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.

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.

The main uses for a second brain are to makes ideas concrete, make new associations between ideas/notes, grow ideas/thoughts over time, and provide a unique perspective.

The process of creating a Second Brain can be summarized by “CODE” - Capture: Keep what resonates or it seems useful - Organize: Save for use or actionability - Distill: Find the essence - Express: Show the work

Capture information that resonates, essentially it provides pleasure, piques curiosity, creates wonder and excitement

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.

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.

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.

It’s so easy to endlessly delay and postpone the experiences that would so enrich our lives. We think we’re not ready. We fear we’re not prepared. We cannot stand the thought that there is one little piece of information we’re missing that, if we had it, would make all the difference. I’m here to tell you that that is no way to live your life. Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory. This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.V We all naturally have a desire to create—to bring to life something good, true, or beautiful.9 It’s a part of our essential nature. Creating new things is not only one of the most deeply fulfilling things we can do, it can also have a positive impact on others—by inspiring, entertaining, or educating them. What should you create? It depends on your skills, interests, and personality. If you are highly analytical, you could evaluate the many options for camping gear and create a list of recommended products to share with your friends. If you like to teach, you could record your favorite dessert recipe and post it on social media or a blog. If you care about a local cause such as public parks, you could create a plan to lobby the city council for more funding.

Information is always in flux, and it is always a work in progress. Since nothing is ever truly final, there is no need to wait to get started. You can publish a simple website now, and slowly add additional pages over time. You can send out a draft of a piece of writing now and make revisions later when you have more time. The sooner you begin, the sooner you start on the path of improvement.

Take a moment now to write down some of your own favorite problems. Here are my recommendations to guide you: Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child (often you’ll continue to be fascinated with the same things as an adult). Don’t worry about coming up with exactly twelve (the exact number doesn’t matter, but try to come up with at least a few). Don’t worry about getting the list perfect (this is just a first pass, and it will always be evolving). Phrase them as open-ended questions that could have multiple answers (in contrast to “yes/no” questions with only one answer). Use your list of favorite problems to make decisions about what to capture: anything potentially relevant to answering them.

There is a way to evoke a sense of inspiration more regularly: keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories. Any time you need a break, a new perspective, or a dash of motivation, you can look through it and see what sparks your imagination.

I often save screenshots of text messages sent between my family and friends. The small moments of warmth and humor that take place in these threads are precious to me, since I can’t always be with them in person. It takes mere moments, and I love knowing that I’ll forever have memories from my conversations with the people closest to me.

Sometimes you come across an idea that is neither inspiring, personal, nor obviously useful, but there is something surprising about it. You may not be able to put your finger on why, but it conflicts with your existing point of view in a way that makes your brain perk up and pay attention. Those are the ideas you should capture. Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know. We are already surrounded by algorithms that feed us only what we already believe and social networks that continually reinforce what we already think.

You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates. Just look for the signs: your eyes might widen slightly, your heart may skip a beat, your throat may go slightly dry, and your sense of time might subtly slow down as the world around you fades away. These are clues that it’s time to hit “save.”

Besides capturing what personally resonates with you, there are a couple other kinds of details that are generally useful to save in your notes. 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.III

Don’t worry about whether you’re capturing “correctly.” There’s no right way to do this, and therefore, no wrong way. The only way to know whether you’re getting the good stuff is to try putting it to use in real life.

If you’re looking for a more precise answer of how much content to capture in your notes, I recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most. Any more than that, and it will be too difficult to wade through all the material in the future. Conveniently, 10 percent also happens to be the limit that most ebooks allow you to export as highlights.

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 purpose of a single note or group of notes can and does change over time as your needs and goals change. Every life moves through seasons, and your digital notes should move along with them, churning and surfacing new tidbits of insight from the deep waters of your experience.

Each time you finish a project, move its folder wholesale to the archives, and each time you start a new project, look through your archives to see if any past project might have assets you can reuse.

When you first capture them, your notes are like unfinished pieces of raw material. They require a bit more refinement to turn them into truly valuable knowledge assets, like a chemist distilling only the purest compound. This is why we separate capturing and organizing from the subsequent steps: you need to be able to store something quickly and save any future refinement for later.

Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,IV instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools. It gives you a practical, easy thing to do that adds value even when you don’t have the energy for more challenging tasks. Most importantly, it keeps your attention on the substance of what you’re reading or learning, which is what matters in the long term.

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. To be clear, it takes skill and courage to let the details fall away.

A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. If you save a series of excerpts from a book amounting to five hundred words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty.

Intermediate Packets are really a new lens through which you can perceive the atomic units that make up everything you do. By “thinking small,” you can focus on creating just one IP each time you sit down to work, without worrying about how viable it is or whether it will be used in the exact way you envisioned. This lens reframes creativity as an ongoing, continual cycle of delivering value in small bits, rather than a massive all-consuming endeavor that weighs on you for months.

The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence. They help us shut the door to new ideas and begin constructing something new out of the knowledge building blocks we’ve assembled.

The Hemingway Bridge is a way of making each creative leap from one island to the next less dramatic and risky: you keep some energy and imagination in reserve and use it as a launchpad for the next step in your progress.

Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect. Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing. Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach.

This is the chicken-and-egg problem of creativity: you don’t know what you should create, but you can’t discover what people want until you create something. Dialing Down the Scope is a way of short-circuiting that paradox and testing the waters with something small and concrete, while still protecting the fragile and tentative edges of your work.

Divergence and convergence are not a linear path, but a loop: once you complete one round of convergence, you can take what you’ve learned right back into a new cycle of divergence. Keep alternating back and forth, making iterations each time until it’s something you can consider “done” or “complete” and share more widely.

This is where Dialing Down the Scope was essential: we identified the most outlandish of our plans and decided to save those for a later stage. I moved those ideas to their own “someday/maybe” section of my outline to revisit later.

Start by picking one project you want to move forward on. It could be one you identified in Chapter 5, when I asked you to make folders for each active project. It could alternatively be something you know you want to (or have to) get started on. The more uncertain, new, or challenging the project, the better. Make an outline with your goals, intentions, questions, and considerations for the project. Start by writing out anything already on your mind, and then peruse your PARA categories for related notes and Intermediate Packets. These could include points or takeaways from previously created notes, inspiration from models or examples you want to borrow from, or templates you can use to follow best practices.

Here are some useful questions to ask as you conduct your search: Is there a book or article you could extract some excerpts from as inspiration? Are there websites that might have resources you could build upon? Are there podcasts by experts you could subscribe to and listen to while commuting or doing household chores? Are there relevant IPs buried in other projects you’ve worked on in the past?

Set a timer for a fixed period of time, such as fifteen or twenty minutes, and in one sitting see if you can complete a first pass on your project using only the notes you’ve gathered in front of you. No searching online, no browsing social media, and no opening multiple browser tabs that you swear you’re going to get to eventually. Only work with what you already have. This first pass could be a plan, an agenda, a proposal, a diagram, or some other format that turns your ideas into a tangible artifact.

If you find that you can’t complete the first iteration in one sitting, start by building a Hemingway Bridge to the next time you can work on it. List open questions, remaining to-dos, new avenues to explore, or people to consult.

The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

Every goal, collaboration, or assignment we take on can be defined as a project, which gives it shape, focus, and a sense of direction. If we consider that these projects are our biggest investments of attention, it’s worth adding a little bit of structure to how we start them. This is where the Project Kickoff Checklist comes in. Here’s my own checklist: Capture my current thinking on the project. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.

This first note is then placed inside a new project folder dedicated to storing all the notes I’ll be creating related to it. This step can and should be messy: I pour out all my random musings, potential approaches, links to other ideas or topics, or reminders of people to talk to. Here are some questions I use to prompt this initial brainstorm: What do I already know about this project? What don’t I know that I need to find out? What is my goal or intention? Who can I talk to who might provide insights? What can I read or listen to for relevant ideas?

While the Weekly Review is grounded and practical, I recommend doing a Monthly Review that is a bit more reflective and holistic. It’s a chance to evaluate the big picture and consider more fundamental changes to your goals, priorities, and systems that you might not have the chance to think about in the busyness of the day-to-day. Here’s mine: Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks.

Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet. Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback.