Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

by Tiago Forte

We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own. So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

To be able to make use of information we value, we need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self. We need a way to cultivate a body of knowledge that is uniquely our own, so when the opportunity arises—whether changing jobs, giving a big presentation, launching a new product, or starting a business or a family—we will have access to the wisdom we need to make good decisions and take the most effective action. It all begins with the simple act of writing things down.

The Building a Second Brain system will teach you how to: Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds. Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently. Save your best thinking so you don’t have to do it again. Connect ideas and notice patterns across different areas of your life so you know how to live better. Adopt a reliable system that helps you share your work more confidently and with more ease. Turn work “off” and relax, knowing you have a trusted system keeping track of all the details. Spend less time looking for things, and more time doing the best, most creative work you are capable of.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

I began to see my as-yet-unnamed Second Brain not just as a notetaking tool but as a loyal confidant and thought partner. When I was forgetful, it always remembered. When I lost my way, it reminded me where we were going. When I felt stuck and at a loss for ideas, it suggested possibilities and pathways.

You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in a deeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is about optimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.I

As a society, all of us could benefit from the modern equivalent of a commonplace book. The media landscape of today is oriented toward what is novel and public—the latest political controversy, the new celebrity scandal, or the viral meme of the day. Resurrecting the commonplace book allows us to stem the tide, shifting our relationship with information toward the timeless and the private. Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. Not only could this lead to more civil discussions about the important topics of the day; it could also preserve our mental health and heal our splintered attention.

This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas.

As soon as you understand that we naturally use digital tools to extend our thinking beyond the bounds of our skulls, you’ll start to see Second Brains everywhere.

Phones to communicate, calendar to not miss an event, could storage for expansion of information, etc

Rethinking Notetaking: Notes as Knowledge Building Blocks

“Knowledge” can seem like a lofty concept reserved exclusively for scholars and academics, but at the most practical level, knowledge begins with the simple, time-honored practice of taking notes.

In the professional world: It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on. No one tells you when or how your notes will be used. The “test” can come at any time and in any form. You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place. You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them. This isn’t the same notetaking you learned in school.

For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.

The length and format don’t matter—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note.

A knowledge building block is discrete. It stands on its own and has intrinsic value, but knowledge building blocks can also be combined into something much greater—a report, an argument, a proposal, a story.

Untapped potential of synthesizing ideas and reference material into nw patterns and opportunities

So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we’re never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest.

As this way of working with information continues over days and weeks and months, the way your mind works begins to change. You start to see recurring patterns in your thinking: why you do things, what you really want, and what’s really important to you. Your Second Brain becomes like a mirror, teaching you about yourself and reflecting back to you the ideas worth keeping and acting on. Your mind starts to become intertwined with this system, leaning on it to remember more than you ever could on your own.

Ideal, is it realistic or possible?

As you begin to see all the knowledge you’ve gained in tangible form, it dawns on you that you already have everything you need to strike out toward the future you want. There’s no need to wait until you’re perfectly prepared. No need to consume more information or do more research. All that’s left is for you to take action on what you already know and already have, which is laid out before you in meticulous detail. Your brain is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, which means you have all the bandwidth you need to pursue any endeavor and make it successful. This sense of confidence in the quality of your thinking gives you the freedom to ask deeper questions and the courage to pursue bigger challenges. You can’t fail, because failure is just more information, to be captured and used as fuel for your journey. This is what it’s like to build and harness the power of a Second Brain.

It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember. —Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic

Think of your Second Brain as the world’s best personal assistant. It is perfectly reliable and totally consistent. It is always ready and waiting to capture any bit of information that might be of value to you. It follows directions, makes helpful suggestions, and reminds you of what’s important to you.

The Superpowers of a Second Brain There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

Second Brain Superpower #1: Make Our Ideas Concrete Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form. Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively.

Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are visual. They turn vague concepts into tangible entities that can be observed, rearranged, edited, and combined together. They may exist only in virtual form, but we can still see them with our eyes and move them around with our fingers.

Second Brain Superpower #2: Reveal New Associations Between Ideas In its most practical form, creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected.

In our Second Brain we can do the same: mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges. The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge.

Second Brain Superpower #3: Incubate Our Ideas Over Time Too often when we take on a task—planning an event, designing a product, or leading an initiative—we draw only on the ideas we have access to right in that moment. I call this approach a “heavy lift”—demanding instantaneous results from our brains without the benefit of a support system.

This tendency is known as recency bias.4 We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. Now imagine if you were able to unshackle yourself from the limits of the present moment, and draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination. I call this approach the “slow burn”—allowing bits of thought matter to slowly simmer like a delicious pot of stew brewing on the stove. It is a calmer, more sustainable approach to creativity that relies on the gradual accumulation of ideas, instead of all-out binges of manic hustle.

Second Brain Superpower #4: Sharpen Our Unique Perspectives Until now we’ve talked mostly about gathering the ideas of others, but the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain is to allow your own thinking to shine.

Remembering, Connecting, Creating: The Three Stages of Personal Knowledge Management

The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid. They use their digital notes to save facts and ideas that they would have trouble recalling otherwise: takeaways from meetings, quotes from interviews, or the details of a project,

The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connect ideas together. Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily a memory tool to becoming a thinking tool.

Eventually, the third and final way that people use their Second Brain is for creating new things. They realize that they have a lot of knowledge on a subject and decide to turn it into something concrete and shareable. Seeing so much supporting material ready and waiting gives them the courage to put their own ideas out there and have a positive impact on others.

Introducing The CODE Method: The Four Steps to Remembering What Matters To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.

Capture: Keep What Resonates Every time we turn on our smartphone or computer, we are immediately immersed in the flow of juicy content they present. Much of this information is useful and interesting—how-to

We need to adopt the perspective of a curator, stepping back from the raging river and starting to make intentional decisions about what information we want to fill our minds.

Cant consume everything

our goal should be to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy.

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside. When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level. Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful. Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just

By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us, we can improve not only our ability to take better notes, but also our understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. It is a way of turning up the volume on our intuition so we can hear the wisdom it offers us.

We can let go of the fear that our memory will fail us at a crucial moment. Instead of jumping at every new headline and notification, we can choose to consume information that adds value to our lives and consciously let go of the rest.

Organize: Save for Actionability Once you’ve begun capturing notes with the ideas that resonate with you, you’ll eventually feel the need to organize them. It is tempting to try to create a perfect hierarchy of folders up front to contain every possible note you might ever want to capture.

Because our priorities and goals can change at a moment’s notice, and probably will, we want to avoid organizing methods that are overly rigid and prescriptive. The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?”

when you focus on taking action, the vast amount of information out there gets radically streamlined and simplified. There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which means you have a clear filter for ignoring everything else. Organizing for action gives you a sense of tremendous clarity, because you know that everything you’re keeping actually has a purpose.

Distill: Find the Essence Once you start capturing ideas in a central place and organizing them for action, you’ll inevitably begin to notice patterns and connections between them.

Every note is the seed of an idea, reminding you of what you already know and already think about a topic. There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence.

Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. It might take hundreds of pages and thousands of words to fully explain a complex insight, but there is always a way to convey the core message in just a sentence or two.

Why is it so important to be able to easily find the main point of a note? Because in the midst of a busy workday, you won’t have time to review ten pages of notes on a book you read last year—you need to be able to quickly find just the main takeaways.

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention.

Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.