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

by Tiago Forte

What do we really have to show for all the knowledge we’ve gained?

So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

The only problem is that you’re often consuming it at the wrong time.

Son las 00:50 al momento que leo esto. Es ironico

When you transform your relationship to information, you will begin to see the technology in your life not just as a storage medium but as a tool for thinking.

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

Mitica frase

You know the feeling of satisfaction when you are the only one in the room who remembers an important detail? That feeling became the prize in my personal pursuit to capitalize on the value of what I knew.

You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in a deeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is about optimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.

For centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

Interesante metodologia para la investigación, aunque un poco dolorosa.

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.

A knowledge building block is discrete. It stands on its own and has intrinsic value, but knowledge building blocks can also be combined into something much greater—a report, an argument, a proposal, a story.

I believe that we have reached an inflection point, where technology has become sufficiently advanced and user-friendly that we can integrate it with our biological brains.

Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”

In a 2004 study, Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki discovered that when monkeys and humans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake to reach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of the body to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea that external tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds.

for an excellent introduction to extended cognition I recommend The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.

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.

This is a remarkable aspect of one of the most famous scientific discoveries of the last century: at the decisive moment, even highly trained scientists deeply familiar with mathematical and abstract thinking turned to the most basic, ancient medium available: physical stuff.

As researchers Deborah Chambers and Daniel Reisberg found in their research on the limits of mental visualization, “The skills we have developed for dealing with the external world go beyond those we have for dealing with the internal world.”

“Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.”

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

If you’ve ever played the word-tile game Scrabble, you know the best way to come up with new words is to mix up the letters in different combinations until a word jumps out at you. In our Second Brain we can do the same: mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges. The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge.

This tendency is known as 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. Now imagine if you were able to unshackle yourself from the limits of the present moment, and draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination.

In other words, the jobs that are most likely to stick around are those that involve promoting or defending a particular perspective. Think of a fundraising organizer sharing stories of the impact their nonprofit has made, a researcher using data to back up their interpretation of an experiment, or a project manager citing a couple of key precedents to support a decision. Our careers and businesses depend more than ever on our ability to advance a particular point of view and persuade others to adopt it as well.

When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t lost your touch or run out of creative juice. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with.

Most important of all, 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. It’s not about having the perfect tools—it’s about having a reliable set of tools you can depend on, knowing you can always change them later.

As people set out on their Second Brain journey, there are three stages of progress I often observe—and even encourage. Those stages are remembering, connecting, and creating.

“CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.

The same way we have a genetic code that determines our height and eye color, we also have a creative code that is hardwired into our imagination. It shapes how we think and how we interact with the world. It is mirrored in the software code that runs the apps we use to handle information.

Capture: Keep What Resonates

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

Organize: Save for Actionability

When it comes to digital notes, we can use much easier and lighter ways of organizing. Because our priorities and goals can change at a moment’s notice, and probably will, we want to avoid organizing methods that are overly rigid and prescriptive. 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: Find the Essence

There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence. 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.

If you’ve highlighted those takeaways in the flow of the reading you were already doing anyway, you’ll be able to remind yourself of what the book contains without having to spend hours rereading it.

Lol

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.

Express: Show Your Work

All the previous steps—capturing, organizing, and distilling—are geared toward one ultimate purpose: sharing your own ideas, your own story, and your own knowledge with others. What is the point of knowledge if it doesn’t help anyone or produce anything?

Debatible

We study every piece of relationship advice available, but never ask anyone out on a date.

You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory.

The word “productivity” has the same origin as the Latin verb producere, which means “to produce.” Which means that at the end of the day, if you can’t point to some kind of output or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive at all.

Other synonyms for expression include publish, speak, present, perform, produce, write, draw, interpret, critique, or translate.

Creativity depends on a creative process.

Songwriters are known for compiling “hook books” full of lyrics and musical riffs they may want to use in future songs. Software engineers build “code libraries” so useful bits of code are easy to access. Lawyers keep “case files” with details from past cases they might want to refer to in the future. Marketers and advertisers maintain “swipe files” with examples of compelling ads they might want to draw from.

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.

Perhaps you have some hesitation about writing down such personal thoughts in a piece of software rather than a private journal. While it’s always up to you what you choose to note down, remember that your Second Brain is private too. You can share certain notes if you want to, but by default everything inside is for your eyes only.

Y que hay con Evernote ? Notion ? Etc...

In my experience, there are four kinds of content that aren’t well suited to notes apps: Is this sensitive information you’d like to keep secure? The content you save in your notes is easily accessible from any device, which is great for accessibility but not for security. Information like tax records, government documents, passwords, and health records shouldn’t be saved in your notes. Is this a special format or file type better handled by a dedicated app? Although you could save specialized files such as Photoshop files or video footage in your notes, you’ll need a specialized app to open them anyway, so there’s no benefit to keeping them in your notes. Is this a very large file? Notes apps are made for short, lightweight bits of text and images, and their performance will often be severely hampered if you try to save large files in them. Will it need to be collaboratively edited? Notes apps are perfectly suited for individual, private use, which makes them less than ideal for collaboration. You can share individual notes or even groups of notes with others, but if you need multiple people to be able to collaboratively edit a document in real time, then you’ll need to use a different platform.

With the abundance of content all around us, it can be hard to know exactly what is worth preserving. I use an insightful exercise to help people make this decision easier. I call it “Twelve Favorite Problems,” inspired by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman.

Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4: You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”