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

by Tiago Forte

In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives.

We cannot do our best thinking and our best work when all the “stuff” from the past is crowding and cluttering our space. That’s why that archiving step is so crucial:

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, momentum, and accomplishment.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you think of the projects that might be on your plate: 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 with people are actually part of a bigger project? Look at your computer desktop, downloads folder, documents folder, bookmarks, emails, or open browser tabs: What are you keeping around because it is part of a larger project? Here’s some examples of projects my students have come up with: Find new doctor who accepts my insurance Plan goals and agenda for annual team retreat Collect list of common food supplies and set up recurring deliveries Develop content strategy for next quarter Review draft of new reimbursement policy and provide feedback Share collaboration ideas with research partner Research and draft article on health equity Complete online course on creative writing

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

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.

To enhance the discoverability of this note, I need to add a second layer of distillation.

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 resonated with me even if I can’t explain why.

For those notes that are especially long, interesting, or valuable, it is sometimes worth adding a third layer of highlighting.

“highlighting”

one more layer we can add, though it is quite rarely needed.

“executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the

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

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

Let’s look at more examples of progressively summarized notes: A Wikipedia article A blog post A podcast interview Meeting notes

The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers

Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting

A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.

five hundred words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty.

Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind

wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use. For example, when I’m preparing to write a blog post or article, I’ll usually start by highlighting the most interesting points

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

leave it better than you found it.

Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult

rely on your intuition to tell you when a passage is interesting, counterintuitive, or relevant to your favorite problems or a current project.

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.

Start by saving only the best excerpts from that piece of content in a new note, either using copy-paste or a capture tool.

Next, read through the excerpts, bolding the main points and most important

Now read through only the bolded passages, and highlight (or, if your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, underline) the best of the best passages.

be very picky:

Put it aside for a few days and set a reminder to revisit it

give yourself no more than thirty seconds and see if you can rapidly get up to speed on what it’s about using the highlights

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.

There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work: Distilled notes: Books or articles you’ve read and distilled so it’s easy to get the gist of what they contain (using the Progressive Summarization technique you learned in the previous chapter, for example). Outtakes: The material or ideas that didn’t make it into a past project but could be used in future ones. Work-in-process: The documents, graphics, agendas, or plans you produced during past projects. Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered as part of past projects, which could become components of something new. Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can reference and incorporate into your work.

If you’re reading how-to articles in your free time, you can save the best tips in your notes and turn them into distilled notes for when it’s time to put them to use.

Consider the different kinds of documents and other content that you probably regularly produce as part of your normal routines: Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media Journal or diary entries with your personal reflections Highlights or underlined passages in books or articles Messages, photos, or videos posted on social media Slides or charts included in presentations Diagrams, mind maps, or other visuals on paper or in apps Recordings of meetings, interviews, talks, or presentations Answers to common questions you receive via email Written works, such as blog posts or white papers Documented plans and processes such as agendas, checklists, templates, or project retrospectives

A concert poster on the side of a building you snapped a photo of might inform the shapes in a logo you’re designing. A song overheard on the subway might influence a jingle you’re writing for your child’s school play. An idea about persuasion you read in a book might become a central pillar in a health campaign you are organizing for your company.

Influences you might use to inspire part of a project

there are four methods for retrieval that overlap and complement one another.

Those four retrieval methods are: Search Browsing Tags Serendipity

Retrieval Method #1: Search

Retrieval Method #2: Browsing

Retrieval Method #3: Tags

Retrieval Method #4: Serendipity

it follows the same simple pattern, alternating back and forth between divergence and convergence.

If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model of divergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template for the creative process in our time. The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence.

In divergence mode, you want to open up your horizons and explore every possible option.

If you decide to enter convergence mode, do the opposite: close the door, put on noise-canceling headphones, ignore every new input, and ferociously chase the sweet reward of completion.