of shallow work that could come. This method best applies to novelists who can avoid email, meetings, or other distractions.
• The bimodal method is a split of substantial periods between deep work and shallow work. Sabbatical might be a good example of bimodal for an academic. It can also apply to someone who can take a few days per week for deep work only as well.
• The rhythmic method involves scheduling little chunks of time to focus on deep work every day. This tends to be used by many knowledge workers who can’t abandon the shallow work for days at a time.
• The journalistic method dictates that you can rapidly switch into deep work and flow at a moment’s notice. This method takes advantage of any free time–even just 15 minutes–to get into a flow state.
• In building a deep work ritual, you need to be able to answer the following questions.
• Where will you work and for how long
• How will you work once started
• How will you support your work
• Maintain energy to maintain the flow
• A strategy for going deep is the grand gesture. This is when someone makes a significant adjustment to their workspace to encourage focus because the expenditure is a source of encouragement.
• Collaboration is great for sharing ideas between individuals from different disciplines. This can allow for creative innovation. However, collaboration is best supported in the hub and spoke models rather than open office designs. This allows for creative collaboration but also allows for isolation for deep work.
• Identify several wildly important aspects of goals that would return tangible and substantial benefits. Focus your deep work on areas related to making progress in those areas.
• Measuring progress is important. However, the measure type determines motivation levels in pursuing the goals. Lag measures focus on the final products and are not always in your control. Since final products usually take a while to produce, it is hard to stay motivated. However, lead measures allow you to add measures to determine the progress that is being made and can be directly influenced by you, such as the number of hours put toward deep work.
• Tracking progress in a physical nature is also important. Creating a scoreboard allows you to see the progress occurring and allows you to note the milestones.
• Reviewing your scoreboard regularly is also important so that you can determine what went right and make corrections when things go wrong.
• Cal suggests the positives of a shutdown habit from work, where you make a clean break from work-related tasks and thinking once you leave the office.
• A shutdown gives our unconscious mind time to sift through all the decisions that need to be made. Without a shutdown, the queue is continually backed up, and the unconscious mind never gets time to catch up while the conscious mind is in control.
• A daily work shutdown also frees our minds to rebuild our ability to focus for the next day. A shutdown ritual will help get us in the right mindset to eventually free our minds from work thoughts after hours.
• Concentrating is hard when we seek entertainment at the slightest hint of boredom. These hits of looking at our phones function like a drug and prevent our ability to focus deeply.
• Setting online and offline blocks will help rewire your brain to handle the lack of novelty in the distractions. Even if your job requires a lot of internet access, you can still schedule offline blocks of time more often so that you also have more online blocks.
• While in an offline block, work on tasks or projects that allow you to be offline completely. If you need the internet to complete a project or task, force yourself to wait until your next online block.
• Productive meditation is doing a physical activity that doesn’t require mental effort and utilizing that time to focus all mental effort on one professional problem.
• While doing a productive meditation, when your mind wanders off the problem, you have to bring it back to the problem. Over time, this will help with distraction resistance.
• Social network detox frees us up and provides less distraction. When we think about some forms of social media, our uses for them are a large majority just distractions and could easily be dropped.
• Instead of any benefit approach, you can use the craftsman approach to tool adoption. This entails analysis of the tool and its benefits and negatives to the success and happiness of our professional and personal lives.
• The first step to tool decisions starts with defining your high-level goals. These have to avoid being specific. This they become more like values. For example, as a parent, I want to be a good parent and run an organized household.
• From here, develop two to three activities to work toward those goals.
• Lastly, analyze each tool you have and determine how it impacts these goals and activities. If they do not positively impact, then the tool should be dropped.
• Social media has been marketed as something we can’t live without, and if we do, we will miss out on so much. However, many find out that after a sabbatical from social media, they find that their lives would not have been notably better without social media and no one else noticed when they didn’t use social media.
• Sites that tend to fill a boredom void, such as Reddit, can be dangerous because the inability to be bored leads to the inability to sit with a thought for a longer period.
• To avoid the lure of distracting entertainment sites, it is important to plan out your leisure time. A planned out leisure time helps avoid those distracting sites and lets you make progress on hobbies or interests.
• Time blocking isn’t about constraint but about thoughtfulness. If you have an unexpected insight that creates a lot of value, you should be able to pursue that insight and come back and reschedule your day at a later point.
• A clever way to determine shallow work is to use the hypothetical concept of how long a new person would take to learn the tasks you are doing. If the time is short, then the tasks are shallow.

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Source

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world.

