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

by Tiago Forte

We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own. So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

I’ve long enjoyed reading books in the “self-improvement” genre, ever since I casually picked up The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz at a bookstore when I was 19. The idea that for only $15 and a few hours of reading I could obtain valuable information about how to improve my life blew my mind, and still does. I can remember even all those years ago feeling that most of what I was reading was slipping through my mind like sand. Those were probably the first inklings that I needed something like a Second Brain to save it all. What was the first moment you can remember wanting something like a personal system of knowledge management?

To be able to make use of information we value, we need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self.

This is currently the most popular highlight in the whole book! It was inspired by my love of science fiction, specifically, time travel stories. I think of notetaking as a two-way collaboration across time between your various selves. Your past self is responsible for research and fact-finding, and your future self for distillation and synthesis. If you could send any piece of knowledge or wisdom through time to your future self, what would it be? (Hint: you can!)

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

David Allen, author of the classic productivity book Getting Things Done, has been one of my chief sources of inspiration. This classic quote of his highlights perhaps the unifying principle between his work and mine: that our brains are very good at imagining new things, but terrible at remembering those things for long. Which is why we have to outsource the job of remembering to external systems that we adopt to complement our own abilities. While his advice is focused on actionable tasks, mine is about notes and the rest of your digital life. Ask yourself: what kinds of information that you are currently trying to remember with your biological memory could just as easily be remembered by your digital memory?

This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas.

One of my biggest challenges has been explaining what a Second Brain is in terms of things people already know and do. Creating such a system may seem like a completely novel thing to do, when in fact we already perform lots of similar behaviors in our everyday lives, such as journaling, sketching, and writing Post-it notes to remember things. A Second Brain just makes them digital and combines them into one centralized place. What writing or notetaking practices do you already have the habit of doing, that could be repurposed to start building a lifelong repository of knowledge?

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.

Through teaching this material over the years, I’ve found that I have to get people to radically reimagine what a note even is. People tend to think of the throwaway notes they took for tests in school or meeting notes they’ll never revisit again. But I think of a note as something far more long-term and reusable, which is why I introduced the definition you see here. The idea to call notes "knowledge building blocks" came from my childhood obsession with LEGOs. Even though I had no idea what I would build in the future, I knew that the more pieces I collected in the meantime, the more prepared I'd be for whatever came.

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.

At this point in the book I suspect people are still on the fence about whether a Second Brain is really for them. They’re in evaluation mode, trying to get a sense of whether the effort required is worth the promised benefits. Reading about these 4 “superpowers” a Second Brain gives you, which one is most attractive and promising? Would having that capability at your fingertips make it all worth it to you?

Introducing The CODE Method: The Four Steps to Remembering What Matters To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.

CODE was actually one of the last things I added to my methodology. I was brainstorming late one night in the apartment in Mexico City where my wife Lauren and I lived at the time. I kept sketching different combinations of words on my notepad to visualize the overarching process of turning inputs into results. Suddenly, the word CODE jumped out at me. It fit the 4 steps perfectly, and also happened to spell out a real English word. I jumped to my feet in excitement and yelled “Yes!!!!” at the top of my lungs because this felt like the last missing piece I needed to write this book. This is also a perfect example of how curating ideas in your Second Brain leads to really unexpected breakthroughs: you start collecting interesting ideas, and eventually they seem to merge together and reach a critical mass and a brilliant insight just pops out at you!

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.

This one little sentence distills so much trial and error I had to do. I spent so much time trying to follow elaborate rules and strict checklists to help me decide what to save in my notes. Ultimately, my fear of not saving the “right” things came from not trusting myself. Once I started to put faith in my intuition about what was insightful, interesting, and novel, I found that my decision became very clear: keep what resonates, and discard the rest.

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?”

I think in some ways this might be the organizing principle for this entire book: to work with information in terms of its utility. It’s so easy for us to get caught up in the meaning of information – whether it’s correct or incorrect, right or wrong, good or bad, and whether we agree or not. There’s a time and place for making those judgments, but when it comes to collecting information in the first place, it is far more powerful to step back and view it objectively. Ask questions such as “Can I use this information to produce a result?” or “Does this provide a new perspective on a topic?“ and save the deep thinking for later, once you’ve collected lots of different perspectives to choose from.

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.

This returns to the idea that notetaking is about communication with your future self through time. When you invest your time and attention in knowledge that can grow and compound, like a high yield investment, then your future self (who will show up just a few minutes from now) will get to continuously harvest that value. It’s a very powerful way to view your future self: as someone important and worthy of giving such precious gifts to.