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

by Tiago Forte

For example, in a few bullet points I might describe the last actions I took, details on why it was postponed or canceled, who was working on it and what role they played,

Hemingway bridge

Allen recommends using a Weekly Review to write down any new to-dos, review your active projects, and decide on priorities for the upcoming week.

I suggest adding one more step: review the notes you’ve created over the past week, give them succinct titles that tell you what’s inside, and sort them into the appropriate PARA folders.

Clear my email inbox. Check my calendar. Clear my computer desktop. Clear my notes inbox. Choose my tasks for the week.

A Monthly Review Template: Reflect for Clarity and Control While the Weekly Review is grounded and practical, I recommend doing a Monthly Review that is a bit more reflective and holistic. It’s a chance to evaluate the big picture and consider more fundamental changes to your goals, priorities, and systems that you might not have the chance to think about in the busyness of the day-to-day. Here’s mine: Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks.

Area notebooks often contain notes that become the seeds of future projects. For example, I used an area folder called “Home” to collect photos for the home studio remodel I mentioned previously. Even before it was an active project,

Noticing that an idea you have in mind could potentially be valuable and capturing it instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s nothing.” Noticing when an idea you’re reading about resonates with you and taking those extra few seconds to highlight it. Noticing that a note could use a better title—and changing it so it’s easier for your future self to find it. Noticing you could move or link a note to another project or area where it will be more useful. Noticing opportunities to combine two or more Intermediate Packets into a new, larger work so you don’t have to start it from scratch. Noticing a chance to merge similar content from different notes into the same note so it’s not spread around too many places. Noticing when an IP that you already have could help someone else solve a problem, and sharing it with them, even if it’s not perfect.

Here are more specific examples of what those opportunities might look like: You decide to visit Costa Rica on your next vacation, so you move a note with useful Spanish phrases from your “Languages” resource folder to a “Costa Rica” project folder to aid in your trip. Your director of engineering leaves for another job and you need to hire a new one, so you move the folder you created last time for “Engineering hire” from archives to projects to guide your search. You schedule the next in a series of workshops you are facilitating and move a PDF with workshop exercises from an area folder called “Workshops” to a new project folder for the specific workshop you’re planning. You notice that you need to buy a new computer because your current one is getting too slow, so you move some articles you’ve saved from the “Computer research” resource folder to a new project folder called “Buy a new computer.”

Wherever you are at this moment—just starting a practice to consistently take notes, or finding ways to more effectively organize and resurface your best thinking, or generating more original and impactful work—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)

Decide what you want to capture. Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. What do you most want to capture, learn, explore, or share? Identify two to three kinds of content that you already value to get started with. Choose your notes app. If you don’t use a digital notes app, get started with one now. See Chapter 3 and use the free guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources for up-to-date comparisons and recommendations. Choose a capture tool. I recommend starting with a read later app to begin saving any article or other piece of online content you’re interested in for later consumption. Believe me, this one step will change the way you think about consuming content forever. Get set up with PARA. Set up the four folders of PARA (Projects; Areas; Resources; Archives) and, with a focus on actionability, create a dedicated folder (or tag) for each of your currently active projects. Focus on capturing notes related to those projects from this point forward. Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems. Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping. Automatically capture your ebook highlights. Set up a free integration to automatically send highlights from your reading apps (such as a read later or ebook app) to your digital notes (see my recommendations

at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources). Practice Progressive Summarization. Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes. Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet. Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback. Make progress on one deliverable. Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and, using the Express techniques of Archipelago of Ideas, Hemingway Bridge, and Dial Down the Scope, see if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain. Schedule a Weekly Review. Put a weekly recurring meeting with yourself on your calendar to begin establishing the habit of conducting a Weekly Review. To start, just clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week.

From there, you can add other steps as your confidence grows. Assess your notetaking proficiency. Evaluate your current notetaking practices and areas for potential improvement using our free assessment tool at Buildingasecondbrain.com/quiz. Join the PKM community. On Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, or your platform(s) of choice, follow and subscribe to thought leaders and join communities who are creating content related to personal knowledge management (#PKM), #SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought. Share your top takeaways from this book or anything else yo...