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

by Tiago Forte

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.

Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?” Surprisingly, 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. You know that it aligns with your goals and priorities. Instead of organizing being an obstacle to your productivity, it becomes a contributor to it.

It starts with realizing that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you. When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.

Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting.

Thinking like a curator means taking charge of your own information stream, instead of just letting it wash over you. The more economical you can be with the material you capture in the first place, the less time and effort your future self will have to spend organizing, distilling, and expressing it.

Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?

Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?

Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?

Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.

Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know.

Ultimately, Capture What Resonates

It’s a good idea to capture key information about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title of the piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published.

Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking.

PARA can handle it all, regardless of your profession or field, for one reason: it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.

One of the biggest temptations with organizing is to get too perfectionistic, treating the process of organizing as an end in itself. There is something inherently satisfying about order, and it’s easy to stop there instead of going on to develop and share our knowledge.

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. The true test of whether a piece of knowledge is valuable is not whether it is perfectly organized and neatly labeled, but whether it can have an impact on someone or something that matters to you.

There are a few lessons I took away from this experience. The first is that people need clear workspaces to be able to create.

Second, I learned that creating new things is what really matters.

Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?”

As you create these folders and move notes into them, don’t worry about reorganizing or “cleaning up” any existing notes. You can’t afford to spend a lot of time on old content that you’re not sure you’re ever going to need.

In this sense, notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.

Progressive Summarization takes advantage of a tool and a habit that we are all intimately familiar with—highlighting—while leveraging the unique capabilities of technology to make those highlights far more useful than anything you did in school. 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.

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible.

You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. You have no idea what your future self will need, want, or be working on. This assumption forces you to be conservative in the time you spend summarizing notes, doing so only when it’s virtually guaranteed that it will be worth it.

The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII

If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear.

The final stage of the creative process, Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know.

Our time and attention are scarce, and it’s time we treated the things we invest in—reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides—as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch.