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.

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

was it possible that my personal collection of notes was a knowledge asset that could grow and compound over time?

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts. —Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Extended Mind

Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively.

we go to work five days per week, but spend more than one of those days on average just looking for the information we need to do our work. Half the time, we don’t even succeed in doing that.

Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories.

Commonplace books were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world. They drew on their notebooks in conversation and used them to connect bits of knowledge from different sources and to inspire their own thinking.

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.

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.

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.

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. All this is literally not just in your head.

So much of our intellectual output—from brainstorms to photos to planning to research—all too often is left stranded on hard drives or lost somewhere in the cloud.

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

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.

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.

By keeping diverse kinds of material in one place, we facilitate this connectivity and increase the likelihood that we’ll notice an unusual association.

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.

Having a Second Brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for the long term turns the passage of time into your friend, instead of your enemy.

If it feels like the well of inspiration has run dry, it’s because you need a deeper well full of examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes—anything that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in.

Multimedia: Just like a paper notebook might contain drawings and sketches,

Informal: Notes are inherently messy, so there’s no need for perfect spelling or polished presentation.

Open-ended: Taking notes is a continuous process that never really ends, and you don’t always know where it might lead.

Action-oriented: Unlike a library or research database, personal notes don’t need to be comprehensive or precise.

don’t get caught in the trap of perfectionism: insisting that you have to have the “perfect” app with a precise set of features before you take a single note.

The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid.

The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connect ideas together.

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.

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.

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.

Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal

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?”

distill your notes down to their essence.

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?”

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.

All these actions—evaluate, share, teach, record, post, and lobbyVI—are synonyms for the act of expression.

All you need is a slightly more intentional, more deliberate way to manage that information, plus a few practical habits to ensure it gets done.

Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message

Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on a creative process.

In the digital world we live in, knowledge most often shows up as “content”—snippets of text, screenshots, bookmarked articles, podcasts, or other kinds of media. This includes the content you gather from outside sources but also the content you create

Knowledge capture is about mining the richness of the reading you’re already doing and the life you’re already living.

A knowledge asset is anything that can be used in the future to solve a problem, save time, illuminate a concept, or learn from past experience.

External knowledge could include:

Highlights:

Qu...

Bookmarks and favorites:

Voice memos:

Meeting notes: