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

by Tiago Forte

The Building a Second Brain system will teach you how to: Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds. Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently. Save your best thinking so you don’t have to do it again. Connect ideas and notice patterns across different areas of your life so you know how to live better. Adopt a reliable system that helps you share your work more confidently and with more ease.

Turn work “off” and relax, knowing you have a trusted system keeping track of all the details. Spend less time looking for things, and more time doing the best, most creative work you are capable of. 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. Like a bicycle for the mind,II once we learn how to use it properly, technology can enhance our cognitive abilities and accelerate us toward our goals far faster than we could ever achieve on our own.

First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words. Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, like practicing a dance routine or shooting hoops, which makes them far more likely to stick.

you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self. You probably consume a lot of books, articles, videos,

There is a key idea that catches our attention in the moment. We feel enraptured and obsessed with it. It’s difficult to imagine ever forgetting the new idea. It’s changed our lives forever! But after a few hours or days or weeks, it starts to fade from our memory. Soon our recollection of that exciting new idea is nothing but a pale shadow of something we once knew, that once intrigued us. Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fading away.

The most important factor in whether your notes can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful. Discoverability is an idea from information science that refers to “the degree to which a piece of content or information can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system.”

habit you probably remember from school: highlighting the most important points.

takes to review it all, and the less time they have to do so.

Here’s an example of a note I captured from an article in Psychology Today.4 I came across the link when it was shared on social media and saved it with two clicks to my read later app, where I collect bookmarks of everything I want to read, watch, or listen to. A few evenings later, when I wanted to do some casual reading to wind down for the day, I read the article and highlighted the passages I found most interesting. I have my read later app synced to my digital notes app, so any passage I highlight there automatically gets saved in my notes, including a link to the source.

This is what I call “layer one”—the chunks of text initially captured in my notes. Notice that I didn’t save the entire article—only a few key excerpts.III By limiting what I keep to only the best, most important, most relevant parts, I’m making all the subsequent steps of organizing, distilling, and expressing much easier. If I ever need to know the full details, I have the link to the original article right there at the bottom.

To enhance the discoverability of this note, I need to add a second layer of distillation. I usually do this when I have free time during breaks or on evenings or weekends, when I come across the note while working on other projects, or when I don’t have the energy for more focused work. All I have to do is bold the main points within the note. This could include keywords that provide hints of what this text is about, phrases that capture what the original author was trying to say, or sentences that especially resonated with me even if I can’t explain why. Looking over the bolded parts of the same note below, can you see how much easier it is to quickly grasp the gist of this note by looking only at those parts?

Look only at the bolded passages you identified in layer two and highlight only the most interesting and surprising of those points.

There is one more layer we can add, though it is quite rarely needed. 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. The best sign that a fourth layer is needed is when I find myself visiting a note again and again, clearly indicating that it is one of the cornerstones of my thinking. Looking only at the points I’ve previously bolded and highlighted in layers two and three makes it far easier to write this summary than if I was trying to summarize the entire article all at once. I recommend using bullet points to encourage yourself to make this executive summary succinct. Use your own words, define any unusual terms you’re using, and think about how your future self, who may not remember anything about this source, might interpret what you’re writing.

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. As Picasso’s bull and Burns’s documentaries illustrate, in making decisions about what to keep, we inevitably have to make decisions about what to throw away. You cannot highlight the main takeaways from an article without leaving some points out. You cannot make a highlight reel of a video without cutting some of the footage. You cannot give an effective presentation without leaving out some slides.

The effort we put into Progressive Summarization is meant for one purpose: to make it easy to find and work with our notes in the future.

More is not better when it comes to thinking and creating. Distilling makes our ideas small and compact, so we can load them up into our minds with minimal effort. If you can’t locate a piece of information quickly, in a format that’s convenient and ready to be put to use, then you might as well not have it at all. Our most scarce resource is time, which means we need to prioritize our ability to quickly rediscover the ideas that we already have in our Second Brain.

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 re...

The true test of whether a note you’ve created is discoverable is whether you can get the gist of it at a glance. Put it aside for a few days and set a reminder to revisit it once you’ve forgotten most of the details. When you come back to it, give yourself no more than thirty seconds and see if you can rapidly get up to speed on what it’s about using the highlights you previously made. You’ll quickly be able to tell if you’ve added too many highlights or too few.

When she was twelve years old, Estelle watched the 1954 film Devil Girl From Mars, a sensationalist B movie that was so terrible it convinced Estelle that she could write something better. She recalls, “Until I began writing my own stories, I never found quite what I was looking for… In desperation, I made up my own.”

The emerging Octavia made three rules for herself: Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”

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 final stage of the creative process, Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.

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.

Our time and attention are scarce, and it’s time we treated the things we invest in—reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides—as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch. Reusing Intermediate Packets of work frees up our attention for higher-order, more creative thinking. Thinking small is the best way to elevate your horizons and expand your ambitions.

Once you understand how incredibly valuable feedback is, you start to crave as much of it as you can find. You start looking for every opportunity to share your outputs and gain some clarity on how other people are likely to receive it. These moments are so important that you will begin changing how you work in order to get feedback as early and often as possible, because you know it is much easier to gather and synthesize the thoughts of others than to come up with an endless series of brilliant thoughts on your own. You will begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.

