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

by Tiago Forte

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

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.

Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form.

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.

resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level.

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 for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.

The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now.

distill your notes down to their essence.

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?”

to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention.

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.

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. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too.

We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.”6

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.

I eventually named this organizing system PARA,I which stands for the four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.

Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories.

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.

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.

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.

My mentor advised me to “move quickly and touch lightly” instead. To look for the path of least resistance and make progress in short steps.

The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers

Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting

Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind

by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done.

mise en place,

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.

I let messages accumulate from one week to the next, it makes it hard to figure out what’s new and requires action and what’s left over from the past. Any action items I find get saved in my task manager, and any notes I capture get saved in my notes app.

Michael Polanyi made an observation that has since become known as “Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.”