In the early 1700s, Central Europe faced a crisis: the forests were running out.

An explosion in mining, shipbuilding, and early industry had devastated old-growth forests that had stood for many centuries. Meanwhile, the population was exploding as well, creating demands on forests that clearly couldn’t be sustained for long.

The kingdoms of Prussia and Saxony decided to apply the emerging methods of science to the problem, developing what would eventually become known as Scientific Forestry. In order to maximize timber production for the state, forestry officials turned their wild and messy woodlands into outdoor timber factories.

They began by meticulously cataloguing every tree in the forest by species and size. They analyzed growth rates and wood quality to identify the most productive species, settling on Norway spruce to yield the maximum volume of timber per square foot. They then cleared the existing forests and turned them into monocultures – endless rows of evenly spaced, identically sized spruce.

What had once been an impossibly complex tangle of diverse kinds of vegetation – oak, beech, fir, and countless others – became a “planned forest.” It was the biological equivalent of a spreadsheet, with straight rows of trees laid out in a precise geometric grid ready for bureaucratic regulation.

At first, it worked beautifully. Forestry officials could now predict with extreme accuracy the exact yield of every patch of forest. The new plantations produced more lumber, at a faster pace, to a more precise standard. Harvests came in on schedule and in uniform sizes ready for sawmills. Logging boomed and the revenue flowed into state coffers.

But something strange began to happen after the second or third generations of trees were planted. The first generation had flourished in the absence of competition for soil and nutrients, but in the following generations, those same ecosystems collapsed, with dramatic production losses of 20-30%.

In order to make the forest more productive, the underbrush had been cleared of smaller trees, bushes, and shrubs. That underbrush had fertilized the soil with decomposing leaves and wood; without this undergrowth, the soil soon became depleted. The disappearance of fungi, worms, and insects caused pollination and soil aeration to crash.

Pests like the pine looper moth and bark beetle raced through identical strands of trees, encountering no obstacles or predators. Storms damaged vast swathes of the forest, toppling over the shallowly rooted spruces like “bowling pins.”

It turned out in retrospect that the messy diversity of the forest had been the source of its resilience. When stresses such as storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold struck, a diverse forest with its full array of different species of trees, birds, insects, and animals was far better able to survive and recover. A windstorm that toppled large, old trees would typically spare smaller ones. An insect attack that threatened oaks might leave lindens and hornbeams unaffected. The rigidity and uniformity of the system meant that failures were not small and contained but systemic. 

By the late 19th and early 20th century, forest plantations had become “a pale shadow of their previous ecological richness.” After all the effort and resources invested, the forests of Central Europe were now producing less timber than the wild forests they had replaced. All these changes culminated in what Germans grimly came to call Waldsterben, or “death of the forest.” 

The supposedly “scientific” management of forests led to ecological problems so severe that multiple generations of restoration ecology have been needed to restore the previous diversity in insects, flora, and fauna. Germany continues to struggle with the lasting effects of monoculture forestry to this day, most recently in 2018 due to the mounting effects of climate change.

This story is recounted in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and in his book, Scott notes that far from being a unique or isolated incident, scientific forestry was one incidence of a far broader movement, which he dubs Authoritarian High Modernism. 

Across many facets of the modern world, from urban planning to public health, from transportation infrastructure to online social networks, we’ve sought to “rationalize” and “optimize” the messiness and complexity of the world. From the way we organize our cities and homes to how we manage the economy, all the way down to the systems and routines we create for our personal productivity, we’ve tried to impose rational order on complex systems based on a narrow vision of efficiency.

In this piece, I’ll argue that the results of that effort have been disastrous, and it’s time to return those systems to their natural, messy state.

An optimal level of mess

I first read the story of scientific forestry in a blog post by Venkatesh Rao in 2014. It was a paradigm-shifting moment for me. I saw in myself much the same attitude as 18th century German forestry officials – an unquestioned belief in order, reason, and systematic thinking.

I had always believed that anything I wanted to achieve in life was to be found on the other side of “getting organized.” My assumption was that there was one “best” path to achieving any goal, which was to follow a highly specific, structured, step-by-step plan with objectives and metrics. It was the “one true way,” as universal and unquestioned as my childhood religious faith.

Yet, in my early 20s, I began to run up against the limits of my blind faith in order. I began to see more and more examples of how it failed – in my own life, the lives of my friends and peers, and even in the business world and in society. The pitfalls and weaknesses of highly ordered, rationalized systems started to become ever more glaring, especially in a world that seemed to be changing faster and becoming more ambiguous and uncertain.

What if, I began to wonder, the costs of being neat and organized outweighed the benefits? What if there were hidden advantages to being messy, informal, loose, and even chaotic?

Last year, I picked up a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, that finally addressed my longstanding question. Their striking conclusion after studying dozens of disciplines was a strong affirmative yes: that “moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones.”

They argue instead for an attitude toward organization that takes into account its costs, by asking yourself: Will more effort spent organizing be worth what it costs me in time and other resources? They suggest that there is an “optimal level of mess” for any given person and every given situation…and that it is just as common for people to err on the side of overorganization as underorganization.

This assertion is akin to heresy in our productivity-obsessed world. And for me personally, as someone who’s dedicated my career to teaching people how to be more efficient and organized, it felt like the portal to a hidden, subversive world.

The surprising benefits of disorder

This may seem counterintuitive, but you can think of “mess” not as simply the absence of order – like a vacuum of nothingness – but as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own qualities.

You can even conceive of mess as a valuable resource you can draw on or a strategy you can proactively apply when needed.

To understand when and where we might want to employ messes, we need to identify its unique benefits. Abrahamson and Freedman suggest six of them: flexibility, completeness, resonance, invention, efficiency, and robustness.

Messes are flexible in that they can adapt and change more quickly, more dramatically, in a wider variety of situations, and with less effort than would be required by highly ordered, formal systems. 

For example, the messiness of a jazz ensemble enables improvisation, as any musician can shift at any moment to address any other, whereas a symphony orchestra has to play the music as written. Neat systems struggle to fight off randomness, and when randomness inevitably leaks in, the system is thrown off.

Messes are more complete (or comprehensive) since they can comfortably tolerate an exhaustive array of diverse entities. 

Neat systems tend to whittle away at the diversity of their elements (as we saw in 18th-century German forestry). As another example, Thomas Edison tried any and every material in his quest to invent a workable lightbulb with a long-lasting glow, without regard to elegant theories as to why they might work. His approach to experimentation was wide-ranging and messy.

Messes are resonant, as in they facilitate surprising connections between overlapping, heterogenous elements. 

Alexander Fleming happened upon the discovery that led to the invention of the first antibiotic, penicillin, because his lab was notoriously messy. A small, ragged circle of mold had invaded one of his petri dishes, but the staphylococci culture it contained seemed to steer clear of the mold, his first clue that the bacteria couldn’t tolerate it.

Messes facilitate invention by randomly juxtaposing many elements in unexpected, unconventional ways. 

Neatness tends to limit novelty and the unexpected and sweeps them aside as aberrations when they do occur. A sobering example: a major reason modern terrorists are so hard to fight and defeat is because they are constituted by loose, constantly shifting, non-hierarchical, i.e., messy groups.

Messes are efficient, able to accomplish goals with a modest consumption of resources. 

Consider the “productivity” of the wild forests before scientific management took root – they produced immense value for a wide variety of human and non-human species, despite the complete lack of an organizing scheme. Neatness tends to require a constant expenditure of resources just to maintain itself.

Messes are robust in that they tend to weave together and interlace many disparate elements, making them more resistant to destruction, failure, and imitation. 

For example, competitive runners benefit from “inconsistent” workouts that mix up the speed, length, difficulty, frequency, and inclination of their running routines, leading to muscles that are more adaptable. Mixed-breed mutts are often hardier than purebred dogs thanks to the random interweaving of genes from their unlike parents. Neat systems, in contrast, tend to be more brittle and more easily disrupted or copied.

Later in the book, Abrahamson and Freedman introduce a seventh benefit: messes can be fun!

Consider the joy of sorting through antiques and doodads at a flea market, browsing a stack of random magazines, or spelunking through a messy collection of notes and finding something you didn’t even know you were looking for. Messy situations inherently include many qualities we find enlivening and interesting: surprise, delight, exploration, and discovery.

Adding disorder to a system can make it more effective

It’s one thing to believe that messes have some intriguingly positive qualities in theory. It’s quite another to realize those benefits in real life.

Let’s get one level more concrete and look at practical ways we can use the benefits of disorder in our daily lives.

Specifically, let’s see how disorder can make for more creative environments, allow information systems to contain more information, make the human brain smarter, enhance one’s personal productivity, and allow us to make more consistent progress on our projects and goals.

Disorder makes for more creative environments

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson highlights many surprising examples of how disorder has led to new ideas and inventions throughout history. In his research, he found that innovation is often driven by “the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.”

Perhaps the most classic model for such a space is the eighteenth-century coffeehouse, which Johnson notes was the hotbed for Enlightenment-era innovations that transformed our world: everything from the science of electricity to the insurance industry to modern democracy itself. 

Sigmund Freud famously hosted an intellectual salon on Wednesday nights in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists came together to discuss the emerging field of psychoanalysis. The legendary Homebrew Computer Club in 1970s Silicon Valley was made up of a ragtag group of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, entrepreneurs, and academics, who together somehow sparked the personal computer revolution.

Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth began investigating the relationship between noise, dissent, and creativity in group environments more than thirty years ago, and her research offers a clue as to why noisy cafes and amateur hobbyist clubs might have fostered so much creativity: she found that “good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error,” ranging from mock juries to corporate boardrooms to academic seminars.

Maybe the best environment for our creativity is not sitting in a minimalist cafe, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, with an all-consuming focus on a tiny screen. Maybe there are times we’d be better served by immersing ourselves in randomness instead.

Disorder makes for more information-rich systems

Steven Johnson, in his book, introduces the field of Descriptive Complexity Theory, a branch of information science that has found that the more randomness in a system, the more information it can hold.

This may seem paradoxical, but imagine the case of two professors: one with a perfectly tidy, neat office with not a paperclip out of place, and one with a messy office full of personal items strewn all over the place. Which one provides you with more information about what kind of person the professor is? Clearly the messy one, since too much neatness and order tends to hide away the idiosyncratic details that distinguish one person from another.

Now imagine a digital notetaking app such as Notion, Obsidian, Tana, or Evernote. You might imagine that perfectly organizing your notes app – with neatly formatted text, seamless folders, comprehensive tags, and uniform headings – might allow you to fully maximize the potential of your knowledge.

But then again…maybe not. Maybe it is the very messiness that we tend to despise that makes our notes personal, intimate, and unique to us. A perfectly organized set of notes could belong to anyone, whereas a messier collection might contain all sorts of hidden clues about your unique desires and interests.

Disorder makes for smarter brains

In a 2007 study on the brain activity of children, neuroscientist Robert Thatcher and his team found that there was a correlation between the IQ of individual children and the amount of time their brains spent in “chaotic mode” (in contrast to “phase lock,” which is a more ordered and focused state of mind).

Every extra millisecond spent in chaos added as much as twenty IQ points, whereas time spent in phase lock was correlated with reduced IQ. Their conclusion is astonishing: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are likely to be.

It turns out that the human brain relies on disorder for its basic functioning at multiple levels, from the processing of raw sensory data to the interplay of abstract ideas. Our brains evolved to navigate a messy world, and perhaps when we insist on organizing its activity, we rob it of that essential ability.

Consider how too much silence in a group dinner can be uncomfortable. Or that kids can knock out homework in a noisy home. Or that jiggling a telescope can help an observer’s eye pick up a faint celestial body. We are designed to thrive in chaos.

Disorder makes for higher productivity

Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planning theorist, noted a similar phenomenon at work in the design of cities. 

She noticed that planners had a tendency to substitute superficial visual order for true functionality. In other words, whether a neighborhood “looked right” became more important than whether it worked for its inhabitants. The assumption seemed to be that if an arrangement was visually pleasing, that automatically meant it would function well.

I see this tendency run amok in the personal productivity space as well: people tend to love visual order, manifesting as pleasing symmetry, clean lines, perfectly squared little boxes, and severe minimalism. Yet all too often, this order and elegance comes at the expense of functionality – Does the thing actually work? Does it work sustainably for the long term? Does it fit how your mind works? Does it provide more value than it requires in upkeep?

It’s far easier to make something superficially pretty than to answer such questions. It’s much easier to compulsively switch to a different app that promises to instantly sweep aside the digital disorder than to figure out what we’re truly trying to accomplish. It’s much easier to organize things than to decide which of those things actually matters.

No doubt some situations call for a more structured approach – think of checklists used by an operating surgeon or an airline pilot. But most of us don’t face such high-stakes situations in our daily lives and would benefit from less formal tools.

Disorder helps you make progress

We normally think of “organizing” a collection of physical, visual, or digital elements, but it also applies to how one structures one’s efforts, including goals and projects.

In Tim Hartford’s book Messy, he found in his research that the top scientists tend to switch topics frequently: “Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times.” 

We are normally taught that in order to achieve something great, we have to focus maniacally on a single pursuit. Yet by cultivating a variety of projects at different stages of fruition, leading scientists clearly gain four benefits:

1. Multiple projects cross-fertilize, with the knowledge gained in one sometimes unlocking key insights in another.
2. Diverse pursuits provide variety that captures our attention, whereas a single-minded pursuit can become monotonous and boring.
3. Each project provides an “escape” from the others, giving you something to turn to when you face an impasse, instead of it becoming a crushing experience.
4. Turning our attention away from a project gives us a chance to process it subconsciously, which some scientists believe is an important key to solving creative problems.

This last benefit was designated by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as “crop rotation.” One cannot use the same field to grow the same crop indefinitely. Eventually the soil must be refreshed by planting something new or simply giving it a break.

This agricultural metaphor brings us back full circle to James C. Scott’s ideas in Seeing Like a State, where he makes an intriguing observation: “The rule seems to be that the more rigid and exclusive is the specialist’s boundary, and the stricter the control within it, the more disorder rages around it.”

In other words, you can’t really ever eliminate disorder; you can only move it around. So perhaps the greatest cost of creating a highly organized environment is that everything just outside its borders – which includes the rest of your life, your body, your family, other people, the natural environment, and human society generally– becomes flooded with externalities for the sake of that perfect system.

Practical takeaways for your productivity

So what does all this mean for our personal approach to order and organization?

Here are some actionable takeaways I can offer based on the findings and examples above:

1. Don’t feel guilty about putting off organizing

The authors of A Perfect Mess note that there’s an advantage in putting off organizing: it’s more efficient to organize a larger batch of items all at once than to do it a little at a time. 

This is known as “batch processing,” and I tend to save it for my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews, when paradoxically, the more stuff that has piled up, the better!

Don’t feel guilty about postponing your organizing to a later date, or only doing it occasionally, because in the meantime, you’re benefitting from all the advantages of mess I highlighted above.

2. Notice and embrace the odd, eccentric ways you tend to organize

Many people say they don’t have time to get organized, but in reality, they are constantly engaging in a wide variety of ingenious organizing strategies. Our propensity to seek shortcuts, find the path of least resistance, and expend as little time and energy as possible to achieve an outcome are some of the most reliable ways to find little tips and tricks that may seem eccentric or odd but work for us.

Abrahamson and Freedman present multiple examples of how most people, since they aren’t aware of the ways they naturally stay organized, tend to misjudge how a technology system might help them. They assume that the laid back, informal methods they already use are suboptimal and that they need a piece of software that only adds a lot of burdensome formality.

3. Satisfice instead of maximize

One of the subtle implications of the ideas in this piece is that we don’t ever truly have control. If we try to fully organize our surroundings, we fall into the traps and pitfalls noted above. If we instead accept the messiness, then we don’t have full control over it either.

What’s left then is to accept the reality: that we are all careening through a chaotic void, with at most brief moments of stability and fleeting periods of agency. Instead of trying to order and control our lives, we can use this inherent randomness as an excuse to satisfice, which has long been recognized as an essential ingredient for happiness.

As Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it, “Having some randomness in your life can actually increase happiness: it forces you to satisfice, instead of maximize. Research shows that those who live under self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.”

Living in the balance

It’s all a balance, all masculine and feminine, yin and yang. When the benefits of order start running out, it’s time to switch to disorder. And vice versa – when disorder starts careening out of control, try adding a little structure to the problem. 

There are no “right” ways that work universally in all situations; only tools that work better or worse depending on the job.

It’s not that order, reason, and efficiency are bad – it’s that they are sometimes extolled as inherent virtues when, in fact, their opposites can be just as valuable and useful.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

I’m thrilled to share a special guest post by my wife, Lauren Valdez. Lauren approaches productivity in a way that’s refreshingly different from my digital-first philosophy. She’s deeply rooted in the tactile and intentional, favoring physical tools like journals over digital systems. 

Journaling has been her cornerstone for reflection, decision-making, and creativity. I’m excited for her to share her journaling practice with you, not as a “how-to,” but as an inspiring example of how to customize systems that resonate with your life and values. You can find more of her ideas, thinking, and work on her Substack newsletter.

Over to Lauren!

For a decade, I bounced between task managers like a serial dater afraid of commitment. Asana to Things, Todoist back to Things, Apple Reminders… Each new app promised to fix my life, but left me more overwhelmed than before. My digital task lists grew into monsters that paralyzed me with anxiety, so I would dump them and start again.

Then my husband Tiago hit me with a truth bomb: ‘I think the problem is you, not the tool.’

Damn him for being right. What I really needed wasn’t another sleek productivity app – I needed a way to face the mess in my head.

I needed a simpler, more intentional way to manage not just my tasks, but my emotions. I needed a way to manage my anxiety that gets in the way of starting a task. I needed a way to simplify overwhelming amounts of information. I needed to find pleasure in my productivity system, rather than it feeling like a burden. 

That’s when I turned to pen and paper.

Lauren’s Journaling Practice: Intentionality, Flexibility, and Joy

Journaling isn’t just something I do—it’s a way I make sense of life and stay true to my values. My journals help me slow down, reflect on highs and lows, and make more intentional decisions. They’re my tools for staying present and navigating life with purpose.

Here’s a look at how I use journaling, organized around the rhythms of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reviews. Each journal has a unique purpose, and together, they form a system that’s messy, intuitive, and deeply personal.

1. Morning Pages: Daily Reflection (3–5x per Week, 15–30 Minutes)

I use a cheap school notebook for this nearly daily practice inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Morning Pages are simple: write three pages by hand about whatever is on your mind. It’s messy, unfiltered, and deeply cathartic.

This practice is my brain dump—a space to clear my head of thoughts, reflections, and feelings. I often write about what happened the day before, including funny things my kids said or little moments we didn’t photograph but I want to remember. I also confront my anxieties, writing out absurd thoughts and reframing them as though I were compassionately giving advice to a friend with the same worries. Some days, I plan my day or draft ideas for work. Other days, big emotions surface, and I rage write–raging my complaints or my pains on the page. It’s my space to get things I would never say aloud out of my head and let them go. It’s always a surprise.

At the end of the year, I reread these pages. It’s humbling and inspiring to see how much I’ve grown, and I rediscover moments of joy and resilience I’d forgotten. When I skip this practice, my day is often less intentional and more chaotic—but that’s okay too.

2. Bullet Journal: Task Management and Notes (3–5x per Week, 15 Minutes)

It’s funny that the feature that makes digital tasks managers so great – quick capture, it the reason I can’t use them. I’m a people pleaser who defaults to saying yes. When I’m quickly capturing tasks, I’m not intentional about what I want to do. My digital lists eventually became so bloated that I spent more time organizing the lists than taking action. It was hard to find, organize, and prioritize what really mattered. I also an indecisive Libra; the more tasks on my list, the more paralyzed I become trying to figure out what to work on.  On top of that, I didn’t have consistent habits for maintaining those systems—like daily or weekly reviews—to keep things up to date.

Eventually, I discovered Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal system for managing my tasks and notes by hand in a paper notebook. I plan out my day and write out my tasks for the day by hand. I also carry my notebook around and take handwritten notes in meetings and even take notes on books I am reading by hand. 

What I love about the bullet journal system is how it makes me feel more deliberate about what I say yes to in my life. 

My #1 productivity principle is: what is simple is sustainable. Writing tasks by hand keeps things simple. It also makes me pause and think. If I don’t want to bother rewriting a task, I have to ask myself, “Does this really matter?” That moment of hesitation often helps me let go of things that don’t align with my priorities.

On most days, I average only about three tasks, and that’s enough. I don’t always do exactly what I set out to do, but I always update my bullet journal with what I actually did and see that all the tasks I used to not track digitally like doing laundry, going to yoga, and cooking dinner are big tasks that need to be celebrated too. There is also something that feels so good about crossing off a task physically with a pen. 

Ryder writes in his book, “Everything on your list has to fight for its life to stay there. More accurately, each item needs to fight for the opportunity to become part of your life.” That principle has transformed how I manage my time and energy.

