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

by Tiago Forte

The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in.

The power of your favorite problems is that they tend to stay fairly consistent over time. The exact framing of each question may change, but even as we move between projects, jobs, relationships, and careers, our favorite problems tend to follow us across the years.

That very same question—How can creativity emerge out of chaos?—still drives me to this day. Only now, it’s in the form of organizing digital information instead of LEGOs. Pursuing this question has taught me so many things over the years, across many seasons of my life. The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.

La gran pregunta de Tiago Forte

If you try to save every piece of material you come across, you run the risk of inundating your future self with tons of irrelevant information. At that point, your Second Brain will be no better than scrolling through social media.

xd'nt

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.

Entonces es importante ser preciso en lo que se quiere guardar y no ir a por todo.

Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?

You can Google the answer to a question, but you can’t Google a feeling.

Me, an intellectual, google: anger

Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?

Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future.

Se trata de mantener un listado de cosas que pueden ser útiles para un futuro. Como un kit de herramientas especiales para una ocasión.

Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal? One of the most valuable kinds of information to keep is personal information—your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos.

No one else values the small moments of your days quite like you do. 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,

Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

The renowned information theorist Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you.

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.

Me parece algo contradictorio pensar que algun dato freak pueda ser más importante que algo que sabemos pero necesitemos guardar, por ejemplo: comandos de terminal, códigos de programación, la tabla periodica, etc.

Ultimately, Capture What Resonates

This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.”

“emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”

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If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowly quiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is telling you, the inner voice will grow stronger. You’ll start to hear it in all kinds of situations. It will guide you in what choices to make and which opportunities to pursue. It will warn you away from people and situations that aren’t right for you. It will speak up and take a stand for your convictions even when you’re afraid. I can’t think of anything more important for your creative life—and your life in general—than learning to listen to the voice of intuition inside. It is the source of your imagination, your confidence, and your spontaneity. You can intentionally train yourself to hear that voice of intuition every day by taking note of what it tells you.

En que se convirtió esto... Un libro de auto ayuda ?

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.

Your Second Brain gives you a place to corral the jumble of thoughts tumbling through your head and park them in a waiting area for safekeeping.

Waiting area.. Interesting concept

you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”

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

“translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.”

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.

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

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There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.

Your Second Brain isn’t just a tool—it’s an environment. It is a garden of knowledge full of familiar, winding pathways, but also secret and secluded corners. Every pathway is a jumping-off point to new ideas and perspectives. Gardens are natural, but they don’t happen by accident. They require a caretaker to seed the plants, trim the weeds, and shape the paths winding through them.

Your Second Brain is like a mind cathedral that you can step into any time you want to shut out the world and imagine a world of your own.

Then one day I had a realization: Why didn’t I just organize my files that way all the time? If organizing by project was the most natural way to manage information with minimal effort, why not make it the default? That is what I did, and to my surprise, it worked. Over time, I refined, simplified, and tested this action-based approach with thousands of students and followers. 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.

En este punto nace la leyenda

You’ll always need to use multiple platforms to move your projects forward. No single platform can do everything. The intention here is not to use a single software program, but to use a single organizing system, one that provides consistency even as you switch between apps many times per day.

With the PARA system, every piece of information you want to save can be placed into one of just four categories: 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.

Projects have a couple of features that make them an ideal way to organize modern work. First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or “publish.”

Setting up folders is relatively easy. The harder question that strikes fear into the heart of every organizer is “Where do I put this?”

So real

The temptation when initially capturing notes is to also try to decide where they should go and what they mean. Here’s the problem: the moment you first capture an idea is the worst time to try to decide what it relates to.

forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process. This makes the experience mentally taxing and thus less likely to happen in the first place.

Separating the capturing and organizing of ideas helps you stay present, notice what resonates, and leave the decision of what to do with them to a separate time (such as a “weekly review,” which I will cover in Chapter 9).

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.

In other words, you are always trying to place a note or file not only where it will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest. By placing a note in a project folder, you ensure you’ll see it next time you work on that project. By placing it in an area folder, you’ll come across it next time you’re thinking about that area of your work or life. By placing it in a resource folder, you’ll notice it only if and when you decide to dive into that topic and do some reading or research. By placing it in archives, you never need to see it again unless you want to.

As Christina Luo, a former mentor in our online program, puts it, “…the goal is to take note of what moves your projects forward, not get a PhD in notetaking. And if ideas are best preserved through execution, what doesn’t bring you closer to making progress on your projects may be detracting from it.”

There is a parallel between PARA and how kitchens are organized. Everything in a kitchen is designed and organized to support an outcome—preparing a meal as efficiently as possible. The archives are like the freezer—items are in cold storage until they are needed, which could be far into the future. Resources are like the pantry—available for use in any meal you make, but neatly tucked away out of sight in the meantime. Areas are like the fridge—items that you plan on using relatively soon, and that you want to check on more frequently. Projects are like the pots and pans cooking on the stove—the items you are actively preparing right now. Each kind of food is organized according to how accessible it needs to be for you to make the meals you want to eat.

Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. Yet this is exactly the way most people organize their files and notes—keeping all their book notes together just because they happen to come from books, or all their saved quotes together just because they happen to be quotes.

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...

PARA isn’t a filing system; it’s a prod...

You might save a note on coaching techniques to a project folder called “Coaching class,” for a class you’re taking. Later, when you become a manager at work and need to coach your direct reports, you might move that note to an area folder called “Direct reports.” At some point you might leave that company, but still remain interested in coaching, and move the note to resources. One day you might lose interest in the subject altogether and move it to the archives. In the future, that note could find its way all the way back to projects when you decide to start a side gig as a business coach, making that knowledge actionable once again.

people need clear workspaces to be able to create.

don’t make organizing your Second Brain into yet another heavy obligation. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?”

Para is a Greek word that means “side by side,” as in “parallel”; this convenient definition reminds us that our Second Brain works “side by side” with our biological brain.

I’m a big fan of four-letter frameworks. Researchers have called it the “Magic Number 4” because it is the highest number that we can count at a glance and hold in our minds without extra effort.

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher

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In 1969,

Nice