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

by Tiago Forte

It doesn’t matter how organized, aesthetically pleasing, or impressive your notetaking system is.

It is only the steady completion of tangible wins that can infuse you with a sense of determination, ...

Your Turn: Move Quickly, Touch Lightly

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

My mentor advised me to “move quickly and touch lightly” instead. 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?”

Start by asking yourself, “What projects am I currently committed to moving forward?” and then create a new project folder for each one.

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...

Look at your computer desktop, downloads folder, documents folder, bookmarks, emails, or open browser tabs: What are you keeping around b...

Each time you finish a project, move its folder wholesale to the archives, and each time you start a new project, look through your archives to see if any past project might have assets you can reuse.

Distill—Find the Essence

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

“I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the first reading because those are the initial instincts about what you thought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thought was bad.”

He broke down each scene according to five key criteria: a synopsis (or summary) of the scene; the historical context; the imagery and tone for the “look and feel” of a scene; the core intention; and any potential pitfalls to avoid. In his own words, “I endeavored to distill the essence of each scene into a sentence, expressing in a few words what the point of the scene was.”

The Godfather Notebook is a perfect example of the behind-the-scenes process used by successful creative professionals.

We can also use our notes to drill down to the essence of the stories, research, examples, and metaphors that make up our own source material.

Quantum Notetaking: How to Create Notes for an Unknown Future

When you initially capture a note, you may have only seconds to get it into your Second Brain before the next meeting, urgent task, or crying child comes calling.

When you first capture them, your notes are like unfinished pieces of raw material.

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.

You probably consume a lot of books, articles, videos, and social media posts full of interesting insights, but what are the chances that you’ll be ready to put any given piece of advice into action right at that instant?

Discoverability—The Missing Link in Making Notes 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.

Your future self might have mere minutes before a meeting starts to quickly search their notes for a reference they need.

Paradoxically, the more notes they collect, the less discoverable they become! This realization tends to either discourage them from taking any notes in the first place, or alternatively, to keep switching from one notetaking tool to another every time the volume gets overwhelming. Thus, they miss out on most of the benefits of their knowledge compounding over time.

You distill your message down to the key points and action steps.

Distillation is at the very heart of all effective communication.

The details and subtleties can come later once you have your audience’s attention.

Highlighting 2.0: The Progressive Summarization Technique

Progressive Summarization is the technique I teach to distill notes down to their most important points.

Progressive Summarization takes advantage of a tool and a habit that we are all intimately familiar with—highlighting—while leveraging the unique capabilities of technology to make those highlights far more useful than anything you did in school.

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...

Here is a snapshot of the four layers of Progressive...

This is what I call “layer one”—the chunks of text initially captured in my notes. Notice that I didn’t save the entire article—only a few key excerpts.III By limiting what I keep to only the best, most important, most relevant parts, I’m making all the subsequent steps of organizing, distilling, and expressing much easier.

I usually do this when I have free time during breaks or on evenings or weekends, when I come across the note while working on other projects, or when I don’t have the energy for more focused work.

All I have to do is bold the main points within the note.

This could include keywords that provide hints of what this text is about, phrases that capture what the original author was trying to say, or sentences that especially ...

At layer two, this note is already dramatically more discoverable.

For those notes that are especially long, interesting, or valuable, it is sometimes worth adding a third layer of highlighting. I advise using the “highlighting” feature offered by most notes apps, which paints passages in bright yellow just like the fluorescent highlighters we used in school (which appear in light gray below).

Look only at the bolded passages you identified in layer two and highlight only the most interesting and surprising of those points.

This will often amount to just one or two sentences that encapsulate the message of the original source.

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.

The best sign that a fourth layer is needed is when I find myself visiting a note again and again, clearly indicating that it is one of the cornerstones of my thinking.

I recommend using bullet points to encourage yourself to make this executive summary succinct.

By reviewing this executive summary, I can rapidly recall the main takeaways from this article in a fraction of the time it would take to reread the original.

Zooming In and Out of Your Map of Knowledge