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

by Tiago Forte

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 Things get lost or go out of date.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...