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

by Tiago Forte

To be able to make use of information we value, we need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self. We need a way to cultivate a body of knowledge that is uniquely our own, so when the opportunity arises—whether changing jobs, giving a big presentation, launching a new product, or starting a business or a family—we will have access to the wisdom we need to make good decisions and take the most effective action. It all begins with the simple act of writing things down.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

As people set out on their Second Brain journey, there are three stages of progress I often observe—and even encourage. Those stages are remembering, connecting, and creating.

“CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.

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?”

There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence.

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.

What is the point of knowledge if it doesn’t help anyone or produce anything?*

Information is food for the brain. It’s no accident that we call new ideas “food for thought.”

Just as with the food we put into our bodies, it is our responsibility and right to choose our information diet.

the information stream and curate only the very best ideas we encounter in a private, trusted place. Think of it as planting your own “knowledge garden” where you are free to cultivate your ideas and develop your own thinking away from the deafening noise of other people’s opinions.

A garden is only as good as its seeds, so we want to start by seeding our knowledge garden with only the most interesting, insightful, useful ideas we can find.

What does it look like to move from mindless consumption to mindful creation?

What would capturing ideas look like if it was easy?

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. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.

Gardens are natural, but they don’t happen by accident. They require a caretaker to seed the plants, trim the weeds, and shape the paths winding through them. It’s time for us to put more intention into the digital environments where we now spend so many of our waking hours.

Your Second Brain is like a mind cathedral that you can step into any time you want to shut out the world and imagine a world of your own.

PARA isn’t a filing system; it’s a production system. It’s no use trying to find the “perfect place” where a note or file belongs. There isn’t one. The whole system is constantly shifting and changing in sync with your constantly changing life.

Any piece of information (whether a text document, an image, a note, or an entire folder) can and should flow between categories.

There is a key idea that catches our attention in the moment. We feel enraptured and obsessed with it. It’s difficult to imagine ever forgetting the new idea. It’s changed our lives forever! But after a few hours or days or weeks, it starts to fade from our memory. Soon our recollection of that exciting new idea is nothing but a pale shadow of something we once knew, that once intrigued us.

If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again.

miss: it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them.

Should you do more research, or start organizing the research you’ve already done? Should you widen your horizons, or narrow your focus? Should you start something new, or finish something you’ve already started?

I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.” He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start.

Capture my current thinking on the project. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.

The most common misconception about organizing I see when I’m working with clients is the belief that organizing requires a heavy lift. They seem to believe that if they could just block off their calendar and get a few days free of pressing commitments, then they’d finally be able to curb the clutter and clear their head.

There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually. There’s no need to clear your inbox frequently; unlike your to-do list, there’s no negative consequence if you miss a given note. There’s no need to review or summarize notes on a strict timeline; we’re not trying to memorize their contents or keep them top of mind.

The truth is, any system that must be perfect to be reliable is deeply flawed.

We have to remember that we are not building an encyclopedia of immaculately organized knowledge. We are building a working system. Both in the sense that it must work, and in the sense that it is a regular part of our everyday lives. For that reason, you should prefer a system that is imperfect, but that continues to be useful in the real conditions of your life.

Underlying our struggles and challenges with productivity, creativity, and performance is our fundamental relationship to the information in our lives. That relationship was forged during your upbringing as you encountered new experiences, and was influenced by your personality, learning style, relationships, and your genes. You learned to react in a certain way when faced with new ideas. You adopted a default “blueprint” for how you treated incoming information—with anticipation, fear, excitement, self-doubt, or some complex mix of feelings that is unique to you.

That is why building a Second Brain is a journey of personal growth. As your information environment changes, the way your mind operates starts to be transformed. You leave behind one identity and step into another—an identity as the orchestrator and conductor of your life, not its passenger.

The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself?

There are people who will be reached only if they are reached by you. People who have no other source for the kind of guidance you can provide. People who don’t know where to look for solutions to problems they might not even know they have. You can be that person for them.

you can always fall back on the four steps of CODE: Keep what resonates (Capture) Save for actionability (Organize) Find the essence (Distill) Show your work (Express)