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

by Tiago Forte

the worst time to try to decide what it relates to.

“keeping what resonates” in the moment is a separate decision from deciding to save something for the long term.

The four main categories are ordered by actionability to make the decision of where to put notes as easy as possible: Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind. Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable. Resources may become actionable depending on the situation. Archives remain inactive unless they are needed. This order gives us a convenient checklist for deciding where to put a note, starting at the top of the list and moving down: In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives.

Organizing by actionability counteracts our tendency to constantly procrastinate and postpone our aspirations to some far-off future. PARA pulls these distant dreams into the here and now, by helping us see that we already have a lot of the information we need to get started.

The archives are like the freezer—items are in cold storage until they are needed, which could be far into the future. Resources are like the pantry—available for use in any meal you make, but neatly tucked away out of sight in the meantime. Areas are like the fridge—items that you plan on using relatively soon, and that you want to check on more frequently. Projects are like the pots and pans cooking on the stove—the items you are actively preparing right now.

Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize.

PARA isn’t a filing system; it’s a production system. It’s no use trying to find the “perfect place” where a note or file belongs. There isn’t one. The whole system is constantly shifting and changing in sync with your constantly changing life.

A mentor of mine once gave me a piece of advice that has served me ever since: move quickly and touch lightly.

To look for the path of least resistance and make progress in short steps. I want to give the same advice to you: don’t make organizing your Second Brain into yet another heavy obligation. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?”

Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you think of the projects that might be on your plate: Notice what’s on your mind: What’s worrying you that you haven’t taken the time to identify as a project? What needs to happen that you’re not making consistent progress on? Look at your calendar: What do you need to follow up on from the past? What needs planning and preparation for the future? Look at your to-do list: What actions are you already taking that are actually part of a bigger project you’ve not yet identified? What communication or follow-up actions you’ve scheduled with people are actually part of a bigger project? Look at your computer desktop, downloads folder, documents folder, bookmarks, emails, or open browser tabs: What are you keeping around because it is part of a larger project?

As you create these folders and move notes into them, don’t worry about reorganizing or “cleaning up” any existing notes. You can’t afford to spend a lot of time on old content that you’re not sure you’re ever going to need. Start with a clean slate by putting your existing notes in the archives for safekeeping. If you ever need them, they’ll show up in searches and remain just as you left them.

The key thing to keep in mind is that these categories are anything but final. PARA is a dynamic, constantly changing system, not a static one. Your Second Brain evolves as constantly as your projects and goals change, which means you never have to worry about getting it perfect, or having it finished.

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher

This is the third step of CODE, to Distill. This is the moment we begin turning the ideas we’ve captured and organized into our own message. It all begins and ends with notes.

Quantum Notetaking: How to Create Notes for an Unknown Future

When you first capture them, your notes are like unfinished pieces of raw material. They require a bit more refinement to turn them into truly valuable knowledge assets, like a chemist distilling only the purest compound. This is why we separate capturing and organizing from the subsequent steps: you need to be able to store something quickly and save any future refinement for later. In this sense, notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.

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.”

To enhance the discoverability of your notes, we can turn to a simple habit you probably remember from school: highlighting the most important points.

Distillation is at the very heart of all effective communication. The more important it is that your audience hear and take action on your message, the more distilled that message needs to be. The details and subtleties can come later once you have your audience’s attention.

Highlighting 2.0: The Progressive Summarization Technique

The technique is simple: you 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.

Here is a snapshot of the four layers of Progressive Summarization:II

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.

With Progressive Summarization, you are building up a map of the best ideas found in your Second Brain. Your highlights are like signposts and waypoints that help you navigate through the network of ideas you’re exploring.

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.

The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers

Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting

A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. If you save a series of excerpts from a book amounting to five hundred words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty.

Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind

The most common question I hear about Progressive Summarization is “When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something.

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.

Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult

Don’t worry about analyzing, interpreting, or categorizing each point to decide whether to highlight it.

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.

Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”) —Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher

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.”

“Use what you have; even if it seems meager, it may be magic in your hands.”

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.

How to Protect Your Most Precious Resource As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource.

The challenge we face in building a Second Brain is how to establish a system for personal knowledge that frees up attention, instead of taking more of it.

there is a flaw in focusing only on the final results: all the intermediate work—the notes, the drafts, the outlines, the feedback—tends to be underappreciated and undervalued.

If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear.

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.

Intermediate Packets: The Power of Thinking Small

Here’s what most people miss: it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them. That system is your Second Brain, and the small pieces of work-in-process it contains I call “Intermediate Packets.”

Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work.

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.

There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work: Distilled notes: Books or articles you’ve read and distilled so it’s easy to get the gist of what they contain (using the Progressive Summarization technique you learned in the previous chapter, for example). Outtakes: The material or ideas that didn’t make it into a past project but could be used in future ones. Work-in-process: The documents, graphics, agendas, or plans you produced during past projects. Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered as part of past projects, which could become components of something new. Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can reference and incorporate into your work.