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

by Tiago Forte

if all we ever do is diverge, then we never arrive anywhere. Like Francis Ford Coppola highlighting certain passages and crossing out others in The Godfather novel, at some point you must start discarding possibilities and converging toward a solution. Otherwise, you will never get the rewarding sense of completion that comes with hitting “send” or “publish” and stepping back from the canvas or screen knowing you got the job done.

Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is truly essential. It is about narrowing the range of possibilities so that you can make forward progres...

it can be so tempting to do more research. It’s so easy to open up dozens of browser tabs, order more books, or go off in completely new directions. Those actions are tempting because they feel like productivity. They feel like forward progress, when in fact they are divergent acts that postpone the moment of completion.

To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense.

The goal of an archipelago is that instead of sitting down to a blank page or screen and stressing out about where to begin, you start with a series of small stepping-stones to guide your efforts. First you select the points and ideas you want to include in your outline, and then in a separate step, you rearrange and sequence them into an order that flows logically.

“Hemingway Bridge.”2 He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.IV

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.

One of the best uses for a Second Brain is to collect and save the scraps on the cutting-room floor in case they can be used elsewhere. A slide cut from a presentation could become a social media post. An observation cut from a report could become the basis for a conference presentation. An agenda item cut from a meeting could become the starting point for the next meeting. You never know when the rejected scraps from one project might become the perfect missing piece in another. The possibilities are endless.

How can you know which direction to take your thinking without feedback from customers, colleagues, collaborators, or friends? And how can you collect that feedback without showing them something concrete? 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.

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.

Ask yourself, “What is the smallest version of this I can produce to get useful feedback from others?”

Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks… It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity. —James Clear, author of Atomic Habits

mise en place, a culinary philosophy used in restaurants around the world. Developed in France starting in the late 1800s, mise en place is a step-by-step process for producing high-quality food efficiently. Chefs can never afford to stop the whole kitchen just so they can clean up. They learn to keep their workspace clean and organized in the flow of the meals they are preparing.

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.

This is exactly how I want you to treat your attention—as an asset that gets invested and produces a return, which in turn can be reinvested back into other ventures.

there are two key moments in this process of recycling knowledge. Two places where the paths diverge, and you have the chance to do something different than you’ve done before. Those two moments are when a project starts, and when it finishes. For the former, I’ll introduce you to the Project Kickoff Checklist, and for the latter, the Project Completion Checklist.

because each and every note in my Second Brain was deliberately chosen, I am able to search through a collection of exclusively high-quality notes free of fluff and filler. This is in stark contrast to searching the open Internet, which is full of distracting ads, misleading headlines, superficial content, and pointless controversy, all of which can throw me off track.

The important thing to remember as you move through this checklist is that you are making a plan for how to tackle the project, not executing the project itself. You should think of this five-step checklist as a first pass, taking no more than twenty to thirty minutes. You’re only trying to get a sense of what kind of material you already have in your Second Brain. Once you do, you’ll have a much better sense of how much time it will take, which knowledge or resources you’ll need access to, and what your challenges will likely be.

Answer premortemI questions: What do you want to learn? What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer? What is most likely to fail?

We don’t want to limit ourselves to merely celebrating the end of a project. We want to learn from the experience and document any thinking that could add value in the future.

I also like to cross out the goal and move it to a different section called “Completed.” Any time I need some motivation, I can look through this list and be reminded of all the meaningful goals I’ve achieved in the past. It doesn’t matter if the goal is big or small—keeping an inventory of your victories and successes is a wonderful use for your Second Brain.

Here are some other items you can include on your Project Completion Checklist. I encourage you to personalize it for your own needs: Answer postmortem questions: What did you learn? What did you do well? What could you have done better? What can you improve for next time?

Allen recommends using a Weekly Review to write down any new to-dos, review your active projects, and decide on priorities for the upcoming week.

I suggest adding one more step: review the notes you’ve created over the past week, give them succinct titles that tell you what’s inside, and sort them into the appropriate PARA folders.

Clear my email inbox. Check my calendar. Clear my computer desktop. Clear my notes inbox. Choose my tasks for the week.

Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks.

Noticing that an idea you have in mind could potentially be valuable and capturing it instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s nothing.”

You notice that you need to buy a new computer because your current one is getting too slow, so you move some articles you’ve saved from the “Computer research” resource folder to a new project folder called “Buy a new computer.”

Muy yo

When you make your digital notes a working environment, not just a storage environment, you end up spending a lot more time there. When you spend more time there, you’ll inevitably notice many more small opportunities for change than you expect. Over time, this will gradually produce an environment far more suited to your real needs than anything you could have planned up front. Just like professional chefs keep their environment organized with small nudges and adjustments, you can use noticing habits to “organize as you go.”

A Perfect System You Don’t Use Isn’t Perfect

any system that must be perfect to be reliable is deeply flawed.

A premortem is a useful practice, similar to a postmortem used to analyze how a project went wrong, except performed before the project starts. By asking what is likely to go wrong, you can take action to prevent it from happening in the first place.

An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people. —adrienne maree brown, writer and activist

#quote

Now our challenge isn’t to acquire more information; as we saw in the exploration of divergence and convergence, it is to find ways to close off the stream so we can get something done.

Once you start seeing even your biggest ambitions in terms of the smaller chunks of information they are made up of, you’ll begin to realize that any experience or passing insight can be valuable. Your fears, doubts, mistakes, missteps, failures, and self-criticism—it’s all just information to be taken in, processed, and made sense of. All of it is part of a larger, ever-evolving whole.

The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.

As Ryder Carroll says in The Bullet Journal Method, “Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.”

“Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.”

Polanyi observed that there are many tasks we can easily perform as humans that we can’t fully explain. For example, driving a car or recognizing a face. We can try to describe how we do these things, but our explanations always fall far short. That’s because we are relying on tacit knowledge, which is impossible to describe in exact detail. We possess that knowledge, but it resides in our subconscious and muscle memory where language cannot reach.

This problem—known as “self-ignorance”—has been a major roadblock in the development of artificial intelligence and other computer systems. Because we cannot describe how we know wh...

The jobs and endeavors that rely on tacit knowledge will be the last ones to be automated.

self-expression is a fundamental human need.

Your system can look like chaos to others, but if it brings you progress and delight, then it’s the right one.

Experiment with consistently distilling and refining your notes using Progressive Summarization and revisiting them during weekly reviews.

Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems. Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping.

I recommend you revisit Building a Second Brain at various points over time. I guarantee you’ll notice things you missed the first time.