Today, the clock taunted me with its mocking hands, pointing to three hours of pure, unadulterated productivity. But alas, capricious fate had other plans, as the mountain of work before me morphed into the nagging voice of an orderly conscience. That’s when the spirit of tidiness possessed me with unprecedented zeal.

My files, those ancient guardians of chaos, cried out for organization. The drawers, dark abysses of forgotten mysteries, begged for light and order. And my desk, that battleground of ideas and papers, demanded to be cleared for the Zen of concentration.

Oh, the irony! Three hours intended for the noble art of work, vanished in the ritual of cleaning. Less than thirty minutes of true labor, a mockery of the time I had set aside.

But here’s the twist: under the tyranny of an urgency, with just thirty minutes stolen from dusk, I emerged victorious. Pressure, that cruel yet effective muse, led me to resolve the crisis.

I ponder now on the strange dance of perfectionism and procrastination. Are we mere playthings of the absence of boundaries, of the missing tyrant that is the deadline? How easily we’re lured by the dream of a perfect space and moment, only to find that in their absence, we’re capable of unexpected feats.

On this day, I’ve learned that perhaps chaos and pressure aren’t foes, but unsuspected allies in the eternal battle against the mocking clock.

Today’s musings led me down a path of unexpected tranquility, reminiscent of the age-old adage: “It is one brick at a time.” A simple yet profound lesson unfolded before me, whispering the importance of the journey over the destination. In a world obsessed with outcomes, I found solace in the idea of letting go, of surrendering to the process without the haste that often clouds our judgment.

As I reflected deeper, it dawned upon me that our penchant for speed carries with it a shadow of doubt, a silent question of our own capabilities. But today, I learned to dance with my tasks, not as a judge but as a partner in a waltz, where each step, each moment, holds its own kind of magic.

Life, in its boundless generosity, presented itself as an unwrapped gift, a treasure trove of nows that we too often overlook. It’s a truth we acknowledge but seldom truly embrace, that each tick of the clock is a gem to be cherished.

Yet, as creatures of thought, we find ourselves ensnared in a web of what-ifs, our minds adrift in a sea of tomorrow’s worries, leaving the precious present unattended. Today, however, was different. Today, I stood firm in the now, marveling at life’s simplicity, a lesson learned one brick at a time.

Yours truly, Victor

Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, by Tiago Forte is one of the books of 2022.

The underlying philosophy is very similar to that of Zettelkasten. Tiago Forte’s method is a pragmatic update to this note-taking system, which is popular in the academic world.

Notes are the building blocks for your second brain. Notes are bits of info that you collect and recall when needed.

Forte proposes the CODE method to process your notes. The key is to make each step as easy and effective as possible:

• Capture and collect ideas, info, bits of knowledge into notes you can later use
• Organize the notes so that they are easy to find when you need them
• Distill the essence of what is relevant to you and your projects (add your context and your unique point of view)
• Express your knowledge into deliverables for your projects

A note-taking apps such as Keep, OneNote, Notion, Evernote, Apple Notes, Obsidian (my favorite) or any other that makes all four steps easy, is the main tool to host your second brain.

The key to make knowledge actionable is to organize it in a way that notes ‘find’ you when you need them. Tiago suggests to organize your notes within four PARA buckets:

• Projects
• Areas
• Resources
• Archive

That is, organize your notes from the most fresh and actionable ones (in Projects) all the way down to those that you want to get out of sight and Archive.

Projects are meant to produce an outcome. That is what makes notes actionable, as they become part of a project with a goal in mind, e.g.: writing a book, a proposal, a presentation, a video script, etc. Projects are the way to transmute Notes into an Asset that can be shared.

Areas are great to collect and accumulate knowledge that you can nurture and grow. Areas can develop into a project or just feed content for specific needs.

Resources are meant to be kept for reference for a future use.

Archive to declutter your note space from those finished projects or perishable notes that are not valuable anymore.

PARA is a frame less liquid than Zettelkasten that adds order, clarity and intention to your note system.

Note: The method proposed by Forte to distill knowledge is Progressive Summarization. The idea is to add your context to your notes so that it ends up becoming knowledge of what is truly relevant for your brain.

There is an interesting visual summary of the book by maggieappleton.com