Project managers are in a unique position of having to digest, direct, store, and apply vast amounts of information from potentially overwhelming amounts of sources: things to be done or monitored, plans, things that must be remembered or learned, important lessons and advice, as well as their own thoughts, ideas and intuitions.
Many of us will have noticed that bottling these things in our brains is not ideal and will likely be forgotten, and as such, we all have Personal Information Management (PIM) systems in place to help us: anything from simple post-it notes and notebooks, to complex digital note-taking systems.
Despite our PIM systems being cornerstones of our professional lives that help us stay focused on what's important, do what needs to be done, and prevent us from being overwhelmed, they are very seldom spoken about: most of us are left to pull our own systems together from scratch with varying degrees of success.
The speaker would like to argue that in order to deal with the fallibility of our own human brains, and lead a more efficient, stress-free professional life, we should actively seek to streamline our PIM systems with the latest tools and techniques, and to look at how best to apply them to project management. The speaker also wants to argue the case for building up your PIM system - your "second brain".