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

by Tiago Forte

The layers of Progressive Summarization give you multiple ways of interacting with your notes depending on the needs of the moment.

The first time you read about a new idea, you might want to dive into the details ...

The next time you revisit that idea, you probably don’t want to repeat all that effort and read the same pie...

You can customize how much attention you spend on a note based on your energy level and time available.

With Progressive Summarization, you are building up a map of the best ideas found in your Second Brain.

You are building this map without moving anything or deleting anything.

Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,IV instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools.

Four Examples of Progressive

Summarization

Progressive Summarization can be used across a wide variety of differ...

I often use Progressive Summarization to summarize my notes after phone calls to make sure I’m extracting every bit of value from them.

Picasso’s Secret: Prune the Good to Surface the Great

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method

for forgetting as much as possible.

As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great...

it takes skill and courage to let the det...

The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers

Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting

The biggest mistake people make when they start

to distill their notes is that they highligh...

If you’re going to capture everything, you might as well capture nothing.

Remember that notes are not authoritative texts. You don’t need to and shouldn’t include every tiny detail.

Your notes only solve the problem of rediscovering those sources when you need them.

Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind

“When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something.

wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use.

When I’m about to get on a call with my lawyer, I’ll often prepare by highlighting my notes from our last call and drawing out decision points and action items into an agenda.

You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful.

This assumption forces you to be conservative in the time you spend summarizing notes, doing so only when it’s virtually guaranteed that it will be worth it.

The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discover...

This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it bette...

Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult

Don’t worry about analyzing, interpreting, or categorizing each point to decide whether to highlight it.

Certain passages will move you, pique your attention, make your heart beat faster, or provoke you. Those are clear signals that you’ve found something important, and it’s time to add a highlight.

When you learn the art of distillation, you will gain a lifelong skill that will impact every area of your life.

Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities.

Your Turn: Keep Your Future Self in Mind

The effort we put into Progressive Summarization is meant for one purpose: to make it easy to find and work with our notes in the future.

Distilling makes our ideas small and compact, so we can load them up into our mi...

Our most scarce resource is time, which means we need to prioritize our ability to quickly rediscover the ideas that we already have in our Second Brain.

When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.VIII

Each time you decide to add a highlight, you are developing your judgment: distinguishing the bits that truly matter from those that don’t.

There are few things more satisfying than the feeling of making consistent progress.

Express—Show Your Work

Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”) —Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher

The emerging Octavia made three rules for herself: Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”

Butler pioneered Afrofuturism, a genre that cast African Americans as protagonists who embrace radical change in order to survive.

The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blank page, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth.

If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.

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