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

by Tiago Forte

Areas: What I’m Committed to Over Time As important as projects are, not everything is a project.

While there is no goal to reach, there is a standard that you want to uphold in each of these areas.

Resources: Things I Want to Reference in the Future The third category of information that we want to keep is resources. This is basically a catchall for anything that doesn’t belong to a project or an area and could include any topic you’re interested in gathering information about.

Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold Finally, we have our archives. This includes any item from the previous three categories that is no longer active.

PARA is a universal system of organization designed to work across your digital world. It doesn’t work in only one place, requiring you to use completely different organizing schemes in each of the dozens of places you keep things. It can and should be used everywhere, such as the documents folder on your computer, your cloud storage drives, and of course, your digital notes app.

Inside each of these top-level folders, I have individual folders for the specific projects, areas, resources, and archives that make up my life. For example, here are the folders for each one of my active projects:

Inside these folders live the actual notes that contain my ideas. The number of active projects usually ranges from five to fifteen for the average person. Notice that the number of notes inside each one (indicated by the number in parentheses after the title) varies greatly, from just two to over two hundred for the book you’re reading right now.

Here is what some of my areas look like: Each of these folders contains the notes relevant to each of those ongoing areas of my life. Areas related to my business begin with “FL” for Forte Labs, so they appear together in alphabetical order.

Under resources I have folders for each of the topics I’m interested in. This information isn’t currently actionable, so I don’t want it cluttering up my projects, but it will be ready and waiting if I ever need it.

The temptation when initially capturing notes is to also try to decide where they should go and what they mean. Here’s the problem: the moment you first capture an idea is the worst time to try to decide what it relates to. First, because you’ve just encountered it and haven’t had any time to ponder its ultimate purpose, but more importantly, because forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process. This makes the experience mentally taxing and thus less likely to happen in the first place.

This is why it’s so important to separate capture and organize into two distinct steps: “keeping what resonates” in the moment is a separate decision from deciding to save something for the long term. Most notes apps have an “inbox” or “daily notes” section where new notes you’ve captured are saved until you can revisit them and decide

Once you’ve captured a batch of notes and it’s time to organize them, PARA comes into play. The four main categories are ordered by actionability to make the decision of where to put notes as easy as possible: Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind. Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable. Resources may become actionable depending on the situation. Archives remain inactive unless they are needed.

This order gives us a convenient checklist for deciding where to put a note, starting at the top of the list and moving down: In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives.

Organizing by actionability counteracts our tendency to constantly procrastinate and postpone our aspirations to some far-off future. PARA pulls these distant dreams into the here and now, by helping us see that we already have a lot of the information we need to get started. The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goals forward, not get a PhD in notetaking. Knowledge is best applied through execution, which means whatever doesn’t help you make progress on your projects is probably detracting from them.

Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. Yet this is exactly the way most people organize their files and notes—keeping all their book notes together just because they happen to come from books, or all their saved quotes together just because they happen to be quotes. Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize.

When it comes to our personal knowledge, there is no such assigned spot. We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is always changing. Sometimes we can receive one text message or email and the entire landscape of our day changes. Because our priorities can change at a moment’s notice, we have to minimize the time we spend filing, labeling, tagging, and maintaining our digital notes.

Any piece of information (whether a text document, an image, a note, or an entire folder) can and should flow between categories.

Using PARA is not just about creating a bunch of folders to put things in. It is about identifying the structure of your work and life—what you are committed to, what you want to change, and where you want to go.

They had repeatedly postponed their creative ambitions to some far-off, mythical time when somehow everything would be perfectly in order. Once we set that aside and just focused on what they actually wanted to do right now, they suddenly gained a tremendous sense of clarity and motivation.

The first is that people need clear workspaces to be able to create. We cannot do our best thinking and our best work when all the “stuff” from the past is crowding and cluttering our space. That’s why that archiving step is so crucial: you’re not losing anything, and it can all be found via search, but you need to move it all out of sight and out of mind.

Second, I learned that creating new things is what really matters. I’d see a fire light up in people’s eyes when they reached the finish line and published that slideshow or exported that video or printed that résumé.

It doesn’t matter how organized, aesthetically pleasing, or impressive your notetaking system is. It is only the steady completion of tangible wins that can infuse you with a sense of determination, momentum, and accomplishment. It doesn’t matter how small the victories. Even the tiniest breakthrough can become a stepping-stone to more creative, more interesting futures than you can imagine.

