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

by Tiago Forte

You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates. Just look for the signs: your eyes might widen slightly, your heart may skip a beat, your throat may go slightly dry, and your sense of time might subtly slow down as the world around you fades away. These are clues that it’s time to hit “save.”

We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8

If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowly quiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is telling you, the inner voice will grow stronger.

Besides capturing what personally resonates with you, there are a couple other kinds of details that are generally useful to save in your notes. 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

Also, 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.

Beyond Your Notetaking App: Choosing Capture Tools

The most common options include: Ebook apps, which often allow you to export your highlights or annotations all at once. Read later apps that allow you to bookmark content you find online for later reading (or in the case of podcasts or videos, listening or watching).

Basic notes apps that often come preinstalled on mobile devices and are designed for easily capturing short snippets of text. Social media apps, which usually allow you to “favorite” content and export it to a notes app. Web clippers, which allow you to save parts of web pages (often included as a built-in feature of notes apps). Audio/voice transcription apps that create text transcripts from spoken words. Other third-party services, integrations, and plug-ins that automate the process of exporting content from one app to another.

Think of your capture tools as your extended nervous system, reaching out into the world to allow you to sense your surroundings.

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 fr...

Capturing excerpts from online articles or web pages:

Capturing quotes from podcasts:

Capturing voice memos:

Capturing parts of YouTube videos:

This is a little-known feature, but almost every YouTube video is accompanied by an automatically generated transcript. Just click the “Open transcript” button and a window will open. From there, you can copy and paste excerpts to your notes.

Capturing excerpts fr...

Capturing content from other apps: You might edit photos in a photos app, or make sketches in a drawing app, or like posts in a social media app. As long as that app has a “share” button or allows for copy-and-paste, you can save whatever you’ve created directly to your notes for safekeeping.

The Surprising Benefits of Externalizing Our Thoughts

Your Second Brain gives you a place to corral the jumble of thoughts tumbling through your head and park them in a waiting area for safekeeping.

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 things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, like practicing a dance routine or shooting hoops, which makes them far more likely to stick.

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

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.

With a Second Brain as a shield against the media storm, we no longer have to react to each idea immediately, or risk losing it forever. We can set things aside and get to them later when we are calmer and more grounded.

Once our thoughts are outside our head, we can examine them, play with them, and make them better. It’s like a shortcut to realizing the full potential of the thoughts flowing through our minds.

Your Turn: What Would This Look Like If It Was Easy?

an open question that will help guide you as you embark on this journey: What would capturing ideas look like if it was easy?

Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’re already having.

Don’t worry about whether you’re capturing “correctly.” There’s no right way to do this, and therefore, no wrong way.

Organize—Save for Actionability

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

The Creative Habit,1

Tharp calls her approach “the box.” Every time she begins a new project, she takes out a foldable file box and labels it with the name of the project, usually the name of the dance she is choreographing. This initial act gives her a sense of purpose as she begins: “The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet. It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.”

Into the box she puts anything and everything related to the project, like a swirling cauldron of creative energy.

Even a project as open-ended as this one started the same way as all the others, with her goals: “I believe in starting each project with a stated goal. Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as ‘keep it simple’ or ‘something perfect’ or ‘economy’ to remind me of what I was thinking at the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it’s the first thing that goes into the box.”

may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.”

Finally, it gave her a way to look back on her past victories:

Twyla Tharp’s box reveals the true value of a simple container: it is easy to use, easy to understand, easy to create, and easy to maintain. It can be moved from place to place without losing its contents.

The Cathedral Effect: Designing a Space for Your Ideas

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.

As knowledge workers we spend many hours every day within digital environments—our computers, smartphones, and the web. Unless you take control of those virtual spaces and shape them to support the kinds of thinking you want to do, every minute spent there will feel taxing and distracting.

Organizing for Action: Where 99 Percent of Notetakers Get Stuck (And How to Solve It)

Capturing notes without an effective way to organize and retrieve them only leads to more overwhelm.

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

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 question: “In which project will this be most useful?” It assumes only that you are currently working on a certain set of projects, and that your information should be organized to support them.

If there isn’t a current project that your note would be useful for, we have a couple of other options of where to put it, including dedicated places for each of the main “areas” of your life that you are responsible for, and “resources,” which is like a personal library of references, facts, and inspiration.