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

by Tiago Forte

So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

Human capital includes “the knowledge and the knowhow embodied in humans—their education, their experience, their wisdom, their skills, their relationships, their common sense, their intuition.”1

Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.I

Information overwhelm is real and addicting. In a quest to pass a little time, we consume more information. We have access to near boundless quantities of information, and yet seldom do the work of synthesizing or creating the information that is uniquely in our own perspective.

The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need. In the professional world: It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on. No one tells you when or how your notes will be used. The “test” can come at any time and in any form. You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place. You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them.

For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.

There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively.

mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges. The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge.

recency bias.4 We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones.

digital notes apps have four powerful characteristics that make them ideal for building a Second Brain.

Multimedia: Just like a paper notebook might contain drawings and sketches, quotes and ideas, and even a pasted photo or Post-it, a notes app can store a wide variety of different kinds of content in one place, so you never need to wonder where to put something.

Informal: Notes are inherently messy, so there’s no need for perfect spelling or polished presentation. This makes it as easy and frictionless as possible to jot things down as soon as they occur to y...

Open-ended: Taking notes is a continuous process that never really ends, and you don’t always know where it might lead. Unlike more specialized kinds of software that are designed to produce a specific kind of output (such as slide decks, spreadsheets, graphics, or videos), ...

Action-oriented: Unlike a library or research database, personal notes don’t need to be comprehensive or precise. They are designed to help you quickly capture stray thought...

remembering, connecting, and creating.

called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.

The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?”

shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.V

we also need information to live: to understand and adapt to our environment; to maintain relationships and cooperate with others; and to make wise decisions that further our interests.

Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?

Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?

Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?

Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

Capture What Resonates

Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives—make

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.”

This is basically a catchall for anything that doesn’t belong to a project or an area and could include any topic you’re interested in gathering information about.

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.”

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.

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.

Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,IV instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools. It gives you a practical, easy thing to do that adds value even when you don’t have the energy for more

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.

each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.

wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use.

The rule of thumb to follow is that 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

If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.

creative process is fueled by attention at every step. It is the lens that allows us to make sense of what’s happening, to notice what resources we have at our disposal, and to see the contribution we can make.

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

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.

Serendipity takes a few different forms when it comes to retrieval.

First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good idea to keep your focus a little broad.

Second, serendipity is amplified by visual patterns.

Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element of serendipity.

Three Stages of Expressing: What Does It Look Like to Show Our Work?

Remember: Retrieve an Idea Exactly When It’s Needed

Connect: Use Notes to Tell a Bigger Story

Create: Complete Projects and Accomplish Goals Stress-Free