This is our penultimate newsletter of 2023 🎉
And it's a special edition to celebrate the past 12 months: The team has curated our most popular blog posts, YouTube videos, and tweets from this year.
Thank YOU for being part of this journey. Everything we do is ultimately to serve you.
I'm truly proud of what we've achieved this year at Forte Labs...
- Launched a complete overhaul of our self-paced course BASB Foundation
- Experimented with AI and got cloned
- Ran the last 4 cohorts of Building a Second Brain, closing this era of our business
- Published my second book The PARA Method which also became a Wall Street Journal bestseller
- Grew our YouTube channel to 223k subscribers
- Launched our first brand-new course in 7 years: Pillars of Productivity
I'll share my full annual review in the beginning of the new year, which will go into more detail.
Now, without further ado...
Our 5 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2023
We published 34 articles and received 1.8 million visits on our blog this year. These 5 blog posts were read most often...
We've updated our introductory guide to BASB with some beautiful graphics that visualize our most popular concepts. Whenever someone asks you "What's Building a Second Brain?" this is the guide you can send them to get a complete introduction.
The PARA Method is my simple, intuitive system for organizing all information in your life. And the first step to using PARA is to apply it to your notetaking app of choice. This is much easier when you see examples of how it's done. So, we curated useful YouTube videos that show PARA setups in the most popular notes apps.
Since I've been using Evernote for 10 years, I decided to evaluate a few of the newer generation of Second Brain apps to see if any of the up-and-comers could take over as my platform of choice. I tried Obsidian, Tana, and Mem as my daily driver for about two weeks each. Applying my criteria for any knowledge management app I adopt, this is my evaluation as to whether they could qualify as my Second Brain platform.
Writing book summaries is one of the very best ways I’ve found to absorb an author’s ideas deeply into my own thinking, while also creating notes I can use as “knowledge building blocks” to reference and reuse far into the future. That said, summarizing books “manually” is incredibly time-consuming. In this article, I describe my attempts to use ChatGPT to create book summaries that fulfill my learning needs in a fraction of the time and effort otherwise required.
If you’ve decided to follow my advice and create your very own personal system of knowledge management – which I call a “Second Brain” – then your first step is to decide which app to build it on. In this blog post, I share the six personal criteria I've developed for choosing the right notetaking app for your needs.
Our 5 Most Popular YouTube Videos of 2023
Our channel received over 4.8M views this year and consumed 32 years of viewing time. Insane! These 5 videos contributed the most...
Most people over-complicate notetaking because they don't have a framework for where things should go. I want you to have a simple system you can follow every time you create a new note or save a new document. This is our introductory video to the PARA Method where I explain what Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives are and how I've personally implemented PARA in my notetaking app.
What's the best way to turn any book into a Second Brain of insights you can grab off the shelf anytime? Book-reading influencer Alex & Books walks us through his notetaking method for physical books (hardcover or paperback) that allowed him to build a following of over 700,000 book fans.
A Second Brain is not one piece of software – it's the entire ecosystem of apps and tools you use to handle information. That said, there is one kind of app that is the centerpiece of your Second Brain: a digital notes app. With an incredible explosion in this category of software in recent years, we now have too many options. Let me guide you through choosing the perfect notes app, taking into account your personal notetaking style.
Here's another example of what PARA looks like in practice. This time, in Apple's free, default notetaking app that's available on all Apple devices. You'll see how I've organized Apple Notes according to Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives, and how I decide in which category a new note goes.
I used to read 50 books a year but none of the wisdom was sticking or making a difference in my life. Then I made a rule to summarize every book in my own words so that the knowledge could really sink in. The only issue: Writing book summaries is time-consuming. But with ChatGPT, I've found a way to create personalized book summaries in a fraction of the time. In this video, I show you how, using the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson as an example.
Our 5 Most Popular Tweets of 2023
I'm always fascinated by which type of content receives the most engagement on social media. These 5 tweets did the best...
Happy Holidays to you and your family! May your season be packed with good times and your New Year be bursting with joy! 🌟