Measure What Matters Summary

In “Measure What Matters,” John Doerr explores the concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a goal-setting framework used by companies like Google, Intel, and Bono’s ONE Foundation. The book emphasizes the importance of setting clear, measurable objectives and using specific key results to track progress. Since reading this book, I have adapted OKRs to be the goal framework that I utilize for my entire life, including areas such as “Work and Career,” “Relationships,” “Finances,” and “Learning”

Measure What Matters Notes

Part 1 OKRS in Action

Chapter 1 Google, Meet OKRs

• An objective is what is going to be achieved.
• Objectives are
  • Significant
  • Concrete
  • Action-oriented
  • Inspirational
• Key Results are a benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective.
• KRs are
  • Specific
  • Time-bound
  • Aggressive
  • Realistic
  • Measurable
  • Verifiable
• If an objective is not met after all key results are achieved, then it was badly designed
• When people have meaningless or arbitrary shifting goals, they become frustrated.
• OKRs make having up to 20 direct reports at Google a functional possibility

Chapter 2 The Father of OKRs

• From inception, OKRs were designed to be simple. At its birthplace of Intel, a complex system would never last

Our MBO Ancestors

• “A corporation should be a community built on trust and respect for the workers–not just a profit machine.”
• If success is rewarded with bonuses, it detours people from taking risk

Measuring output

• Aggressive introverts attack the problem but not the person

Intels Lifeblood

• Publicly posting your OKRs gives you an opportunity to say no to things that don’t progress your priorities

Andy Grove’s Legacy

• Each cycle should have three or fewer objectives with no more than five key results each
• OKRs are a basis for individuals to pace themselves. It is not a legal document on which to base evaluations or bonuses
• It takes time to get good at OKRs. Four to five quarterly cycles

Chapter 4: Superpower #1 Focus and Commitment to Priorities

• What is the most important? Commit to those and defer the rest

In the beginning

• Senior leadership must commit to organizational level OKRs
• Top level OKRs take priority and everyone chips in to assist the team primarily responsible

Communicate with Clarity

• Senior leadership must know the top priorities for the organization at any one time. They then must make employees aware of those top priorities constantly and consistently

Key Results: Care and feeding

• Key results are number bound. They need to be measurable
• You should have 3 to 5 key results per objective. Too many more and you dilute the results and progress
• Key results should be reasonably challenging

What, How, When

• Yearly cycles are good for new organizations easing in. Quarterly is more nimble with changing markets

Pairing Key Results

• Key results should pair both a quantity and quality goal to make sure no unsafe compromise infests the process

The Perfect and the Good

• OKRs should adapt to changes. There is no such thing as a perfect OKR
• Completion of all Key results must result in attainment of the objective

Less is More

• Our time is finite. We can either half-ass a lot of things or give our all to 3-5 things.
• We must look at a list of many tasks with seemingly equal benefits and decide on the top 3-5

Chapter 6 Commit: The Nuna Story

• The more challenging an objective is the more temptation we have to abandon it

Chapter 7: Superpower 2: Align and Connect for Teamwork

• OKRs made public give transparency to the things we are working on. It opens them to criticism or praise

The Same page

• Vertical alignment is difficult for an organization
• OKRs make vertical alignment easier

The Grand Cascade

• Cascading occurs when upper levels of management push their objectives down to lower levels
• The problems with this
  • Loss of agility
  • Lack of flexibility
  • Marginalized contributors
  • One-dimensional linkages

Bottoms up

• OKRs skip the ladder. The CEOs objectives are clearly visible to all levels

Cross-functional coordination

• OKRs set up transparency which allows teams to clearly see when individuals or teams are knocking things out of the park or are falling behind. This allows others to come in and help

Chapter 8: Align: The MyFitnessPal Story

• Two great people with the best intentions for a business often pull in two different directions without proper alignment

Chapter 9 Connect: The Intuit Story

• Bosses and Supervisors need their own OKRs if the organization objectives rarely change

Chapter 10: Superpower 3: Track for Accountability

• OKRs have 3 Lifecycles

The Setup

• At large companies, OKRs need dedicated software. Text files don’t cut it when you have thousands of employees

Chapter 12: Superpower 4: Stretch for the Amazing

• Setting harder goals does mean you won’t always reach them. But you will perform better than if you only set easy to achieve goals

Our need to stretch

• For some we have this innate desire to push ourselves further and achieve more

Chapter 14: Stretch: The YouTube Story

Big Rocks

• When you have a bunch of big rocks, pebbles, and sand to put in a jar, you must start with the big rocks, pebbles, and then the sand. If you start with sand or pebbles the big rocks never fit.
• You must start with your biggest tasks first

A Better Metric

• In order for YouTube to grow they needed tasks that focused on increasing viewers watch time

Part Two: The New World of Work

Chapter 15: Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs

• End of year evaluations are ineffective due to recency bias
• “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”
• Conversations aimed at driving performance
• Feedback or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide improvement
• Recognition or expressions of appreciation for contributions of all sizes

An Amicable Divorce

• OKRs and compensation are two different conversations

Conversations

• One on Ones should be driven by the subordinate
• Should be held weekly or monthly based on need

Feedback

• Feedback in a mature organization is always on and doesn’t have to wait for an HR meeting

Recognition

• Add peer to peer shoutouts to the end of staff and department meetings

Chapter 17: Baking Better Everyday The Zume Pizza Story

• “We go super fast. We just figure stuff out”
• Two things happen
  • Unsuccessful companies outgrow leadership teams capacity. Organization dies
  • Successful companies scale beyond the team’s capacity, and they get replaced