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

by Tiago Forte

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.