Adam Savage, host of the popular MythBusters television show and a skilled model maker, noted that because these pieces are so versatile, “There were some kits to which you would return repeatedly.” As part of the team at Industrial Light & Magic, the studio behind many special effects films, he relied on a particular kit that found its way into almost every model the team ever built.7

As the potential of your intellectual assets becomes apparent, you’ll start to look for any way to spend your time creating such assets and avoid one-off tasks whenever possible. You will start to seek out ways of acquiring or outsourcing the creation of these assets to others, instead of assuming you have to build them all yourself. These changes will enable you to get things done at a pace that is far beyond what mere “productivity tips” can ever achieve.

My favorite quote about creativity is from the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.”

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. To get stronger, you need to lift weights using the correct form. A musician relies on standardized notes and time signatures so they don’t have to reinvent the basics from scratch every time. To improve your writing, you need to follow the conventions of spelling and grammar (even if you decide to break those rules for special effect down the road). Through the simple acts of capturing ideas, organizing them into groups, distilling the best parts, and assembling them together to create value for others, we are practicing the basic moves of knowledge work in such a way that we can improve on them over time.

One of the most important patterns that underlies the creative process is called “divergence and convergence.”II

A 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.

When you distinguish between the two modes of divergence and convergence, you can decide each time you begin to work which mode you want to be in, which gives you the answers to the questions above. In divergence mode, you want to open up your horizons and explore every possible option. Open the windows and doors, click every link, jump from one source to another, and let your curiosity be your guide for what to do next. If you decide to enter convergence mode, do the opposite: close the door, put on noise-canceling headphones, ignore every new input, and ferociously chase the sweet reward of completion. Trust that you have enough ideas and enough sources, and it’s time to turn inward and sprint toward your goal. Of the two stages of this process, convergence is where most people struggle.

An archipelago is a chain of islands in the ocean, usually formed by volcanic activity over long spans of time. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are an archipelago of eight major islands extending over about 1,500 miles of the Pacific Ocean. 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.

Besides his prolific works, Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.” 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

How do you create a Hemingway Bridge? Instead of burning through every last ounce of energy at the end of a work session, reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes: Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect. Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing. Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach.

To take this strategy a step further, there is one more thing you can do as you wrap up the day’s work: send off your draft or beta or proposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend, family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still a work-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. The next time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input and suggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.

The solution that software teams landed on to deal with this kind of ballooning complexity is to “dial down the scope.” Instead of postponing the release of the app, which might prove disastrous in the face of looming competition and only delays the learning they need, the development team starts “dialing down” features as the release date approaches. The social network gets postponed to a future version. The progress charts lose their interactive features. The gym finder gets canceled completely. The first parts to be dialed down are the ones that are most difficult or expensive to build, that have the most uncertainty or risk, or that aren’t central to the purpose of the app. Like a hot-air balloon trying to take off, more and more features get thrown overboard to lighten the load and get the product off the ground. Any features that don’t make it into this version can always be released as part of future software updates.

When the full complexity of a project starts to reveal itself, most people choose to delay it. This is true of projects at work, and even more true of side projects we take on in our spare time. We tell ourselves we just need more time, but the delay ends up creating more problems than it solves. We start to lose motivation as the time horizon stretches out longer and longer. Things get lost or go out of date. Collaborators move on, technology becomes obsolete and needs to be upgraded, and random life events never fail to interfere. Postponing our goals and desires to “later” often ends up depriving us of the very experiences we need to grow. The problem isn’t a lack of time. It is that we forget that we have control over the scope of the project. We can “dial it down” to a more manageable size, and we must if we ever want to see it finished. Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time. You can’t wait until everything is perfect. There will always be something missing, or something else you think you need. Dialing Down the Scope recognizes that not all the parts of a given project are equally important. By dropping or reducing or postponing the least important parts, we can unblock ourselves and move forward even when time is scarce. Your Second Brain is a crucial part of this strategy, because you need a place to save the pa...

Knowing that nothing I write or create truly gets lost—only saved for later use—gives me the confidence to aggressively cut my creative works down to size without fearing that I’ve wasted effort or that I’ll lose the results of my thinking forever. Knowing that I can always release a fix, update, or follow up on anything I’ve made in the past gives me the courage to share my ideas before they’re perfectly ready and before I have them all figured out. And sharing before I feel ready has completely altered the trajectory of my career.

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.

Chefs have a particular system for accomplishing this daunting feat. It’s called 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. In the kitchen, this means small habits like always putting the mixing spoon in the same place so they know where to find it next time; immediately wiping a knife clean after using it so it’s ready for the next cut; or laying out the ingredients in the order they’ll be used so that they serve as placeholders. Chefs use mise en place—a philosophy and mindset embodied in a set of practical techniques—as their “external brain.”1 It gives them a way to externalize their thinking into their environment and automate the repetitive parts of cooking so they can focus completely on the creative parts.

The practice of conducting a “Weekly Review” was pioneered by executive coach and author David Allen in his influential book Getting Things Done.III He described a Weekly Review as a regular check-in, performed once a week, in which you intentionally reset and review your work and life. 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.

In a 1966 book,I the British-Hungarian philosopher 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.”

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 what we know, it can’t be programmed into software.