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

by Tiago Forte

Writing creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.*

In a wide range of controlled studies, writing about one’s inner experiences led to a drop in visits to the doctor, improved immune systems, and reductions in distress. Students who wrote about emotional topics showed improvements in their grades, professionals who had been laid off found new jobs more quickly, and staff members were absent from work at lower rates.

PARA can handle it all, regardless of your profession or field, for one reason: it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.

Instead of inventing a completely different organizational scheme for every place you store information, which creates a tremendous amount of friction navigating the inconsistencies between them, PARA can be used everywhere, across any software program, platform, or notetaking tool.

With the PARA system, every piece of information you want to save can be placed into one of just four categories: 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.

Projects have a couple of features that make them an ideal way to organize modern work. First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or “publish.”

Examples of areas from your personal life could include: Activities or places you are responsible for: Home/apartment; Cooking; Travel; Car. People you are responsible for or accountable to: Friends; Kids; Spouse; Pets. Standards of performance you are responsible for: Health; Personal growth; Friendships; Finances.

This order gives us a convenient checklist for deciding where to put a note, starting at the top of the list and moving down: 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.

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.

The first is that people need clear workspaces to be able to create. We cannot do our best thinking and our best work when all the “stuff” from the past is crowding and cluttering our space.

Second, I learned that creating new things is what really matters.

A mentor of mine once gave me a piece of advice that has served me ever since: move quickly and touch lightly.

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?

Prompts for folder creation in PARA system.

“I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the first reading because those are the initial instincts about what you thought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thought was bad.”

“I endeavored to distill the essence of each scene into a sentence, expressing in a few words what the point of the scene was.”

Coppola’s story demonstrates that we can systematically gather building blocks from our reading and research that ultimately make the final product richer, more interesting, and more impactful.

Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect.

This is where I make my mistakes, Ispend all my time taking notes and not focusing on the actions I can take on them.

When you first capture them, your notes are like unfinished pieces of raw material. They require a bit more refinement to turn them into truly valuable knowledge assets, like a chemist distilling only the purest compound.

In this sense, notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.

Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fading away.

Discoverability is the element most often missing from people’s notes. It’s easy to save tons and tons of content, but turning it into a form that will be accessible in the future is another matter.

It’s your job to “sell” them on the value of the notes you are taking now.

Distillation is at the very heart of all effective communication.

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

Picasso’s act of distillation involves stripping away the unnecessary so that only the essential remains. Crucially, Picasso couldn’t have started with the single line drawing. He needed to go through each layer of the bull’s form step-by-step to absorb the proportions and shapes into his muscle memory. The result points to a mysterious aspect of the creative process: it can end up with a result that looks so simple, it seems like anyone could have made it. That simplicity masks the effort that was needed to get there.

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible.

As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly.

The biggest mistake people make when they start to distill their notes is that they highlight way too much.

If you’re going to capture everything, you might as well capture nothing.

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

If you try to do it with every note up front, you’ll quickly be mired in hours of meticulous highlighting with no clear purpose in mind. You can’t afford such a giant investment of time without knowing whether it will pay off. Instead, wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use.

The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future self*—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary.

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

The Parable of the Sower,

I should read this

The final stage of the creative process, Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others.

Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work.*

Like LEGO blocks, the more pieces you have, the easier it is to build something interesting.

Thinking small is the best way to elevate your horizons and expand your ambitions.

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...

Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered as part of past projects, which could becom...

Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can ...

Those four retrieval methods are: Search Browsing Tags Serendipity

They will often be completely uninterested in an aspect you think is utterly fascinating; they aren’t necessarily right or wrong, but you can use that feedback either way. The reverse can also happen. You might think something is obvious, while they find it mind-blowing. That is also useful feedback. Others might point out aspects of an idea you never considered, suggest looking at sources you never knew existed, or contribute their own ideas to make it better.

Thoughts are fleeting, quickly fading as time passes. To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it.

It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters.

What I learned from my father is that by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done.

Building a Second Brain is really about standardizing the way we work, because we only really improve when we standardize the way we do something.