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

by Tiago Forte

there is one category of software I recommend as the centerpiece of your Second Brain: a digital notetaking app.* There are plentiful options available, from the free notes app that came preinstalled on your smartphone to third-party software you can download with exactly the features you need.

Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?” It might include questions about relationships, such as “How can I have closer relationships with the people I love?” or productivity, like “How can I spend more of my time doing high-value work?”

professionally. The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in.

Take a moment now to write down some of your own favorite problems. Here are my recommendations to guide you: Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child (often you’ll continue to be fascinated with the same things as an adult). Don’t worry about coming up with exactly twelve (the exact number doesn’t matter, but try to come up with at least a few). Don’t worry about getting the list perfect (this is just a first pass, and it will always be evolving). Phrase them as open-ended questions that could have multiple answers (in contrast to “yes/no” questions with only one answer).

I eventually named this organizing system PARA,* 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.†

Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories.

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 can easily tell them apart.

of Progressive Summarization:*

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.”

all the intermediate work—the notes, the drafts, the outlines, the feedback—tends to be underappreciated and undervalued.

You can step through them in order until you find what you’re looking for. Those four retrieval methods are: Search Browsing Tags Serendipity

The CODE Method is based on an important aspect of creativity: that it is always a remix of existing parts. We all stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. No one creates anything out of a pure void.

It’s called mise en place, a culinary philosophy used in restaurants around the world.

To make this concrete: 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.

When organizing notes or files within PARA, it’s a very forgiving decision of where to put something, since search is so effective as a backup option.

Keep what resonates (Capture) Save for actionability (Organize) Find the essence (Distill) Show your work (Express)