Even though my bullet journal is primarily for tasks, it’s also where I take notes and plan projects. I create messy, functional spreads to brainstorm ideas, plan trips, or track habits like my sleep. Writing by hand takes longer than using an app, but it saves me time in the long run. Digital tools can be distracting—if I open my phone to track a habit, there’s a 90% chance I’ll get sucked into notifications and forget why I picked it up in the first place. By staying analog, I avoid that entirely.

You’ll notice my bullet journal isn’t cute or Instagram-worthy. For me, it’s about processing and getting things out quickly. The messiness is the beauty.

Above: I managed a mini hallway and living room remodel just using my bullet journal, planning my ideas, tracking the budget, and staying on top of the vendors. 

3. Weekly Review Journal: Reflecting on the Week (1x per Week, 45 Minutes)

For a decade, I struggled to maintain a weekly review practice. I knew it was important, but it always felt like a chore. Reviewing my week on a Sunday felt boring, and by Monday or Friday, I rarely had the time or motivation to sit down and do it.

That changed this past year when I found a weekly review system that I actually enjoy. My second productivity principle is, what is pleasurable is motivating. By making my weekly review pleasurable, it’s become a ritual I look forward to.

Most Sunday evenings, after the kids are asleep, I take out my weekly review journal. First, I flip through my phone’s photos from the week and pick 2–4 favorites to print using my sticker printer. Then, I go through my bullet journal to jog my memory and write a one-page summary of the week. I capture funny quotes from my kids, moments of joy, and even the harder things I experienced.

Life moves so fast, that I’m surprised by how much I forgot by Sunday. Sometimes I sit down feeling like I didn’t do enough or that the week was full of challenges. But as I reflect and write, my perspective shifts. I start to see how much I accomplished and am reminded of how beautiful life is, even in the hard moments.

My favorite part of this practice is how much I revisit this journal. Unlike a traditional scrapbook that might sit on a shelf, this journal becomes a living document I flip through regularly. Each page tells the story of a week, creating a wonderful summary of the year as a whole.

This ritual started because I failed to make a scrapbook as part of my 2023/2024 annual review. I had printed over 100 photos, bought stickers, stencils, and gel pens, and spent hours trying to create something perfect. But I bit off more than I could chew, and the project felt overwhelming.

That failure inspired this simpler practice—small, consistent reflections captured in real time. My weekly review journal is messy and imperfect, but it’s become one of my favorite ways to savor life and stay grounded.

The journal itself is nothing fancy—just an affordable notebook from Amazon. It holds up well to photos and marker pens, and my sticker printer makes it easy to capture memories. The photo quality isn’t great, but it gets the job done.

4. My Spell Book: Manifesting Goals and Intentions (Monthly & Annually)

Okay this is where I get a bit woo and may lose some of yall, but this practice is how I make something like goal-setting fun and playful. I like to call this my Spell Book because it feels magical! It’s where I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and write out my hopes, dreams, and visions for the future.

If you have ever set out to create a project, you have dared to put something into existence that never existed before.

That’s magic.

Creating something from nothing is one of the greatest powers we possess as humans.

Whether it’s sending out a newsletter, cooking a meal, hosting a dinner party, or bringing humans into the world, that’s creation.

It’s easy to forget all the things we accomplish and my monthly and annual review rituals are how I remind myself of how magical I am.

Some might call this goal-setting, but that term doesn’t resonate with me. Traditional goal-setting has often felt rigid and intimidating—like I’m setting myself up for failure if I don’t achieve something exactly as planned.

Instead, my Spell Book is about flowing with life’s cycles. My cousin introduced me to moon rituals, and they completely transformed how I approach reflection and intention-setting. Now, every new moon feels like a mini New Year’s celebration for me. We often associate rituals with religion. But a ritual is just a rite, practice, or consistent series of steps. There is something that makes me more motivated to perform a ritual where I light candles and put on a reflective playlist. I feel more enlivened practicing my new moon ritual, rather than a monthly review. The former feels spiritual, a practice I honor for myself, while the latter feels like something I’m supposed to do.

Here’s how it works: I use the new moon to reflect on the past moon cycle. I ask myself questions like, What were the highs and lows? What lessons did I learn? What do I want to let go of? Then, I set an intention for the next moon cycle—something I want to create, embody, or grow into.

On the full moon, I revisit my intention and recalibrate if needed. This practice reframes goals for me, turning them into a cyclical, embodied process. Instead of feeling like I’ve failed if I don’t meet a rigid target, I’m reminded that life ebbs and flows. Each moon cycle is an opportunity to start fresh.

This journal also serves as the home for my annual and birthday reflections. When I sit down for my birthday review, I flip through the past year’s moon reflections. It’s amazing how easy it is to see patterns, growth, and recurring themes. What used to feel overwhelming—looking back on an entire year—now feels manageable and even joyful.

I love choosing a special notebook for my Spell Book. Right now, I’m using one I found on Etsy, and I had it engraved to make it feel even more personal. The journal is both functional and beautiful, and that adds to the sense of ceremony and ritual I bring to this practice.

For me, this isn’t just about setting goals—it’s about connecting with myself, aligning with my values, and embracing the natural rhythms of life.

Big Picture Thoughts

Journal AND Digital

Journaling works for me because it matches how I process life. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned digital tools entirely—I still use my second brain systems like my calendar, Evernote, and Notion. These tools are indispensable for managing complex projects or tracking long-term details.

When something important comes up in my journals, it often transitions to my digital tools. Conversely, when my digital tools feel too overwhelming or disconnected, I come back to pen and paper. Writing by hand grounds me, especially when fear or paralysis sets in. Journaling helps me clarify what I’m doing and regain my momentum.

Systems Change as You Change

Over the years, my systems have evolved with me. Early in my career, when I was focused on execution, digital tools helped me manage a high volume of tasks and details. As my responsibilities shifted to leadership and decision-making, I needed a different approach. That’s when my moon rituals became essential—they gave me space to think strategically and navigate tough conversations.

Motherhood was another turning point. During my postpartum years, my brain often felt fractured, like a horcrux split into pieces. Journaling became my lifeline. It gave me uninterrupted time to process my thoughts, and my morning pages habit finally stuck.

And now, I’m moving into a space where I am journaling less and using more embodied practices like meditation to clear the gunk or move me past my fears. 

If you’ve tried and failed to start a journaling practice, it might not have been the right season of life for you. That’s okay. Systems aren’t static—they should adapt to your needs as they change.

Making Time and Saving Time

People often ask how I make time for all of this. The truth is, these practices bring me so much relief and joy that I crave them. I look forward to journaling, so I naturally make time for it.

Journaling also saves me time. Without it, I’d waste hours working on the wrong things, burning myself out, or spiraling in fear and anxiety. There have been countless moments when I was completely stuck on a project. After just 15 minutes of journaling, the answer became clear, and I eliminated 80% of what felt overwhelming.

I also keep things simple. I don’t try to make my journals pretty or perfect. If anything, the messiness ensures privacy—it discourages nosy people from reading what I write. Logistically, most of my journaling happens after the kids are asleep. Sometimes that means waking up early or skipping TV at night, but the payoff is worth it.

Staying Flexible

I’ve learned that I fail at any system that’s too rigid. Life isn’t predictable, and my journaling practice reflects that. There are weeks when I journal a lot and weeks when I barely touch my notebooks. Sometimes I miss my weekly reviews for two or three weeks. That’s okay. There’s no one “right” way to do this.

Make it Simple and Pleasurable

If you want journaling to become a habit, start small and keep it simple. Maybe set a 15-minute timer or decide to journal only when you’re traveling. Experiment until you find something that sticks.

And make it pleasurable! Invest in beautiful notebooks and pens that inspire you. Take your journal on a hike and reflect during a break. Treat yourself to a journaling date with a lavender latte at your favorite café. When you associate journaling with joy, it becomes less of a task and more of a ritual you look forward to.

Journaling has been my companion through the seasons of life—helping me reflect, navigate challenges, and celebrate the moments that matter. Whether you’re drawn to pen and paper or prefer a digital system, what matters most is finding a practice that feels true to you. 

Start small, experiment, and let your journaling evolve with you. It doesn’t need to be perfect or pretty—just something that helps you stay connected to yourself and your values.

You can find more of Lauren’s ideas, thinking, and work on her Substack newsletter.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

On October 3-4, 2024, we hosted our very first in-person Second Brain Summit in Los Angeles, and honestly, it was a dream come true. 

This event felt like a “bucket list” moment in every way. I’d count it among my top five life milestones, right up there with getting married, witnessing my children’s births, and signing my first book deal.

Looking back, I’m still in awe of the warmth, love, and generosity everyone displayed—from attendees to volunteers to our lineup of speakers.

One of my biggest takeaways from the Summit was personal: I learned the incredible growth that comes from letting go. 

For much of this project, I had to place my trust in others to handle details big and small. For someone who’s used to doing everything himself (or at least attempting to), this was transformative. For the first time, I felt fully carried by a team of talented individuals working right alongside me, taking collective ownership of a vision we all believed in.

A special shoutout goes to Simply Storied, our event organizer. They made it all possible, guiding us through each stage with finesse and care. And of course, none of this would have happened without the energy and dedication of our team and volunteers.

Now that I’ve had a month to process everything that happened, I’m ready to share my reflections with you, including some painful realizations and lessons learned.

Who joined the Second Brain Summit 

We welcomed 212 total attendees from 16 countries! Only 57% came from the U.S., with some traveling from faraway places such as Bali, Taiwan, and Australia to join us. 

59% were male and 41% female. A third of attendees identified as business owners and entrepreneurs, followed by employees and freelancers. 

I loved to see such a wide distribution of different ages at the Summit, as I think it’s super important for different generations to learn from each other:

Only 44% of attendees had ever purchased one of our courses or cohorts. So for many, it was the first time joining one of our experiences. 

I can confidently say that everyone who attended was a 10/10 in interest and passion. Each person followed such a unique and personal path to get there that we can’t identify a “typical” attendee profile. 

The highlights: What attendees loved the most  

Our highlights video will express this better than words ever could:

I was honestly taken aback by the positive things people said about the experience, starting about two hours in. They spoke about it being “life-changing” and “healing”; as the best conference they’d ever been to. 

My favorite quotes I overheard:

• “You created the world you wanted to live in.” (from my dad)
• “This is a conference for high-functioning autistic people.” (this one made me laugh)
• “I finally found my people.” 
• “This was a spiritual experience.” (from a speaker)

Here are the things attendees said they loved most: 

• The incredible lineup of 39 speakers, their diversity along multiple dimensions, and how most stuck around and participated for the full two days of the conference. 
• High-quality, warm and friendly, and interesting fellow attendees, whom many people noted were unlike any group they’d encountered elsewhere.
• The positive energy of the event, noting that people were genuinely excited to be there. 
• The opportunity to meet people in real life whom they had known online for a while and to have informal yet deep conversations in person.  
• The size of the event (~200 people) was ideal for connecting with others and getting to know them beyond superficial “networking.”
• The seamless, frictionless, classy event design and management (kudos to Simply Storied team)
• The sponsors added a lot of value by offering relevant products and education about how to use them. 
• The “Digital Swag Bag” full of courses, memberships, and tools, allowing attendees to go deeper into what they learned. 

Here’s how attendees reported feeling at the end of the summit (“inspiring connection” jumps out as perhaps the overarching theme of the entire summit):

By the end of the event, 98% of attendees said the Summit met or exceeded their expectations. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) hit 80, a rare and impressive outcome that shows how likely they are to recommend it to others.

This shows how hungry people are for such communal experiences in our digital-centric world and that there’s huge potential in this area.

The financial snapshot

In the interest of transparency, I’d like to share what it took financially to bring this event to life.

Ticket sales brought in $120,604, and sponsorships contributed an additional $60,000, for a total of $180,604 in revenue. However, our total expenses came to $349,771, resulting in a net loss of $169,166. This essentially meant we subsidized each attendee by about $798 on top of the ticket price, which ranged from $999 (early-bird) to $1,200.

The primary challenge? We only sold about half as many tickets as I had originally envisioned, leaving us with the cost profile of a much larger event than we actually hosted. Although we made adjustments along the way, I was so committed to delivering a high-quality experience that I chose to eat the additional cost rather than cut essential aspects of the event.

Moving forward, it’s clear we’ll need a more sustainable financial model to make future Summits viable.

What we’d do differently next time

After reviewing the attendee feedback and our own reflections as a team, here are the things we’d change if we were to host the Second Brain Summit again:

• Increase the focus on the B2B and professional aspects of our niche, making it easier for people and their employers to justify the cost and time to attend.
• Prioritize interactive workshops and hands-on practical sessions, which can only be delivered live and in person. 
• Cut non-essentials such as games, a reserved hotel block, and catered food. A smaller venue would also reduce costs for AV, rented furniture, on-site event staff, security, signage, etc.
• Pick a location different from downtown LA, as the surrounding neighborhood was pretty sketchy. 
• Cap the attendance at an even lower number, so we are guaranteed to sell out and can spend more time on the event design rather than marketing/sales. 
• Schedule fewer sessions concurrently. We had as many as 6 sessions happening at the same time, which was too many for people to choose from and created FOMO. 
• Start conversations with sponsors earlier (9-12 months before the event, when budgets are being committed), seeking deeper, more strategic partnerships that would allow for higher sponsor revenue. 
• Offer a recorded or live-streamed version of the Summit sessions, as so much value was on offer it would have been nice to capture it.
• Add a third day with an unstructured agenda, allowing for informal meals, walking around town, and follow-up meetups to process all the new information and deepen new relationships. 
• Sell a “high-ticket program” on the backend of the summit, such as a group coaching program or mastermind, to support the financial side. 

With these changes, I believe we could make future Summits a financially viable and deeply impactful addition to the Second Brain community. I know of no better way to build true community and connection in our increasingly fragmented, distracted, isolated modern world.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who joined, participated, and made this Summit possible. It’s an experience I’ll never forget, and I owe a huge “thank you” to every single one of you who helped make it real.

A personal note

There was something about this summit that moved me at a very deep level. I felt myself changing, transforming into someone new. 

Diving into the emotions and insights afterward with my coach, I realized that gathering together all these wonderful people in a warm, welcoming environment had touched a nerve inside me: a longstanding feeling I’ve had that I didn’t belong anywhere.

I traced that feeling back to my school years when I attended 5 different schools in 5 years from 5th grade to 9th grade, which made me highly resilient and adaptable but also made me feel isolated and alone like I didn’t have real friends. I traced it further back, to being the child of immigrant parents from two separate countries, a true third culture kid.

That narrative – that I didn’t belong in any group and no one could understand me – simply couldn’t withstand the outpouring of acceptance and love of 200 people, all united together in one common purpose. It was just so obvious that everyone there had felt alone or misunderstood, but that we could, in the words of my father, “Create the world we wanted to live in” anyway.

Many people have asked me whether we plan on hosting another summit in the future. I honestly can’t say, but what I do know is that in the coming years community is going to be one of the last and most meaningful differentiators in a world transformed by AI. It’s one of the only things that can’t be generated algorithmically, no matter what “social” media tells you.

I honestly don’t know how the financial side makes sense, but I do know two things: that every time I’ve doubled down on community it’s always worked out; and that every time I’ve doubled down on what has aliveness and energy it’s worked out, even if I couldn’t envision how in the beginning.

So in one way or another, I’m going to keep seeking ways to build true, meaningful community, to bring people together whether virtually or in person, and to help forge relationships that transcend any particular app, trend, or niche, so that everyone in my community has the chance to feel that sense of shared purpose and belonging that has been so transformative for me.

The best snapshots from the Second Brain Summit

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17 years ago, at the age of 22, I uploaded my first YouTube video.

My high school friend Derick and I had set up a digital camcorder, faced the camera with our backs to his bedroom wall, hit record, and just started talking about 3D printing, which was to be the first episode in a recurring show about emerging future trends. 

Needless to say, our show never had an episode two, but something was sparked in me that day. I saw that I could share a message with the entire world from my bedroom, without permission from anyone. All I needed was a message worth sharing. It would take me 14 years to find one.

I distinctly remember feeling back then, in 2007, that I was too late. I thought I had already missed the golden era of online video. Little did I know, those were prehistoric times, revealing only the faintest glimmer of what the YouTube empire would eventually become.

This piece is a comprehensive retrospective of my 17 years of experience on YouTube, including my path to 275,000 subscribers and 12 million views. It is a deep dive into the different “eras” I’ve moved through, the team and production process I’ve built, and the detailed finances throughout. 

I’ll summarize for you what I’ve learned so far, analyze my successes and failures alike, and distill practical insights that you can use in your own YouTube efforts. Whether you aspire to create YouTube videos in the future, or are already doing so now, my hope is that these lessons will shorten your learning curve and save you from making the same mistakes I made. 

Even after all these years and some notable successes, we still haven’t figured out a business model for YouTube that is sustainable for the long term, so this piece will also serve as a springboard for the next era of our channel.

The 4 Eras of My YouTube Journey

I’ve gone through four distinct “eras” in my time on YouTube, each one with a central theme:

• The Experiment Era (2007-2012): Performing random experiments and trying things out
• The Portfolio Era (2013-2020): Using YouTube as a professional portfolio
• The Startup Era (2021-2023): Starting to take YouTube seriously
• The Factory Era (2023–2024): Building a full production process

Each era lasted between 1 and 7 years, and they seem to be getting shorter over time as we iterate more quickly. These years encompass my entire adulthood, and reflect the stages of my growth both professionally, creatively, and as a human being.

Let’s dive into each era one at a time.

The Experiment Era (2007-2012)

The first era I think of as a series of crackpot experiments, dating from that first grainy video uploaded from my friend’s bedroom to the start of my professional career.

In that time I uploaded anything and everything I could think of, from photo slideshows showcasing my volunteering work in Rio de Janeiro, to profiles of microentrepreneurs in support of my microfinance work in Colombia, to short clips of my adventures across South America, to highlight reels from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine.

I had no particular goal, vision, or mission for what I wanted to do on YouTube. I thought of it as a social media site, like Myspace or Facebook – a place for me to share updates about my life and travels and to document my experiences for future record.

And yet some of the most basic lessons I learned during this period were essential, forming a foundation for everything that would come later: how to point a camera, frame an interesting shot, make sure the audio was working, and import it all to a computer to make simple edits and add appropriate music.

In this first experimental era I made 19 videos, which drew 7,411 views and 20.8 hours of watch time from a grand total of 3 subscribers, one of whom was my mom!

The Portfolio Era (2013-2020)

In early 2012 I returned from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine, excited to finally begin my professional career in the big city. 

After working in consulting for a couple years, I struck out on my own as a freelancer in June 2013. To mark the occasion, I uploaded my first “professional” video, a 102-minute long recording of a workshop I had delivered at a coworking space in downtown San Francisco. 

That video frankly left a lot to be desired. The video and audio quality were quite poor, there was no lead-in or introduction, no titles or animations, and no link to the slides. I had not yet heard of concepts like virality or retention. 

And yet, this early video already contained within it some promising signs of YouTube’s potential. It demonstrated that I could expand the reach of my ideas via digital video. It showed me that there was a place for educational content amidst the deluge of endless clickbait. And by including a link in the description to my first product, an online course teaching the Getting Things Done methodology in more detail, it proved that I could find customers by sharing content freely on the web.

All these seemed like earthshaking realizations at the time. With a single video, I could already see the outlines of a holistic online education business, from testing and validating ideas, to gathering feedback, to building community, to finding customers, to serving them with valuable products.

Despite all the limitations and flaws in what I had created, the essential quality of the material I was teaching managed to shine through, and it soon gathered thousands of views, which at the time felt like a big deal.

I forged ahead, uploading the first lesson of my course as a preview, and then a short promotional trailer filmed by a friend in an afternoon. I later leveled up the production values, hiring a videographer to film a Design Thinking workshop I was beginning to offer companies.

As sales of my first course dwindled over time, and a subsequent one I launched fizzled, I decided to set aside online courses to focus on where I knew I could make money: talks and workshops for companies. My YouTube channel accompanied me on this pivot, becoming essentially my “speaker’s reel.”

I spoke on emerging trends such as the Quantified Self movement, new theories of innovation, and shared my personal experiments in using network science to analyze my habits. My attitude was that I would speak for free if needed, as long as I could come away with a recording I could add to my YouTube channel – a tangible, publicly visible “proof of work” that I could point to for future gigs.

After a couple years, I was fed up with corporate work and wanted to return to where I began – teaching people directly online. I had started a blog in 2014 and found that writing was a crucial medium to fully work through the details and implications of my ideas. After writing dozens of in-depth essays, I decided to take my most successful piece, on how I used Evernote as a “second brain,” and turn it into a full-fledged course.

YouTube again played a crucial role in this new chapter. I published testimonial videos from my earliest cohort students, recordings of Q&As, interviews with experts, quick demos and case studies of PKM tools and techniques, recordings of talks on the subject I delivered, and a promotional trailer for my course, which I called Building a Second Brain. I also continued experimenting with personal interests and developing my videography skills during this period, such as with the documentary I created on my father’s life and artistic career once I realized that smartphone cameras were up to the task.

Five years after I wrote my first essay on the subject of Personal Knowledge Management, and two years into teaching the Building a Second Brain course as my sole focus, I uploaded a video that encapsulated for the first time my Second Brain methodology. In many ways, it was the culmination of the first six years of my career, incorporating ideas and insights from a dozen subjects I had researched, taught, and coached on in search of my niche.

It was my first “viral” video, reaching hundreds of thousands of views and serving as the default place to send people for an introduction to me and my work.

I had just begun exploring the possibility of publishing a book in early 2019 when this video came out, and it became the first true test of my holistic methodology. Nothing about the video is optimized or particularly strategic. It’s just a bunch of slides with voiceover, a decidedly low-tech style that didn’t even require a camera – just a computer and a mic. 

And yet, it’s difficult to overstate the impact this single video had on my career. It served as an incredibly effective delivery vehicle for introducing a complex topic to a wide variety of new people, including my future book agent and publisher, who in turn would help me spread my message to even more audiences far from my home base.

During this second YouTube era, which lasted seven years, I released 113 videos drawing 885,000 views, 101,000 hours of watch time, and gaining 20,454 subscribers. This small but promising start laid the foundation for the next era, when I would begin to invest in YouTube seriously and make it the focus of my content creation.

The Startup Era (2021-2023)

In July of 2021 I realized that we had only one year left until the release of my book, and I wanted to invest the book advances I’d received from various countries to make the biggest splash possible. This was also a few months after our largest-ever cohort (fueled by the pandemic), meaning I had substantial resources on hand to do so.

After looking at a variety of avenues, I decided making YouTube our primary focus was the most promising path we could take, for several reasons that remain just as or even more valid today:

• YouTube is the world’s most widely used and most influential platform for educational content, reaching millions of people with a highly accessible form of media that anyone can consume and benefit from.
• The algorithmic reach of YouTube is a powerful mechanism for continuously reaching new audiences beyond our original niche.
• Video production is expensive and time-consuming, but my business was finally at a place where we could afford to make those investments.
• Videos can be produced as a collaboration between a team, rather than relying solely on my personal time and energy as with writing.

By this point, I’d been experimenting on my own and uploading all kinds of videos for years, and knew I needed a different approach if I was going to change the trajectory of the channel and make it a long-term driver of book and course sales.

I’d reached 20,000 subscribers through my own personal efforts, but it had taken many years to do so, and I knew I now had less time and energy to dedicate to video creation with a toddler running around the house and a second baby on the way in a few months. I needed to find a way to massively level up both the quantity and quality of our videos, while also delegating most of the necessary work to my team so it didn’t fall on my shoulders.

I started at the most fundamental level of the videos I wanted to create – with a dedicated place where they could be made. My wife and I decided to extensively remodel our two-car garage, including new tile, an attractive brick facade along one wall, new electrical wiring and lighting, high-end cabinets along another wall, and stylishly modern furniture and interior design throughout, tastefully chosen by my wife Lauren according to a “Mexico City cafe” aesthetic.

Between the $50,000 remodel, $30,000 in cameras and other equipment, and $20,000 in consultants, we would eventually spend about $100,000 making the ultimate home studio, as I’ll detail further below. You can see a video recapping the project here. 

The next step was to hire someone to lead our YouTube efforts, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain hands-on all the time. After a wide-ranging search, I hired Marc Koenig as our first Creative Director to lead our overall YouTube strategy as well as provide creative direction for our videos from beginning to end.

It took more than 4 months from when Marc joined to the release of our first video in January 2022. This included everything from buying cameras and microphones and lighting, to brainstorming the kinds of videos we wanted to create, to establishing the initial team and the workflow they would use, to experimenting with test shots in the studio. 

We bought specialized furniture, cameras, microphones, lighting, rigging, computers, editing software, hard drives, and various other tools. We recruited a video editor, a production assistant, and several thumbnail designers. Marc flew out from Wisconsin a number of times to help set up our gear, brainstorm ideas, and iterate on everything from the framing of shots to how we would write scripts to my live performance on camera. We mapped out the first year of videos we wanted to create, scheduled a trip to the East coast and Europe to record a series of interviews with leading experts in our field, and built the beginnings of a production workflow to coordinate everyone who would be contributing.

We also hired a studio design consultant, Kevin Shen, who spent a couple weeks helping us improve our production setup and teaching me the basics of how images, sound, and light interact to produce a holistic effect for the viewer. I gave Kevin the mandate to help us make a “classroom that can teach the entire world,” encompassing not only filming videos but also teaching cohorts on Zoom, working and writing day to day, joining meetings with the remote team, recording interviews with guests, and more. It was a small 320-square-foot space that needed to elegantly straddle the physical and digital worlds while projecting a compelling message to the world.

All this was an incredible amount of work, and took much longer than I expected. There were so many twists and turns, for example:

• We had to buy a commercial-grade AC unit to make sure we weren’t sweating on camera, and to minimize the risk of cameras overheating.
• We needed a backup battery to keep everything online even during a power outage, and a second Internet connection in case the primary one went down.
• We found we needed full blackout curtains across every window to be able to keep the lighting constant, and a door with an access code so various people could come in and out at all hours of the day.
• Lights had to be mounted on walls or ceilings and folded away so we could use the space as an office whenever we weren’t filming.

We faced a constant tradeoff between aesthetics and functionality – we didn’t want an ugly space that we wouldn’t want to spend time in, nor a beautiful one that didn’t support our needs. This creative constraint led to a number of innovative solutions, such as using sound blankets that could be put away instead of wall-mounted pads.

Here’s the “before and after” comparison:

We kicked off this new era with an interview with Thomas Frank in January 2022, instantly 10xing our production values from one video to the next, wowing our viewers, and setting the stage for an epic run in the months to come. The video skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands of views and, more importantly, we now had a team and a process that would allow us to produce such videos regularly.

I was totally occupied with the launch and promotion of my book throughout 2022 and 2023, which meant that Marc led virtually all aspects of our video production, from generating ideas and choosing the most promising ones, to outlining and scripting, to coordinating and managing the editors and post-production workflow, to configuring the look and feel of the channel. This was by far the most control I had ever delegated to anyone, and forced me to give up my perfectionism and trust the process we were developing and iterating on, even when a given video fell flat. 

In August 2022, a full year after making YouTube my primary focus and beginning to feel secure in my new identity as a YouTuber, I wrote a blog post on Why I’m Becoming a YouTuber. It laid out my vision for how and why we would become a YouTube-centric company, after a first decade dedicated mostly to text-based content.

Despite all the talented people I had the privilege of working with during this period, I still had an extremely steep learning curve to climb. It felt so much riskier and more vulnerable to open up my creative process to so many other people, compared to the solitude and privacy of writing. My brain had to think about so many more factors than I was used to – technical problems, creative problems, communication problems, and logistical problems all interacting with each other, across multiple timescales and distributed geographically around the world. 

My most important lessons fell into three categories:

1. On-set production

Initially I thought I could create a “push-button” studio, where everything was already set up and automated and all I had to do was sit down in my chair and hit record. This quickly turned out to be a fanciful dream, for a number of reasons.

Conditions change from one day and even one hour to the next: the sun moves, the temperature fluctuates, sources of noise come and go. Every video also has different requirements, from where I’m sitting or standing to what I’m wearing to which devices I’m using.

Despite having the support of an on-set producer, I still needed to learn how light worked, including how the shutter speed, aperture size, and ISO settings influenced each other and how to adjust them dynamically based on what I was trying to accomplish in a given segment. I had to learn how sound worked, such as how far away the mic should be from my mouth, how to adjust the gain so it’s not too high or too low, and what effect my decisions would have down the line when the editors loaded up the files I’d created. 

Likewise, I needed to learn to always work from a checklist (such as the one below, about how to ensure our cameras wouldn’t overheat) rather than relying on memory, because one wrong setting could make hours of footage unusable. Checklists also ensured any given job could easily be handed off to someone else, so no one person became the bottleneck.

2. On-camera performance

I’d spent years creating content for the Internet at this point, but it had been primarily in the form of writing, either on Twitter or my blog. I thus had a rude awakening when I realized that communicating a message on camera required a radically different level of energy.

It wasn’t just that I needed to be more lively and animated for video. It went far beyond that. There is so much more being communicated in video form: my body language and hand gestures and posture; my emotions and vulnerability; my facial expressions and eye movements; my tone of voice, diction, pacing, and volume. Even the words I used and the structure of sentences had to change, from long-winded and technically precise to punchy and emotionally resonant. All this while reading from a teleprompter, and trying to “act natural.”

I still have a lot to learn on this front to be honest, as it isn’t natural for me to be effusively charismatic on command. I’d also like to move away from word-for-word scripts and incorporate more spontaneity and improvisation into my delivery, as that seems to result in more engaging, natural performances.

3. YouTube strategy

One of the most pervasive and damaging misconceptions I held about YouTube, and one that many creators seem to share, is that “All you have to do is create great videos and the audience will come.”

As much as I would love that to be true, this attitude fails to capture a crucial aspect of the platform: that the algorithm is everything. I’ve never paid much attention to algorithms, never optimized my content for SEO, and never tried to pursue “trending topics,” so this pains me to admit, but it’s plainly true.

When you see two of your videos – both of which you’ve invested similar amounts of time and attention into and which you believe offer important and valuable ideas – but one gets picked up by the algorithm and receives hundreds of thousands of views while the other merely thousands, it really forces you to stop and reconsider. YouTube makes it so excruciatingly clear which videos are succeeding and which are not, with so much precise data about every possible metric of success, it forces you to reckon very directly with the “why” behind each video.

If I was creating videos as an art form, or for the pure pleasure of it, it wouldn’t matter whether they were boosted by an algorithm. But the entire point of growing our YouTube channel is to expand the reach of my message, so it absolutely does matter how many people see it. If I believe a video’s message is important, and that by “packaging” it in a certain way I can have 100x the reach and thus 100x the impact, why would I not do everything in my power to make sure it gets seen by as many people as possible? Any other attitude, I believe, is a matter of stubborn pride.

This realization has led me to seriously study the “strategy” of YouTube – that is, the often secret or subtle tactics, techniques, and creative decisions that the algorithm looks for when deciding which videos to send to the stratosphere. For example, how to design a title and thumbnail that attracts a click, how to write an introduction and hook that keeps them watching past the first few seconds, and how to structure a video to maximize retention across different segments. 

Despite countless lessons learned, I have to admit that this is still the area where we need to grow the most. I still don’t really see myself as a YouTuber, am not immersed in the nitty gritty details of the platform every day, and as a result, it’s been a challenge to acquire the rapidly evolving “insider knowledge” that the most successful YouTubers seem to thrive on.

Marc decided to move on from Forte Labs in July 2023, capping off an incredible run of 31 videos that were watched over 5.7 million times, or over 183,000 views on average per video (compared to 7,800 views per video on average during my previous DIY era, a 23x improvement). Astonishingly, our channel attracted 392,000 hours of watch time during this period, or more than half a human lifespan. We added 161,000 subscribers in two years, or 6,700 per month (versus 243 per month on average during the previous era, a 27x acceleration). 

My hypothesis – that by making large investments of time and money we could rapidly level up every metric on our channel – was strongly vindicated.

(Marc now runs his own solo YouTube agency working directly with business owners, authors, and creators to launch their channels using many of the techniques and workflows he developed at Forte Labs – if you’d like to partner with him on your YouTube strategy, go here!)

The Factory Era (2023–2024)

In the summer of 2023 I was faced with a huge challenge: continuing to make high-quality YouTube videos without the creative lead who had driven the whole process forward up until that point.

And even though our creative director left the company on good terms and with a clear handoff, it was at this moment I realized the downside of having a point person who I’d completely delegated creative direction and project management to: key man risk, in which the departure of one person endangers a whole line of business. I realized it was time to create a more structured, predictable, and transparent process for our video creation.

We started by restructuring the team, putting our head of marketing and content Julia Saxena in charge of all YouTube efforts and bringing our two video editors and other contractors into direct contact with the rest of the core team (they had operated independently and outside our normal communication channels up until then). 

I was surprised to find this required a lengthy acculturation process, as they didn’t have a lot of context around the ways we worked, our values and priorities, and what was going on in the rest of the business. That isolation had allowed them to work in a focused, distraction-free way, but I could see they now needed to come into alignment and synchronize their efforts with ours.

We instituted a weekly all-hands meeting every Tuesday morning to talk through all things YouTube: which videos were coming up, the progress of already filmed videos, metrics and feedback on videos we’d recently released, and sharing lessons about titles, thumbnails, editing, and many other aspects of the craft. This ensured that ideas and insights were flowing between the three main parts of the company: marketing/content, operations/product, and YouTube.

Here’s what the team looked like once we integrated YouTube as a core function of the company:

During the prior two years of our “startup” era, the video team had worked in a relatively unstructured way, treating each video as a bespoke project being created more or less from scratch. This resulted in extremely successful videos from a creative and metrics standpoint, but also meant I had little visibility into our production process, such as which videos were planned or underway, which stage of post-production they were at, and most of all, when I could expect the next video to be released, with timelines ranging from two weeks to two months. This meant it was difficult to coordinate promotion across our newsletter and social media to give it the best possible chance of succeeding.

I’ve noticed this principle repeatedly: the factors that make one era successful become the weaknesses and blindspots of the following one. Conversely, the weaknesses of one era become the greatest opportunities and areas of growth for the following one. Like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other, we decided to pivot away from bespoke videos guided by a singular vision toward collaborative videos guided by a predictable process. 

This meant primarily focusing on two things during the subsequent 12 months of the Factory Era: adding predictability and visibility to our process.

To enhance predictability, we decided to stick unwaveringly to a two-week video release schedule going forward – every Thursday morning, 9 am ET. This unlocked several benefits:

• It provided a predictable cadence to synchronize all the moving pieces and contributors at various stages of a video’s lifecycle.
• It gave us a lot of lead time before each video’s release, allowing us to promote them across all our channels and with extra collateral like lead magnets or bonus resources.
• It forced us to lower our standards and ship a video to meet the next deadline, instead of spending an indeterminate period of time polishing it to perfection.
• It made it easier to compare metrics between videos and across time, as well as more accurately calculate the ROI of each video.
• Our publishing schedule was mapped out far in advance, allowing us to schedule around vacations, PTO, holidays and other events, and seasons of the year.

Once each video’s release date was fixed on the calendar, everything else needed to hit that deadline also became predictable. To hit publish on Thursday, we knew when we needed to have an initial A-cut, and then a B-cut, and then a title and thumbnail, and then a final review. This told us when we were behind schedule long before it became a crisis, and allowed us to tweak and tune our schedule to align with weekends and staff availability.

To gain visibility into our pipeline, we worked to thoroughly document every aspect of our production process in ClickUp. Having a “single source of truth” that everyone could see also unlocked a number of benefits:

• We now had dedicated documents for ongoing ideation around titles, thumbnails, video concepts, formats, insights, feedback, and analysis of our metrics, so we always knew where to look for these things.
• People could be assigned to specific videos and specific stages, and receive an email notification the minute a new milestone was reached and a video handed off to them.
• All comments, feedback, and decisions were centralized in comments that anyone could see, ensuring that key information wasn’t siloed away in 1-to-1 communication channels.
• Clickup allowed us to work in a highly iterative, collaborative, and asynchronous way among many people both internal and external, while minimizing meetings.

Looking back over the last year, we’ve seen substantial improvement across a variety of metrics. Comparing only videos released during the Startup versus Factory eras:

• Our subscriber growth rate grew from 6,737/mo to 7,428/mo, a 10% improvement
• Views per month grew from 80,110/mo to 107,923/mo, a 35% improvement (although the average number of views per video 30 days after publication went down, from 62,020 to 51,803)
• Our click-through rate (a measure of what percentage of people click on our thumbnails) grew slightly from 4.2% to 4.5%
• Average View Duration has remained basically unchanged, from 3:50 to 3:52 minutes
• We reduced the number of days needed to produce each video from 28 to 13 days on average, doubling our publishing cadence

And of course, all cumulative metrics have improved as the “back catalog” of our channel grows and compounds over time:

• Watch time grew from 16,355 hours per month to 28,052 hours per month across all videos, a 72% improvement
• AdSense revenue went from $1,326/mo to $2,067/mo, a 56% increase

We’ve found significant savings on the cost side as well:

• Total YouTube costs declined from $14,406/mo to $11,493/mo, a 20% decrease
• Cost per Subscriber (how much we spend to acquire each new subscriber) decreased from $7.63 to $4.71, a 38% drop
• Cost per View (how much we spend per view) decreased from $0.11 to $0.05, a 55% drop
• We cut the average cost per video by more than half, from $11,146 to $5,094

My takeaways from these results are two-fold:

1. The steady cadence of a new video released every two weeks, produced using a highly predictable and transparent workflow, is a powerful forcing function for consistency and keeping our rate of learning high
2. However, seeing as how the most important metrics (click-through rate, average duration viewed, and views per video at 30 days) are all unchanged or with only very slight improvements, this suggests that we’re not improving the essential quality of our videos, as defined by YouTube

In other words, while we successfully made the transition from “startup mode” to “factory mode” in terms of our internal production process, we’re only treading water when it comes to the value we provide our viewers. And since everything on YouTube is designed for rapid growth, merely maintaining our performance is at best a mediocre outcome.

The Underlying Business

Since I began investing heavily in YouTube over the last few years, the question of return-on-investment has become paramount. No matter how successful our channel is, it can’t be justified or sustained unless it contributes to the bottom line of the business.

Starting with the top of our funnel, it’s very clear that YouTube audience growth is in a category all its own, far outpacing all other active platforms including our two primary ones, X and the newsletter:

The overall Forte Labs audience across all platforms has grown from 13,600 in March 2020 to 578,000 in June 2024, a 42x increase. 264,215 of those followers came from YouTube, or 47%, meaning that YouTube alone has accounted for almost half our audience growth since 2020.

In terms of financial results, the channel has made $517,955 in revenue over the last four years, across the following 6 monetization sources (the two tiny slices are book sales made directly through YT Shopping, and YT Premium payments; course referrals are inferred by asking customers where they heard about us):

In terms of costs, we’ve spent $483,651, including $345,734 during the Startup Era to get the new system up and running:

Plus $$11,493 in monthly recurring expenses on average during the subsequent Factory Era, or $137,917 over 12 months:

In other words, over the last 3 years in which we’ve invested seriously into YouTube, we’ve spent $483,651 and made $517,955, for a profit of $34,304.

These numbers represent a paradox for me: on the one hand, they are probably in the top 0.01% of all YouTubers. To make a profit from content creation at all is a rare thing. And yet, from a business perspective, it’s quite unimpressive. For the amount of time and effort we’ve all had to put in, $952 in profit per month is a meager sum.

I continue to do it anyway for a couple main reasons:

• These numbers can’t fully capture the value that YouTube provides to me personally, to our team creatively, and to the wider business in terms of audience growth, goodwill, and expanding the reach of our message
• YouTube is a long-term play, expanding our sphere of possibilities for the future in ways we can’t currently imagine and opening doors we don’t even know exist

I’ve repeatedly found that our YouTube following can be leveraged for other, seemingly unrelated pursuits. For example, when we started outreach for potential sponsors for our first in-person conference, the Second Brain Summit, being able to include a sponsored video in our proposals made them much more attractive. If I ever land a TV show, the track record and viewership of our YouTube channel will be a pivotal part of it.

That said, I continue to find my much more highly involved role in our video production challenging. My natural inclination is to obsess and pour myself into it, but I’m constrained from doing so both for lifestyle reasons and, more importantly, because I don’t want to create a system with myself as the central element. I don’t want to build a successful channel that I can never take a break or walk away from – that cost is too steep, so I’m trying to find another way, with the team at the center.

The Next Era (2024–?)

In August 2024, I moved with my family to Valle de Bravo, a small town outside Mexico City. Our desire is to embrace a slower pace of life, immerse our two kids in the Spanish language, and focus on writing my next book (I announced the move, fittingly, as part of a “life update” YouTube video).

That move also represented the end of one YouTube era and the beginning of a new one, because it means I no longer have easy access to our home studio in LA. I’ll need to find a way to continue planning and recording videos while in a remote location, while also respecting the limits of family time and my desire to focus mostly on writing.

But there’s another, much more important reason it’s time to embark on a new era, which has been very hard for me to accept: it’s time for us to fully embrace, immerse ourselves in, and master the intricate and subtle strategy of YouTube algorithm-driven growth. 

We focused on the internal-facing and operational aspects of our YouTube process over the last year, which yielded strong results on the backend. But from what I’ve learned recently at YouTube-centric events like VidCon, and from talking to and listening to the YouTubers I look up to, our next frontier will be about leveling up the viewer-centric aspects of our videos – the curiosity-provoking, retention-enhancing, and virality-creating aspects that determine whether our videos get watched by a few thousand people, or a few hundred thousand, or even millions.