Your Turn: Move Quickly, Touch Lightly

A mentor of mine once gave me a piece of advice that has served me ever since: move quickly and touch lightly. She saw that my standard approach to my work was brute force: to stay late at the office, fill every single minute with productivity, and power through mountains of work as if my ...

Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?” When it comes to PARA, that step is generally to create folders for each of your active projects in your notes app and begin to fill them with the content related to those projects. Once you have a home for something, you tend to find more of it. Start by asking yourself, “What projects am I currently committed to moving forward?” and then create a new project folder for each one.

The key thing to keep in mind is that these categories are anything but final. PARA is a dynamic, constantly changing system, not a static one. Your Second Brain evolves as constantly as your projects and goals change, which means you never have to worry about getting it perfect, or having it finished.

Distill—Find the Essence

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher

We can also use our notes to drill down to the essence of the stories, research, examples, and metaphors that make up our own source material. This is the third step of CODE, to Distill. This is the moment we begin turning the ideas we’ve captured and organized into our own message. It all begins and ends with notes.

Quantum Notetaking: How to Create Notes for an Unknown Future

Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect.

This holds true for so much of the ideas and inspiration around us. There is a key idea that catches our attention in the moment. We feel enraptured and obsessed with it. It’s difficult to imagine ever forgetting the new idea. It’s changed our lives forever! But after a few hours or days or weeks, it starts to fade from our memory. Soon our recollection of that exciting new idea is nothing but a pale shadow of something we once knew, that once intrigued us. Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fading away.

Discoverability—The Missing Link in Making Notes Useful The most important factor in whether your notes can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful.

It’s easy to save tons and tons of content, but turning it into a form that will be accessible in the future is another matter. To enhance the discoverability of your notes, we can turn to a simple habit you probably remember from school: highlighting the most important points. Highlighting is an activity that everyone understands, takes hardly any additional effort, and works in any app you might use.

Highlighting 2.0: The Progressive Summarization Technique Progressive Summarization is the technique I teach to distill notes down to their most important points. It is a simple process of taking the raw notes you’ve captured and organized and distilling them into usable material that can directly inform a current project.

The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.

“layer one”—the chunks of text initially captured in my notes. Notice that I didn’t save the entire article—only a few key excerpts.III By limiting what I keep to only the best, most important, most relevant parts, I’m making all the subsequent steps of organizing, distilling, and expressing much easier.

second layer of distillation. I usually do this when I have free time during breaks or on evenings or weekends, when I come across the note while working on other projects, or when I don’t have the energy for more focused work. All I have to do is bold the main points within the note. This could include keywords that provide hints of what this text is about, phrases that capture what the original author was trying to say, or sentences that especially resonated with me even if I can’t explain why.

For those notes that are especially long, interesting, or valuable, it is sometimes worth adding a third layer of highlighting. I advise using the “highlighting” feature offered by most notes apps, which paints passages in bright yellow just like the fluorescent highlighters we used in school (which appear in light gray below). If your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, you can use underlining or another kind of formatting instead. Look only at the bolded passages you identified in layer two and highlight only the most interesting and surprising of those points. This will often amount to just one or two sentences that encapsulate the message of the original source.

There is one more layer we can add, though it is quite rarely needed. For only the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words. The best sign that a fourth layer is needed is when I find myself visiting a note again and again, clearly indicating that it is one of the cornerstones of my thinking.

sometimes you want to zoom in and examine one specific research finding, while other times you want to zoom out and see the broad sweep of an argument all at once. With Progressive Summarization, you are building up a map of the best ideas found in your Second Brain. Your highlights are like signposts and waypoints that help you navigate through the network of ideas you’re exploring. You are building this map without moving anything or deleting anything. Every sentence gets left right where you found it, giving you the freedom to leave things out without worrying that you’ll lose them. With this map in hand, you can actually see what you’ve captured, helping you find what you’re looking for but also what you don’t even know you’re looking for.

Picasso’s Secret: Prune the Good to Surface the Great

Progressive summrization unlocks the value of collected information by ditilling it into discoverable and the actionable knowledge

Picasso’s act of distillation involves stripping away the unnecessary so that only the essential remains. Crucially, Picasso couldn’t have started with the single line drawing. He needed to go through each layer of the bull’s form step-by-step to absorb the proportions and shapes into his muscle memory. The result points to a mysterious aspect of the creative process: it can end up with a result that looks so simple, it seems like anyone could have made it. That simplicity masks the effort that was needed to get there.

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly.

The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers