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

by Tiago Forte

In a short documentary titled Francis Coppola’s Notebook3 released in 2001, Coppola explained his process. He started with an initial read of the entire novel, noting down anything that stuck out to him: “I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the first reading because those are the initial instincts about what you thought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thought was bad.”

He broke down each scene according to five key criteria: a synopsis (or summary) of the scene; the historical context; the imagery and tone for the “look and feel” of a scene; the core intention; and any potential pitfalls to avoid. In his own words, “I endeavored to distill the essence of each scene into a sentence, expressing in a few words what the point of the scene was.”

Coppola’s story demonstrates that we can systematically gather building blocks from our reading and research that ultimately make the final product richer, more interesting, and more impactful.

notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.

each note is like a product you are creating for the benefit of that future customer. If they don’t buy it—they don’t think it’s worth the effort of revisiting past notes—then all the value of the work you’re doing now will be lost.

The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.

Here is a snapshot of the four layers of Progressive Summarization:II

For only the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words.

It’s like having a digital map of your notes that can be zoomed in or out depending on how many details you want to see, like a maps app on your smartphone. Navigating to a new destination, you might want to zoom in and see exactly which driveway to turn into. On the other hand, if you’re planning a cross-country road trip, you might want to zoom out and see your entire itinerary in one glance. The same is true for your landscape of knowledge—sometimes you want to zoom in and examine one specific research finding, while other times you want to zoom out and see the broad sweep of an argument all at once.

With Progressive Summarization, you are building up a map of the best ideas found in your Second Brain. Your highlights are like signposts and waypoints that help you navigate through the network of ideas you’re exploring.

I had a handful of highly actionable notes saved in a resource folder called “Hiring.” To get started, I moved the entire folder from resources to projects. Then I spent about thirty minutes to review the notes it contained and highlight the most relevant takeaways. Those highlights were the starting point for the hiring process I ended up using for my own business, inspired by one of the most innovative and desirable employers in the world.

Nueva tarea > Reorganizar notas > Revisar puntos destacados

One of Pablo Picasso’s most famous drawings, created in 1945 and known as Picasso’s Bull, offers a master class in how distillation works. It is a sequence of images that he drew to study a bull’s essential form. The process of distillation happens in every art form, but this example is unusual in that Picasso preserved each step of his process.

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.

If you’re going to capture everything, you might as well capture nothing.

Remember that notes are not authoritative texts. You don’t need to and shouldn’t include every tiny detail. They are more like bookmarks peeking out from the pages of a book on the shelf,

You will always be able to go back and review the full, original source if needed. Your notes only solve the problem of rediscover...

A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 pe...

when I’m preparing to write a blog post or article, I’ll usually start by highlighting the most interesting points from a group of notes that I think will be relevant to the topic at hand. That way I have a predictable, not-too-difficult task to get me warmed up for writing, the same way an athlete might have a warm-up and stretching routine.

Preparacion mediante la revision de notas

every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary.

When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.VIII You can prepare in advance for the future challenges and opportunities you don’t even yet know you’ll face, by taking advantage of the effort you’re already spending reading books, learning new things, and simply being curious about the world around you.

Esta es la mayor ventaja de leer sobre diversos topicos y tomar nota de ello.

I like to think of layer one as the “soil”—an excerpt from a source or my own thinking (whether as words, drawings, images, or audio) I initially capture into my notes. They are like the ground on which my understanding will be built. Layer two is “oil,” as in “I’ve struck oil!,” conveniently represented by black, bolded text. Layer three is “gold,” which is even more valuable, and shines in highlighter yellow in many apps. Layer four is the “gems,” the most rare and illuminating finds that I’ve distilled in my own words as an executive summary.

As Sönke Ahrens observes in his book How to Take Smart Notes, this is the fundamental paradox at the heart of writing: you have to do the research before you know what you will write about.

