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.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.1 A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2

Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.

Every minute we spend trying to mentally juggle all the stuff we have to do leaves less time for more meaningful pursuits like cooking, self-care, hobbies, resting, and spending time with loved ones.

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.

if 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.

She isn’t meeting her own standards for what she knows she’s capable of. There are experiences that she wants for herself and her family that seem to continuously get postponed, waiting for “someday” when somehow she will have the time and space to make them happen.

Literally my exact thoughts at the moment. Whilst I am performing well I’m not hitting the standards I set for myself and feel like something is missing.

So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse.

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.

Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form.

“The skills we have developed for dealing with the external world go beyond those we have for dealing with the internal world.”

“Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.”

By keeping diverse kinds of material in one place, we facilitate this connectivity and increase the likelihood that we’ll notice an unusual association.

In our Second Brain we can do the same: mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges.

The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge.

This tendency is known as recency bias.4 We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones.

Now imagine if you were able to unshackle yourself from the limits of the present moment, and draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination.

Our careers and businesses depend more than ever on our ability to advance a particular point of view and persuade others to adopt it as well.

Advocating for a particular point of view isn’t just a matter of sparkling charisma or irresistible charm. It takes supporting material.

When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t lost your touch or run out of creative juice. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with.

If it feels like the well of inspiration has run dry, it’s because you need a deeper well full of examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes—anything that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in.

You can find a free, continually updated guide to choosing your notes app and other Second Brain tools at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources.

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.

Each of these individuals has leveraged technology to remember, connect, and create far more effectively than if they had to do it on their own.

CODE is a map for navigating the endless streams of information we are now faced with every day. It is a modern approach to creating a commonplace book, adapted to the needs of the Information Age.

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

Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.

By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us, we can improve not only our ability to take better notes, but also our understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. It is a way of turning up the volume on our intuition so we can hear the wisdom it offers us.

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?”

Organizing for action gives you a sense of tremendous clarity, because you know that everything you’re keeping actually has a purpose.

It might take hundreds of pages and thousands of words to fully explain a complex insight, but there is always a way to convey the core message in just a sentence or two.

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?*

personal knowledge management exists to support taking action—anything else is a distraction.

Information isn’t a luxury—it is the very basis of our survival.

It’s not a matter of having enough raw talent. Talent needs to be channeled and developed in order to become something more than a momentary spark.

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

In other words, Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions.

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?”

This is something I want to do. Would be useful to have a list of big questions to answer and take action on.

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).

Put a plan in place to do this.

Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting.

The more economical you can be with the material you capture in the first place, the less time and effort your future self will have to spend organizing, distilling, and expressing it.*

Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future. A statistic, a reference, a research finding, or a helpful diagram—these are the equivalents of the spare parts a carpenter might keep around their workshop.

Sometimes you come across an idea that is neither inspiring, personal, nor obviously useful, but there is something surprising about it. You may not be able to put your finger on why, but it conflicts with your existing point of view in a way that makes your brain perk up and pay attention. Those are the ideas you should capture.

If what you’re capturing doesn’t change your mind, then what’s the point?

Make sure your best findings get routed back to your notes app where you can put them all together and act on them.

First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words.