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

by Tiago Forte

I could either take responsibility for my own health and my own treatment from that day forward, or I would spend the rest of my life shuttling back and forth between doctors without ever finding resolution.

With all this information in one place, patterns began to emerge.

In the digital realm, information could be molded and shaped and directed to any purpose, like a magical, primordial force of nature.

I wrote down feedback from my more experienced colleagues so I could make sure I digested it and took it to heart.

Every time we started a new project, I created a dedicated place on my computer for the information related to it, where I could sort through it all and decide on a plan of action.

as I worked on consulting projects for some of the most important organizations in the world, I started to realize that it could be a business asset as well.

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

I discovered that once I had that information at hand, I could easily and generously share it in all kinds of ways to serve the people around me.

Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do.

According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.

174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2

Information Overload has become 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

Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for mispl...

And a report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating infor...

In other words, we go to work five days per week, but spend more than one of those days on average just looking for the information we need to do our work.

Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories.

However, there’s a catch: every change in how we use technology also requires a change in how we think.

For centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”II

Popularized in a previous period of information overload, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the commonplace book was more than a diary or journal of personal reflections. It was a learning tool that the educated class used to understand a rapidly changing world and their place in it.

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book.

They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks.

and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.III

Commonplace books were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world.

used them to connect bits of knowledge from different sources and to insp...

Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time.

Once our notes and observations become digital, they can be searched, organized and synced across all our devices, and backed up to the cloud for safekeeping.

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.

It is a laboratory where you can develop and refine your thinking in solitude before sharing it with others.

A studio where you can experiment with ideas until they are ready to be put to use in the outside world.

When you enter the professional world, the demands on your notetaking change completely. The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need.

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.

The length and format don’t matter—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note.

You need to put in the effort to create a note only once, and then you can just mix and match and try out different combinations until something clicks.

Now we collect knowledge building blocks and spend our time imagining the possibilities for what they could become.

You take ten minutes before the meeting starts to organize your notes. About a third of them aren’t a priority, and you put them aside. Another third are critical, and you make them into an agenda for the meeting. The remaining third are somewhere in between, and you put them into a separate list to refer to if appropriate.

As this way of working with information continues over days and weeks and months, the way your mind works begins to change. You start to see recurring patterns in your thinking: why you do things, what you really want, and what’s really important to you.

All that’s left is for you to take action on what you already know and already have, which is laid out before you in meticulous detail.

You can’t fail, because failure is just more information, to be captured and used as fuel for your journey.

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.

Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are visual. They turn vague concepts into tangible entities that can be observed, rearranged, edited, and combined together. They may exist only in virtual form, but we can still see them with our eyes and move them around with our fingers. As researchers Deborah Chambers and Daniel Reisberg found in their research on the limits of mental visualization, “The skills we have developed for dealing with the external world go beyond those we have for dealing with the internal world.”2

In its most practical form, creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected.

“Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.”3

This tendency is known as 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. Now imagine if you were able to unshackle yourself from the limits of the present moment, and draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination.

Having a Second Brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for the long term turns the passage of time into your friend, instead of your enemy.

Until now we’ve talked mostly about gathering the ideas of others, but the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain is to allow your own thinking to shine.

It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”5

American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger once wrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, [but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7

If it feels like the well of inspiration has run dry, it’s because you need a deeper well full of examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes—anything that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in.

It’s not about having the perfect tools—it’s about having a reliable set of tools you can depend on, knowing you can always change them later.