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

by Tiago Forte

Use your list of favorite problems to make decisions about what to capture: anything potentially relevant to answering them.

in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed.

Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too. With a notes app, you can always save links back to the original content if you need to review your sources or want to dive deeper into the details in the future.

The biggest pitfall I see people falling into once they begin capturing digital notes is saving too much. If you try to save every piece of material you come across, you run the risk of inundating your future self with tons of irrelevant information. At that point, your Second Brain will be no better than scrolling through social media.

This is why it’s so important to take on a Curator’s Perspective—that we are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information we choose to let into our lives. Thinking like a curator means taking charge of your own information stream, instead of just letting it wash over you. The more economical you can be with the material you capture in the first place, the les...

Here are four criteria I suggest to help you decide exactly which nuggets of know...

Capture Criteria #1: Does It ...

There is a way to evoke a sense of inspiration more regularly: keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories.

Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?

Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future. A statistic, a reference, a research finding, or a helpful diagram—these are the equivalents of the spare parts a carpenter might keep around their workshop.

Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?

One of the most valuable kinds of information to keep is personal information—your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos. Like the age-old practice of journaling or keeping a diary, we can use notetaking to document our lives and better understand how we became who we are.

Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.”6

The renowned information theorist Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you.7

Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.

Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know. We are already surrounded by algorithms that feed us only what we already believe and social networks that continually reinforce what we already think.

By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions.

Ultimately, Capture What Resonates I’ve given you specific criteria to help you decide what is worth capturing, but if you take away one thing from this chapter, it should be to keep what resonates.

We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8 When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why.

“Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without our conscious awareness.”

It’s a good idea to capture key information about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title of the piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published.III

it’s often helpful to capture chapter titles, headings, and bullet-point lists, since they add structure to your notes and represent distillation already performed by the author on your behalf.

No matter how many different kinds of software you use, don’t leave all the knowledge they contain scattered across dozens of places you’ll never think to look. Make sure your best findings get routed back to your notes app where you can put them all together and act on them.

Here are some of the most popular ways of using capture tools to save content you come across: Capturing passages from ebooks: Most ebook apps make it very easy to highlight passages as you read. On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes. You can also add comments right alongside the text as you read, which will help you remember what you found interesting about a passage. Capturing excerpts from online articles or web pages: When you come across an online article or blog post you want to read, save it to a “read later” app, which is like a digital magazine rack of everything you want to read (or watch or listen to) at some point. Whenever you have some free time (such as on breaks or in the evening after work), scroll through the articles you’ve saved and pick one to read. You can make highlights, just as with ebooks, and they can also be automatically exported to your notes app using a third-party platform. Capturing quotes from podcasts: Many podcast player apps allow you to bookmark or “clip” segments of episodes as you’re listening to them. Some of them will even transcribe the audio into text, so you can export and search it within your notes. Capturing voice memos: Use a voice memo app that allows you to press a button, speak directly into your smartphone, and have every word transcr...

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 creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.V

Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking.

There is even significant evidence that expressing our thoughts in writing can lead to benefits for our health and well-being.11 One of the most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that “translating emotional events into words...

Perhaps the most immediate benefit of capturing content outside our heads is that we escape what I call the “reactivity loop”—the hamster wheel of urgency, outrage, and sensationalism that characterizes so much of the Internet. The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means. You need to set it aside and gain some objectivity.

Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’re already having. It’s about squeezing more juice out of the fruit of life, savoring every moment to the fullest by paying closer attention to the details.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.

Every time I fell off the organizing wagon, I reverted to dropping all my notes and files into a folder for whichever project I was currently focused on. This ensured that at least I had exactly what I needed for my current work immediately on hand—no tagging, filing, or keywords needed. Then one day I had a realization: Why didn’t I just organize my files that way all the time? If organizing by project was the most natural way to manage information with minimal effort, why not make it the default?

I eventually named this organizing system PARA,I which stands for the four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.II

PARA can handle it all, regardless of your profession or field, for one reason: it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.

The project becomes the main unit of organization for your digital files. Instead of having to sort your notes according to a complex hierarchy of topics and subtopics, you have to answer only one simple q...

Instead of requiring tons of time meticulously organizing your digital world, PARA guides you in quickly sorting your ideas according to what really matters: your goals.

One of the biggest temptations with organizing is to get too perfectionistic, treating the process of organizing as an end in itself. There is something inherently satisfying about order, and it’s easy to stop there instead of going on to develop and share our knowledge. We need to always be wary of accumulating so much information that we spend all our time managing it, instead of putting it to use in the outside world.

The intention here is not to use a single software program, but to use a single organizing system, one that provides consistency even as you switch between apps many times per day.

With the PARA system, every piece of information you want to save can be placed into one of just four categories: 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: What I’m Working on Right Now

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.”

Areas: What I’m Committed to Over Time

Examples of areas from your personal life could include: Activities or places you are responsible for: Home/apartment; Cooking; Travel; Car. People you are responsible for or accountable to: Friends; Kids; Spouse; Pets. Standards of performance you are responsible for: Health; Personal growth; Friendships; Finances.

Resources: Things I Want to Reference in the Future

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.

Any one of these subjects could become its own resource folder. You can also think of them as “research” or “reference materials.”

Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold

This includes any item from the previous three categories that is no longer active.

The archives are an important part of PARA because they allow you to place a folder in “cold storage” so that it doesn’t clutter your workspace, while safekeeping it forever just in case you need it.