It’s taken me a long time to internalize the importance of virality on YouTube, mostly because I never paid attention to it on any other platform. For years I tweeted daily, never thinking about what was trending or what people wanted to see. Same thing on the blog: I never looked at the analytics, only writing about what I thought was interesting and important based on my own curiosity.

But YouTube is an altogether different beast. The algorithm is all-powerful, determining which videos will be targeted at likely viewers and aggressively boosted, and which will languish in obscurity, like a temperamental god deciding which of his subjects will perish in obscurity and which will be exalted to the heavens. If the algorithm’s divine judgment resulted in a 10% or 20% difference in viewership it wouldn’t matter so much, but in reality it’s more like a 10-100x difference, or even more. Our least viewed videos only receive a few thousand views, whereas our most successful receive more than 500,000, despite the fact that we’re spending similar amounts of time, money, and effort on them.

The artist in me wants nothing more than to ignore the importance of algorithmic growth. It offends my creative sensibilities, as I hate catering to the crowd and maximizing hype. That attitude works fine when it comes to my writing, because I enjoy doing it for its own sake, because writing is more about evergreen ideas that stand the test of time, and because writing is essentially free to produce.

But videos are different on all three counts: I don’t really love doing them for their own sake, they don’t really stand the test of time, and are quite expensive to produce. It’s hard for me to ignore the distribution element when each video is costing me about $5,000. Each one needs to have a return, to make an impact, otherwise what’s the point of making them at all?

This leads me to conclude that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. Now that we’ve built a finely tuned machine for spitting out high-quality videos, it’s time to return to the more subjective, subtle, strategic aspects of video making. On YouTube, this specifically means:

• Idea generation, which I’ve learned needs to be a near-constant activity taking place behind the scenes, to ensure that only the top 1% most promising ideas get made.
• Improve and double down on our most successful “formats,” which has become a major trend on the platform recently, as channels become more like TV shows with a highly consistent, repeatable formula that people come to expect and make part of their routines.
• Bigger bets, as video performance tends to be non-linear, meaning a 10% or 20% greater investment of effort might yield a 10-20x greater result; the trick is to know which ideas and videos to put extraordinary investment into, such as by releasing a single video and then only doing follow-ups or a series if it performs well.
• Titles, thumbnails, intros, and hooks, which I’ve learned are an endlessly subtle and rapidly evolving domain whose importance is impossible to overstate.
• Making the filming process enjoyable for me, as that is key to making it sustainable and viewers can always tell whether you’re having fun (this likely means finding someone to record videos in person with me in Mexico, whom I can iterate and improvise with in real time, which I find far more fun).

There’s another constraint I’m facing that adds a challenging wrinkle to this new era: the business is shrinking. 

After peaking around $3 million in revenue in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic, and plateauing at around $2 million the last two years, in 2024 we’re likely to see a 30-40% decline, or about $1.2–1.4 million. We’re experiencing the post-pandemic slump faced by many creator businesses these days, the continued impact of discontinuing our flagship cohort-based course last year, and significant headwind from the rise of Artificial Intelligence both in terms of lower search traffic and a lot of the enthusiasm around PKM shifting to AI.

As a result, I’ve had to let go of several team members, effectively reducing the team to the smallest core group necessary to send out our newsletter, support our courses and membership, and produce YouTube videos, while also giving me the time and space to write books.

Open questions for the next era

These are the five questions I’m currently grappling with, the answers to which will define the next few years of our channel.

How can we optimize for public metrics while keeping personal enjoyment high?

This obviously isn’t a binary choice, and any long-term successful channel requires some of both. But I’m considering where on the spectrum we should lie, between extrinsic motivators like viewership, subscriber count, and revenue, and intrinsic motivators like curiosity, pleasure, and making videos I think are important even if they don’t perform well.

This also affects the kinds of ideas we produce. From a metrics standpoint, we should probably only make videos that are directly Second Brain-related, as that is what I am by far the most known for. But my interests and curiosity lead me in many directions, and I don’t think I can stomach churning out such videos endlessly.

What is my relationship and level of obsession toward YouTube?

Veteran YouTuber Samir recently said in a video, “To do YouTube right requires all of you…your constant obsessive attention.” I see this attitude reflected in all the biggest names on the platform. They live and breathe all things YouTube, and it defines who they spend their time with, how they spend their days, and even their personalities and beliefs.

But this is where my background comes into play: I didn’t start as a YouTuber, especially not the classic profile of an early 20-something obsessing over videos 24/7. I don’t even particularly like consuming content in video form. I’m nearly 40 years old, have two kids, and a wonderful business that already sustains me financially and artistically. I don’t feel the pressure to “make it” on YouTube as a jumping off point for the rest of my career, nor am I interested in any of the negative effects of that level of obsession on my lifestyle, my health, my family, or my other interests.

At the same time, I don’t want to “phone it in” and do subpar work. I’ve always believed that if something is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well. In this paradox I see an experiment: for me to learn what it looks like to produce extraordinary outcomes without my time and effort as the primary input. I know that I have the capability to accomplish anything if I put my mind to it, but what does it look like to reach the same, or even greater, levels of accomplishment by harnessing a team and systems instead?

I think that is the current frontier of my growth as a founder, a CEO, and a leader, which is why I’m purposely holding back from throwing my entire being into YouTube and learning to depend on the team instead.

What are the video formats that work best for us?

We’ve experimented with many different formats over the last few years, and these are the ones that seem to have worked best:

• Case studies of Second Brain setups/workflows: Showcases of real-life applications of a Second Brain and PKM tools
• Techniques: Notetaking and productivity techniques that the viewer can use right away
• App and tool walkthroughs/reviews/reactions: Which apps Tiago uses and how; help viewers decide which app is right for them and get started with their choice
• AI: How Tiago and our team use AI tools, what impact AI will have, the overall mindset to deal with this shift
• Expressing yourself/becoming a creator: About the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain, what different ways of expressing yourself look like, how to become a creator or realize the potential of your creativity

My question is to what extent and how we should continue doubling down on and evolving these proven formats, or branch out into new ones that have more potential in the future. 

How can we engage with our audience to incorporate their feedback into our work? How can we learn what our audience wants?

One thing I’ve noticed from spending time with successful YouTubers is how incredibly close to their audiences they are. They interact frequently through comments and the community feed, among other venues. They often consume the same content and are part of the same online circles. They have a lot of inside jokes and subculture knowledge in common. Most of all, the best YouTubers are extremely sensitive to the slightest desires and shifts in perception among their viewers.

While I don’t necessarily want to be subject to our subscribers’ every whim, I do think this is an area I am weak in because I didn’t “grow up” on YouTube. I don’t have that much interaction with my viewers, and have chosen to cultivate the hermit life of a writer instead. I think there’s significant room for improvement in how we expose ourselves as a team to our audience, but am not sure how to do that without changing how I spend my time, which I don’t want to do.

How can we better measure how YouTube is driving business results? 

The most challenging contradiction of the last year has been watching our channel grow to unprecedented new heights, and receiving so much praise for that success, while at the same time, watching the underlying business decline.

As exciting as it is to watch our “top of funnel” grow so much, it means nothing if it’s not measurably contributing to the underlying business that makes it all possible. If profit is the permission to keep going, we’re not currently gaining that permission from the marketplace. Something needs to shift.

This could mean improving conversion rates to our courses and other products, doubling down on sponsorships, or other avenues, but I would say we haven’t yet found the business model that works for us long term on YouTube.

Our new (old) vision

What is my grandest vision for what our YouTube channel could become?

This isn’t particularly measurable or objective, but my vision is simply to change the culture. Specifically, the culture around notetaking, reading, learning, productivity, and creativity. To make those subjects more accessible and less daunting. To open up many new entry points for different kinds of people to harness them, whether via technology or otherwise. Creating a profitable business is just a stepping stone to carry us toward that vision.

This vision remains unchanged from its first articulation on the blog two years ago: “To build an open-source Library of Alexandria for the PKM world.” I’ve learned so much about what it will actually take to achieve that vision, and I can now see it’s a much longer and harder road than I first naively envisioned. But I’m also more inspired and dedicated to it than ever.

YouTube is the world’s most important media platform, with more than 114 million active YouTube channels publishing 2,500 new videos every minute, all competing to reach 2.6 billion monthly active users in over 100 countries. I continue to believe we should have a horse in that race, and make our best attempt at shifting the perception and behavior around some of the most important facets of a 21st century undergoing rapid, daunting change.

As I write this, we’ve been living in a small town in Mexico for a week. In that time, two people have recognized me. In both cases, it wasn’t for my blog, or my books, or my newsletter, or my X posts. It was from my YouTube channel, where they said they had learned from me how to organize their information and make use of it.

These anecdotes are more meaningful to me than any quantifiable metric. They are signs that I’m escaping the confines of my niche, going beyond the narrow subculture of productivity bros, and having an impact on people who might never otherwise have access to such powerful ideas. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

I’ve long believed that our choices about which projects to take on are among the most important decisions we make, and now I have evidence to back it up.

In an article on the TED blog and a paper called The Methodology of Personal Projects Analysis, research professor Brian R. Little examines how the pursuit of “personal projects” powerfully affects the trajectory of our lives. 

Little pioneered the development of a field called Personal Projects Analysis, or PPA, to study how the pursuit of such projects is a fundamental component of human well-being.

“Personal projects” by his definition include not just formal ones you might focus on at work, but informal ones as well. Toddlers are pursuing a project as they learn to walk. Lovers are pursuing a project as they fall in love. All the way to the highest reaches of human achievement, like landing on the moon.

The key factors in making them “personal” are that they are personally meaningful and that they are freely chosen, not imposed from the outside. Little’s research has shown that such “intrinsically regulated” projects tend to be more successful and lead to greater well-being than “externally regulated” projects.

Little and his colleagues have studied the projects of thousands of people, and found that they tend to have 15 active projects on average at any given time, falling into 6 major categories:

1. Occupational/Work: “Make sure the department budget is done.”
2. Interpersonal: “Have dinner with the woman in the floppy hat.”
3. Maintenance: “Get more ink cartridges.”
4. Recreational: “Take a cruise holiday.”
5. Health/Body: “Lose fifteen pounds.’
6. Intrapersonal: “Try to deal with my sadness.”

They have found that a person’s collection of personal projects not only shapes their life but even who they are at their core.

This is a fundamentally different view of “personality”: We are not limited to a collection of traits fixed at birth, or shaped in childhood. We evolve over time through personally meaningful pursuits we decide to take on. This opens up the possibility that we can purposefully choose the ways we want to change, by choosing projects that give us new skills, perspectives, and ways of thinking.

In other words, by changing what you do, you can change who you are. Your actions speak louder than words, including the words others have applied to you in the form of labels like “introverted” or “extroverted,” “ambitious” or “lazy,” “focused” or “distractable.”

Little’s research found that we can even take on new traits to more effectively pursue our personal projects. We commit to delivering a talk, and as a result, start to take on the traits of a public speaker. We say yes to a new relationship, and begin to change into someone more vulnerable. He dubs these “free traits,” like free-floating personalities, we can grab ahold of and put on like a new outfit.

It turns out that there is more than “nature vs. nurture.” There is more to us than the genes we were born with, and the events that unfolded shortly after our birth. There is a third component – projects – and those projects are actively shaping who we are now and for many years into the future. 

Which is another way of saying, a single creative project can change the trajectory of your life. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

Creativity is often described as an elusive, even magical, phenomenon. In reality, it’s a skill – and there are many ways to prime your brain to be more creative. 

Surprisingly, one of them is procrastination. We generally think of procrastination as a bad habit, a mental hurdle we need to overcome. But research shows that delaying and postponing tasks can actually stimulate creative thinking — provided the conditions are just right. 

Let’s look at the techniques that can turn procrastination into one of your most creative habits.

An honest look at procrastination

Procrastination stems from our urge to flee the discomfort of an unwanted task. In the brain, this plays out as a war between our logical prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making — and our hasty, pleasure-seeking limbic system. When the limbic system wins, we rebel against the undesirable task and choose the temporary dopamine hit of procrastination instead. 

Some of us are better equipped than others to fend off the urge to procrastinate. The volume of the amygdala — part of the brain’s limbic system and responsible for processing our motivations, fears, senses, and emotions — influences our likelihood to procrastinate, and its size comes down to genetics. 

However, it is possible to escape an inherited tendency to procrastinate: studies show that cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation can change the size of the amygdala over time. But what if you didn’t need to eliminate procrastination, and you could harness its creative benefits instead? 

Procrastination and creativity: different sides of the same equation

To create anything meaningful, we need to allow our minds to wander freely. As multi-award-winning director Aaron Sorkin once quipped: “You call it procrastinating, I call it thinking.”

We may achieve our biggest creative breakthroughs when we throw off the mental constraints of a preordained task and follow our inner curiosity, but we can’t leave procrastination unchecked. If we do, the tasks we’re avoiding will still be waiting for us, accompanied by the guilt and the pressure of lost time.  For chronic procrastinators, it’s even worse: they have higher levels of stress and illness, and produce lower-quality work. 

Moderation is crucial. Researchers primed three groups of volunteers for different levels of procrastination and found that those who procrastinated moderately — delaying an assigned task for an average of 25% of their allotted time to complete it — generated higher-quality creative ideas. However, volunteers with high or low levels of procrastination (respectively, procrastinating for averages of 40% and 4% of their time) didn’t reap the same benefits. 

How do we hit this sweet spot? Through active procrastination, which means installing guardrails and optimizing the conditions for creativity.

How to stimulate creativity through active procrastination

Time-boxing, setting intentions, and choosing a procrastination activity can help you reap the full creative benefits of procrastination. Here’s how…

1. REFRAME HOW YOU THINK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION 

Shame is a common emotion when people procrastinate, but self-blame can sap your ability to be creative. Instead, build the habit of being compassionate to yourself when you procrastinate. The process of resetting how you think about procrastination takes time and effort, as you’re attempting to form new neural pathways — but by continually refocusing your thoughts on compassion, blame will cease to be the default emotion. 

When you feel the itch to abandon a task, observe the warring forces in your brain. You’re starting to procrastinate, and that’s OK because you’re about to maximize the benefits through active procrastination.  

2. ELIMINATE PASSIVE PROCRASTINATION BY REMOVING DISTRACTIONS

Distractions are common triggers for procrastination, as they give us an excuse to leap between multiple tasks without fully engaging in any of them. This is passive procrastination, and it’s the antithesis of procrastinating creatively. 

Rather than letting your mind play, you’re being controlled by inbound stimuli like emails and Slack notifications. The urge to respond to these cues can be hard to resist — and the rush of dopamine when we give in can trap us in a neverending reactivity loop.

To fend off passive procrastination, you need to make a conscious decision about what you’re consuming. Escape the reactivity loop by changing your response: instead of instantly consuming content presented to you by others, cut the loop by saving the content for later. For example, if it’s email that usually sends you into reactivity mode, a tool like SaneBox can help you remove distractions: you can snooze emails for later or consign them to the SaneBlackHole (a folder that you can train over time to collect your unwanted email). 

3. STRUCTURE YOUR PROCRASTINATION

If you have multiple projects, you can delay one by working on the other. Philosopher John Perry calls this structured procrastination, and it allows you to give in to the delicious feeling of avoiding your intended task while you make progress on something else. You might even find unexpected touchpoints: switching between different projects, aka “slow-motion multitasking,” is how some of the world’s greatest innovators sharpened their multidisciplinary ideas. 

4. CULTIVATE A PROCRASTINATION ACTIVITY

Building a habit when your mind starts to wander — like journaling, online puzzles, or an art project — can be an incredible way to get you “unstuck” from your current project by engaging different parts of your brain. Scientists speculate that switching to a second task forces you to clear your brain of information, allowing you to approach the first task from a fresh perspective when you return to it.

Whatever your chosen procrastination activity, time-boxing can ensure you keep within the limits of moderate procrastination. Give yourself 15 minutes, or even an hour, to explore wherever your restless brain is trying to take you. 

Time limits are especially important if your procrastination activity is browsing online, otherwise, you can slip back into the reactivity loop — see the next step for ways to interrupt the cycle.

5. CAPTURE IDEAS FOR LATER

If procrastination leads you to engrossing Reddit threads or you risk descending into a YouTube spiral, you need to be able to stop when your time is up. It’s easier to cut yourself off if you use a capture tool to add content to a read-later app (we recommend Reader by Readwise), so you can consume it at a different time. 

Later on, if you find the content useful but don’t quite know what to do with it (yet), you can use the PARA Method to add it into your knowledge management system, aka your Second brain (here’s how to choose a suitable app). This way, you can let your ideas simmer and mentally set aside your procrastination material for when you’re ready to return to it. In the meantime, you can go back to your original task with a newly playful and creative brain.

With these techniques, procrastination can transform from a time-wasting hindrance into a game-changing creative tool. Understand the neuroscience behind this common habit, reframe your mindset, and implement procrastination strategies — you’ll see your creativity flourish in unexpected ways.

This article is a guest post from our friends at SaneBox. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

Like so many others, I’ve spent the past year exploring and experimenting with emerging AI tools. 

Throughout that time, there has been one question I’ve been trying to answer: Will AI replace the need for Second Brains entirely?

A lot of people seem to think so, and I admittedly have a self-interested motivation: to decide whether I should continue advising people to build a Second Brain at all, or just tell them to rely on AI and save all that effort. 

After many dozens of hours of experimentation, my conclusion is that AI is not going to replace the need for a Second Brain anytime soon.

Here’s why: no matter how powerful AI becomes, the data we put into it has to come from somewhere, and the AI’s outputs have to go somewhere. A Second Brain (or whatever you want to call it) is still needed both as the repository of all those inputs and as a staging area for storing those outputs until they’re ready to be used.

What’s Changed – Organize and Distill

There is no doubt that AI is going to radically change what we think of today as the creative process.

Looking at my CODE framework representing the creative process, however, it is mostly the middle stages of Organizing and Distilling that AI is transforming.

Organizing (step #2) is the stage of the creative process that inherently adds the least value – it is only needed to prepare the ground for the subsequent stages. Thus it’s no surprise that it’s the first one to be automated by AI. 

No longer does it make sense to meticulously format your data in a perfectly organized database – instead you can just dump a morass of text into a prompt window, and AI is smart enough to understand what you intended. 

As an example, Notion has added AI to its software, allowing you to interact with and “talk to” your notes without having to spend a lot of time adding structure.

Distillation (step #3) is also a perfect fit for the rapid, emotionless decision-making of AI. Large Language Models excel at rapidly summarizing huge amounts of text at whatever level of detail you desire.

For example, in my video on using ChatGPT to summarize books, I showed how AI was able to save me dozens of hours of formerly manual work to end up with a concise, actionable book summary.

What Hasn’t Changed – Capture and Express

The first stage of the creative process – capturing information in the first place – has still hardly been touched on the other hand.

New apps like Rewind allow you to record everything that happens on your computer, but in my experience that just creates a lot of recordings to wade through.

Although some capture tasks like digitizing handwritten text have been automated, we still have to write down our thoughts and ideas in the first place!

The quality of an AI chatbot’s response is always dependent on the quality of the inputs you provide it. AI cannot (yet) go out into the world and collect its own data, so we have to do that ourselves by capturing notes, highlighting passages in books, taking pictures, and saving our favorite ideas.

The fourth and final stage of creativity, expression, also still requires a human to decide what to do with the outputs of ChatGPT and other AI tools. Someone has to put the finishing touches on the final product via their own voice, style, taste, or perspective.

My wife Lauren’s video about creating a children’s storybook using AI perfectly illustrates this point: although every major component of the final product was created by ChatGPT, it was Lauren’s direction, synthesis, and creative nudges that allowed all the parts to come together in a cohesive, meaningful whole.

AI Concentrates Human Creativity at the Initial and Final Stages

AI doesn’t make human creativity unnecessary – it concentrates our creativity at the beginning and end of the creative process.

For a concrete example, in my video on Google’s new AI platform NotebookLM, I demonstrate how I can import the entire history of my reading highlights, and then freely make associations and connections out of that vast collection of text totaling 594,379 words from 719 sources.

While that capability seems almost superhuman, notice what it still required of me: to do the reading in the first place and save the excerpts I found valuable (capturing), and then to take NotebookLM’s responses and turn them into my own creation (expressing). In other words, the first and last steps of creativity haven’t been touched.

I can effectively skip from the first step to the last step, barely touching the steps in between. But that means I still need to take the first and last steps, to give the AI a starting point and an endpoint.

The relevant question has become: what do we do now that the “cost” of intermediate steps like organizing and distilling has plummeted?

Tasks that formerly required expensive human effort can now be completed with cheap computer effort, in fractions of the time. What kinds of goals, outcomes, and creative projects have suddenly become far more feasible than they were just a couple years ago?

For an example of what it might look like to work with AI as a real-time creative partner in this way, check out my in-depth interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Srini Rao on the AI-powered noteaking app Mem (which by the way is the only notetaking app that OpenAI has invested in).

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