Butler would scrape together twenty-five cents to buy small Mead memo pads, and in those pages she took notes on every aspect of her life: grocery and clothes shopping lists, last-minute to-dos, wishes and intentions, and calculations of her remaining funds for rent, food, and utilities. She meticulously tracked her daily writing goals and page counts, lists of her failings and desired personal qualities, her wishes and dreams for the future, and contracts she would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write. Of course, Butler also gathered material for her fantastic stories: lyrics to songs she’d heard on the radio, an idea for a character’s name or motivation, a new topic to research, details of news stories—everything she needed to build the worlds her stories would take place in.

One of Butler’s novels, The Parable of the Sower, hit the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in 2020,3 fulfilling one of Butler’s life goals fourteen years after her death. The book portrays a postapocalyptic future in the aftermath of runaway climate disasters, in which small communities must band together in order to survive.

The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blank page, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth. Professional creatives constantly draw on outside sources of inspiration—their own experiences and observations, lessons gleaned from successes and failures alike, and the ideas of others. If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.

The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world.

Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work.I For example, a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call. Any note can potentially be used as an Intermediate Packet in some larger project or goal.

Like LEGO blocks, the more pieces you have, the easier it is to build something interesting. Imagine that instead of starting your next project with a blank slate, you started with a set of building blocks—research findings, web clippings, PDF highlights, book notes, back-of-the-envelope sketches—that represent your long-term effort to make sense of your field, your industry, and the world at large.

There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work: Distilled notes:

Outtakes: The material or ideas that didn’t make it into a past project but could be used in future ones.

Work-in-process: The documents, graphics, agendas, or plans you produced during past projects.

Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered as part of past projects, which could becom...

Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can ...

You should always cite your sources and give credit where credit is due. A scientist doesn’t obscure her sources—she points to them so others can retrace her footsteps. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and it’s smart to build on the thinking they’ve done rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

Al igual que uno deja los rastros en sus notas

eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs.

I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational system. It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your folders.

Standard Notes: :thinking_emoji:

Creative expression isn’t always about self-promotion or advancing our own career. Some of our most beautiful, creative acts are ones in which we connect the dots for others in ways they wouldn’t be able to do themselves.

A book is created out of a dance between an author and their editor.

Reframing your work in terms of Intermediate Packets isn’t just about doing the same old stuff in smaller chunks. That doesn’t unlock your true potential. The transformation comes from the fact that smaller chunks are inherently more shareable and collaborative.

The fundamental difficulty of creative work is that we are often too close to it to see it objectively. Getting feedback is really about borrowing someone else’s eyes to see what only a novice can see. It’s about stepping outside your subjective point of view and noticing what’s missing from what you’ve made.

La importancia del feedback

Reframing your productivity in terms of Intermediate Packets is a major step toward this turning point. Instead of thinking of your job in terms of tasks, which always require you to be there, personally, doing everything yourself, you will start to think in terms of assets and building blocks that you can assemble.

philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.”

Intermediate Packets are abbreviated as IPs, a lucky coincidence that is appropriate, because they are absolutely your Intellectual Property. You created them, you own them, and you have the right to use them again and again in any future project.

Tagging for personal knowledge management is a subject unto itself. While not necessary to get started, I’ve written a free bonus chapter on tags you can download at buildingasecondbrain.com/bonuschapter

One of my favorite rules of thumb is to “Only start projects that are already 80 percent done.” That might seem like a paradox, but committing to finish projects only when I’ve already done most of the work to capture, organize, and distill the relevant material means I never run the risk of starting something I can’t finish.

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. We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. I learned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine that systematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of our awareness.

Building a Second Brain is really about standardizing the way we work, because we only really improve when we standardize the way we do something.

En resumen

the process of creativity, it is a very different story. The creative process is ancient and unchanging. It was the same thousands of years ago as it is today. There are lessons we can learn on that deeper level that transcend any particular medium and any particular set of tools.

creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence. You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible. Like Taylor Swift’s notes, Twyla Tharp’s box, Francis Ford Coppola’s prompt book, or Octavia Butler’s commonplace notebooks, you begin to gather different kinds of outside inspiration, expose yourself to new influences, explore new paths, and talk to others about what you’re thinking. The number of things you are looking at and considering is increasing—you are diverging from your starting point.

The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas, so the process is necessarily spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander.