Thread by @storyrulesindia

About a month back, I completed an online course called Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte (@fortelabs).

Going through the course and reflecting on its implications, I realised something.

As a student in #BASB12, I was getting a ringside view to something remarkable.

Something that folks a few decades from now will herald as a breakthrough in personal knowledge management and productivity.

Something that is essentially a revolutionary new software OS for the Knowledge Era.

Here’s why.

A revolution requires the right hardware and software

In the early 1700s, many folks in Britain were grappling with a peculiar problem. How to get water out of coal mines. Since the coal mines were underground, they tended to get frequently flooded.

A humble blacksmith called Thomas Newcomen built the first prototype of a gloriously inefficient, but workable contraption - known as a steam engine - to pump out the water... and kickstarted a revolution that changed the world forever.

Newcomen's engine was invented in 1712, and further developments - especially vast improvements made by a Scottish instrument maker named James Watt, which made it viable for mass use - led to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s.

This revolution was powered by innovations in 3 key resources:

1. Energy: From steam to electricity, several innovations propelled the manufacturing industry

2. Materials: From metals to plastics, material science has also been a key driver of innovation; and...

3. People: The education, hiring and management of an innumerable mass of workers was the final piece of this Industrial Revolution

You could say that the Industrial revolution needed both:
- The right hardware (Energy, Materials) and
- The right software (people and their skills and management practices)
to come to fruition.

Now, we all know that both hardware and software need frequent upgrades.

Hardware upgrades continue through innovations in the use of energy and materials.

But it's in the software upgrades that I'm more interested in.

The first phase of manufacturing was the 'craft' phase. Highly skilled workers with small but flexible machinery and tools.

The issue with this approach is that it lacks scale and results in significantly high costs - resulting in a very small potential customer base.

In the early 1900s, some pioneers in the US auto industry decided to do something about this.

To achieve the goal of mass manufacturing at low costs, entrepreneurs hit upon the solution which was a combination of: standardisation, extreme division of labour and rigorous top-down planning.

Basically, they upgraded human capital software to unlock Manufacturing 2.0

One of the earlier pioneers in this area was an engineer called Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Sometimes called the first 'Management Consultant', Taylor was a thorough, methodical guy, who revolutionised factories with his scientific approach.

Here's management guru, Peter Drucker (writing in 1974) on Taylor:

"Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all...

...the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do."

Taylor (and other pioneers) were the drivers of the 'Efficiency Movement' - which was widely adopted by the 'industry of industries' - auto.

Specifically by @Ford and GM, post World War 1. This led the US Auto industry to global leadership of the sector.

Now, while these new techniques vastly improved the productivity for both man and machine they had their fair share of challenges:

a. Limited customisation (Henry Ford: “A customer can have a car painted any colour, so long as it is black.”)

b. A top-down approach, leading to extreme specialisation and mind-numbingly boring jobs for the vast majority of workers.

c. High inventory levels, and higher workforce requirement, resulting in a higher cost structure

It was time for the next major 'software update' in manufacturing.

If Europe pioneered craft manufacturing and the US took the lead in mass manufacturing, it was the third industrial powerhouse that gave the world the next innovation.

Japan.

And the innovation? #lean manufacturing.

Pioneered by the @ToyotaMotorCorp (leaders like Sakichi Toyoda, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno), Lean Manufacturing was a whole new way of approaching the activity.

If mass manufacturing focused on efficiency, lean focused on flexibility.

If mass manufacturing was top-down, lean empowered the frontline worker with a bottom-up approach.

If mass manufacturing was the past, lean was the future.

If you have worked in or been exposed to any factory in the world, you would have most likely come across one or more Japanese management concepts - such as Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Kanban (including actual Japanese words like Mura, Mudi, Seiri, Seiton etc).

In other words, Japanese manufacturing workflows are arguably the most influential ‘software-stack’ in the history of manufacturing.

Interestingly, many of these ideas smoothly transitioned to 'software-manufacturing' too - underscoring their conceptual solidity and versatility.

But then, the world started to change in the early 1980s. Manufacturing increasingly gave away to knowledge work.

A new type of work needed new tools. New hardware and new software.

The Knowledge Revolution begins...

For most readers - especially millennials and Gen-Zs - the idea of manufacturing and industry might seem quaint. Doesn't everyone work on computers, you may ask?

That has been the power of the Knowledge Era - most of us work with our brains, not hands.

While this may seem to be a fairly recent phenomenon, the term 'knowledge worker' was coined by (who else) Management Guru, Peter Drucker, way back in 1966, in his seminal book, 'The Effective Executive'. (I remember getting a copy on landing my first job...

but not being mature enough to really understand the ideas therein)!

Later, in 1999, Drucker wrote that "the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."

It’s useful to see the parallels between manufacturing and knowledge work - especially from the lens of the hardware and software which have been used to run it.

Let's start with hardware: perhaps the most important tool for knowledge workers, was the invention of the PC in the early 1970s.

Digression alert: I'm taking you through a cool digression - because it is such a good example of storytelling!

In its initial versions, the personal computer it was seen more as a geek or hobbyist's plaything and not something that can seriously help regular office folks.
The person to see its potential and tell a compelling story - was Steve Jobs.

Today every house has a computer. But in the early 1980s, it was not seen as a must-have. For a present day analogy, think 3D printers. Maybe in 20 years, each of us would have one at home. But today they are an expensive plaything.

Back to Steve Jobs: Instead of talking about the speed, computing power or memory of these machines, Steve told a story.
A story of how a computer was like a bicycle for the mind.



Once a storyteller, always a storyteller.

Digression done, back to the main story!

After the PC, the next major hardware revolution was the advent of the internet. Like electricity a century earlier, the internet has been the the most fundamental change of our era.

With the pace of hardware innovation picking up, we kept seeing new tools - new bicycles for the human mind.

Faster, sleeker computers. Smartphones in 2007. Faster internet access at lower costs. Democratised computing power through innovations like AWS.

Knowledge workers have had a plethora of hardware innovations to help them perform better.

Let's talk about software now.
Creating the software for the Knowledge Era
Just like productivity was the Holy Grail for the manufacturing sector, it was for Knowledge workers too.

Every knowledge worker has pondered the question: how can I get more done with lesser time and effort?

​Of course, this is also not a recent question. Especially, when you look at productivity enhancement through the lens of Time Management...

...(since time is the knowledge-worker's universally constrained resource). We have had thinkers mull over better time management for centuries now.

Consider this article on Benjamin Franklin's daily schedule - he created it in the 1700s.
medium.com/copywriting-se…

Franklin says: "every part of my business should have its allotted time, one page in my little book contain'd the following scheme of employment for the twenty-four hours of a natural day."

Franklin was a model knowledge worker, amirite?!

Having said that, the real developments in thinking about knowledge worker productivity started in the mid-late 20th century.

​Just like Taylorism was one of the early attempts at streamlining manufacturing,

Knowledge workers found their champions in Peter Drucker (with works like 'The Effective Executive' and 'The Changing World of the Executive') and Steven Covey ('Seven Habits of Highly Effective People').
But these efforts were still at a philosophical level.

It did not get into the weeds. It answered the Why and What questions, but not the How.

The first person to attempt a comprehensive answer of the 'how' question was an odd-jobs-worker turned productivity consultant called David Allen.

In 2001, David wrote the bestseller, 'Getting Things Done' (abbreviated as GTD) a book that has been through several revised editions since then.
GTD was breakthrough thinking and Allen was feted by the media with positive coverage across leading outlets ex. in Fortune & the Time

Here's how the Time article (published in 2007) starts:

"Every decade has its defining self-help business book. In the 1940s it was How to Win Friends and Influence People, in the 1990s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People...

These days we're worried about something much simpler: Getting Things Done."

So is that it? Is 'Getting Things Done' the ultimate Bible for the Knowledge worker?

Not yet. Something was missing.

Knowledge work still needed to build its 'Japanese software stack'.

Enter Tiago Forte.

When GTD met PKM (and BASB was born)

GTD was focused on tasks, efficiency, organisation, structure. But it didn't really grapple with the fundamental unit of the Knowledge Era: Knowledge!

Also, GTD came in 2001...

We all know how much the world has changed in the last 20 years. David Allen did stellar work, but his worldview was still formed in the pre-smartphone, pre-ubiquitous-internet era.

Tiago Forte is a digital-first thinker. And sure, GTD was a major influence on him.

But he built on top of it and has come up with a groundbreaking new software update to the system.

Incidentally, here's a cool conversation between Tiago and David, in December 2015. You can almost tag that as the moment the baton was handed over.
fortelabs.co/blog/a-convers…

On the software side, the Japanese management principles pioneered by Toyota Motor Company formed the predominant stack that has powered efficiency and scale in the world of manufacturing (and now, fittingly, even software development)!

But the world has moved from the Industrial to the Knowledge Era. An era which needs different hardware (computers, smartphones, the internet) and software.

Now there are various aspects to this 'software' of knowledge work, but they can be divided into two groups.

1) which looks at things from the individual level - how can an individual knowledge worker be more productive and fulfil his/her creative potential.
2) which looks at the team/group/organisation level - how can you lead teams and foster collaboration to achieve great outcomes.

I'll share why I think Tiago Forte's BASB can become a key component of the software stack of individual knowledge work.

A quick disclaimer: My approach to explaining this is not to offer a detailed tear-down of the approach...

you'll be much better served consuming Tiago's own (vastly better expressed) posts and videos on the topic. This detailed article is a great place to start.
fortelabs.co/blog/how-to-us…

The idea is also not to proclaim complete victory over my knowledge management challenges and preach to you from the top of the Knowledge Nirvana mountain. Like most others, I'm also an explorer and learner in this domain, stumbling and struggling my way uphill.

What BASB has given me is a set of breakthrough ideas that, in some ways, have already changed my work-life and in many ways are likely to be transformational going forward.

So let me share my understanding of BASB through just two clutter-breaking ideas that I have assimilated:

Capturing all your knowledge in one place
Organising your captured knowledge for actionability

1. Capture all your knowledge in one place

I've written before about the importance of 'Consuming' right, for knowledge workers - in an earlier post on the 5Cs of Thought Leadership.
storyrules.com/blog/posts/the…

The 5Cs are: Consume-Cerebrate-Confer-Create-Coach.

But I realised that my 5Cs were missing a crucial set of ingredients - especially between Consume and Cerebrate.

What should you do with the information you consume before reflecting on it and creating outputs?

​Here's where Tiago comes with two crucial steps:

Capture the information and then Organise it. These two form part of his powerful 'CODE' (Capture-Organise-Distil-Express) framework.

But, before we get into what 'Capture' means, let's talk about rainwater harvesting.
For most of human history, we used to take water for granted

We didn't really make the most of the water we got.

Sure, there were natural channels (rivers and streams) and reservoirs (lakes); and simple manmade structures such as wells, bunds and irrigation channels.

But for most people (my grandma included), getting water meant walking... to the nearby riverbank and taking as much water as you needed for your daily needs.

Knowledge is also like water. It falls on you like rain...

As you consume it through books, articles, podcasts, videos, learning sessions etc. It is stored - in our brain (and in various filing systems in our devices). It is retrieved - as needed - for a project. And then it is expressed - in our outputs in the form of presentations,

reports, emails, code etc.

In addition, we all have access to a constant flowing river of water (which is more like an ocean really) - Google.

So we never feel the need to really 'store' the knowledge that we consume (in addition to what our memory does).

Just like our ancestors didn't feel the need to capture and store their water in a large scale manner.

But soon people realised the inconvenience, inefficiency and plain ineffectiveness in not doing that. And so, a key breakthrough for humankind was when,

we started managing water resources better - when we learnt to formally capture and store it through the use of dams, canals, and large artificial reservoirs and tanks. And then figure out ways to filter it, and finally transport it directly to users where they could access it.

But it all started with step 1: Capture.

Now here's the rub - most of us do NOT have any formal knowledge capture system!

Think of the effort you take to read books, articles, watch videos, listen to podcasts, attend online sessions, discuss with colleagues... and then what? Let it all run off to the ocean of oblivion? Or lie dusty and unused in some deep recess of your mind?

My first lesson from BASB: Capture (almost) everything you consume.

Here are the key steps:

a. Identify a capture tool: Your capture tool is the 'dam' where all the rain water you receive is accumulated for future retrieval and processing.

The choice of capture tool is critical, so you need to make a considered call. The BASB program makes it simple by breaking down the cohorts by the preferred choice of capture tool. There were mainly 5 tools in use
- Evernote
- Notion
- Roam
- OneNote
- General (no specific tool)

Now, a lot of people fret over tool choice - but it is a red herring.

There is no one best tool - with different tools having different advantages. I had been using Evernote before BASB, so decided to stick with it (although, I later realised that I hardly used 5% of Evernote).

Incidentally, Tiago Forte also primarily uses Evernote for his work notes.

​Having said that, many advanced practitioners like Ali Abdaal use multiple tools including Notion and Roam.

​If you are starting off, and unsure, then @evernote is a good place to start.

It has a simple interface and is very user-friendly (plus it has a great free basic plan).

​The main point is - the tool is secondary... what matters is what you do with it.

b. Create a Capture Toolkit and start capturing!

A capture toolkit is the 'plumbing' that you create from the content rain-water source to the Evernote reservoir.

Here's Tiago Forte's Capture toolkit for instance. (The Elephant sign is the Evernote logo):

He mentions how he uses various apps to ensure that all his consumed knowledge is captured in one place.

This may seem like a lot, but it must have taken several years of trial and error for him to reach this position.

And it's not an all-or-nothing play. You can start small and slowly build your kit.

For instance, I have properly implemented just one of the above workflows: the Kindle-Readwise-Evernote flow. (it really matters to me because the Kindle is the dominant source for me).

Here's how it works.

When reading on the Kindle, I highlight key sentences/paras
I also tag them with key storytelling concepts (e.g. #Story, #Analogy, #Surprise)
I've subscribed to a service @readwiseio (paid, $8/month), which exports all these highlights onto the cloud.

Readwise syncs with Evernote, exporting all highlights and tags into one separate note on Evernote (in a chosen folder)
Voila, ALL the highlights from the books that you have read are now available to you through the powerful Evernote Search function.

How does this help? Imagine wanting to write an article on the importance of 'diversity'.

Here's what I get by a quick search using that term in my Evernote desktop app:

There are 21 notes - all from different books that I have read in the past several years. With sources as, appropriately, diverse as - Yuval Harari, Rory Sutherland, David Epstein, Annie Duke and Charles Duhigg.

It's like Googling your past!

On that note, there's one very cool feature of the Evernote web clipper: Even when you do a general Google search of a keyword, it simultaneously searches your notes and displays the results on the top right corner:

Did I mention all these Evernote features are free?! Honestly, I'm this close to becoming a paid customer - it's a fabulous app

And to think, for several years, I was just using Evernote as a place to record ideas that I would get...

I clearly hadn't realised it's full potential (It was like driving a Ferrari only in first gear!).

To actually use Evernote (or any other tool) as a store of (almost) all my knowledge is an idea that has been simple yet revolutionary for me.

“I look at books as investments in a future of learning, rather than a fleeting moment of insight, soon to be forgotten” - Kevan Lee

2. Think output-first, not input-first

Let's face it - we all face information FOMO.

In an age of knowledge super-abundance, we are constantly consuming. Books, newsletters, podcasts, tweets, emails... the list of stuff to consume is unending, while our time and attention remain stubbornly constrained.

My approach to knowledge was that of a hoarder.

I would constantly worry: 'Let me get that book/subscribe to that podcast/favourite that tweet lest I regret missing out on it's potentially life-altering contents'.

In other words I was input-focused.

The approach was: Keep consuming 'good content', reflect on it and something good would eventually come out.

Tiago turned that approach on its head.

​Instead of going input-first, he goes output-first. And to do that, comes the second part of the CODE methodology: Organise.

The key insight: Organise your knowledge NOT by category, subject, location, date… but by ACTIONABILITY.

That insight hit me like a ton of bricks.

Here I was, having a list of major to-dos on my plate. And here I was (same person) reading and watching stuff in general...

almost without any connection with what I wanted to finally create.

​Those major things to-do, the stuff that you want to create, are the key driver of work in the knowledge world: they are called 'Projects'.

The concept of the Project in knowledge work was an eye-opening one for me. I mean we all know that we need to be working on a bunch of major deliverables. But to clearly demarcate them as Projects, and then crucially, to organise your knowledge around them, was a killer insight.

For instance, when attending BASB, I was working on the Covid-19 Explainer ebook. (I know, I know, Chapter 3 is pending). Now that is an example of a 'project'. So I created a Notebook (in Evernote, you can bunch a set of notes under a Notebook, like a folder)...

called 'Covid19 Explainer ebook' and started adding all my notes on that topic there.

I've started doing that for all sorts of projects - a major post I'm working on; a corporate training program; a new course...

Essentially, your projects provide urgency and direction to your knowledge-gathering process.

"Instead of organizing ideas by where they came from, organize them by where they are going" Tiago Forte

The ideas expressed in the BASB program are incredible not just because...

they are powerful and effective, but also because they have been explained and expressed in such a simple framework. Incidentally, Tiago mentioned that the CODE framework took him a DECADE distil and refine.

It is likely to become the standard for individual knowledge work for several decades from now. Of course given the pace at which our world is changing, one can never make such proclamations with certainty.

But for now, one thing I know for sure: I now have a new software stack to enhance my creativity and productivity.