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

by Tiago Forte

at some point you must start discarding possibilities and converging toward a solution.

Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is truly essential. It is about narrowing the range of possibilities so that you can make forward progress and end up with a final result you are proud of.

To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense.

Clicking a link will lead me not to the public web, where I can easily get distracted, but to another note within my Second Brain containing my full notes on that source.*

Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start.

The Hemingway Bridge is a way of making each creative leap from one island to the next less dramatic and risky:

reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things

Ideas for next steps. Current status. Things that maybe forgotten. Intention for tomorrow.

there is one more thing you can do as you wrap up the day’s work: send off your draft or beta or proposal for feedback.

You can’t wait until everything is perfect.

Dialing Down the Scope is a way of short-circuiting that paradox and testing the waters with something small and concrete, while still protecting the fragile and tentative edges of your work.

Chefs use mise en place—a philosophy and mindset embodied in a set of practical techniques—as their “external brain.”1 It gives them a way to externalize their thinking into their environment and automate the repetitive parts of cooking so they can focus completely on the creative parts.

The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

Here’s my own checklist: Capture my current thinking on the project. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.

Answer premortem* questions: What do you want to learn? What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer? What is most likely to fail?

How can I install the pre-mortem concept into my own work ?

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

Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks.

Monthly review template

I ask myself questions like “What successes or accomplishments did I have?” and “What went unexpectedly and what can I learn from it?”

There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually.

A perfect system you don’t use because it’s too complicated and error prone isn’t a perfect system—it’s a fragile system that will fall apart as soon as you turn your attention elsewhere.

Our attitude toward information profoundly shapes how we see and understand the world and our place in it. Our success in the workforce depends on our ability to make use of information more effectively and to think better, smarter, faster.

The brain can solve problems, but that isn’t its sole purpose. Your mind was meant for much more.

Any shift in identity can feel confronting and scary. You don’t know exactly who you will be and what it will be like on the other side, but if you persevere through the transition, there is always a new horizon of hope, possibility, and freedom waiting for you on the other side.

All you have to do is listen to what life is repeatedly trying to tell you. Life tends to surface exactly what we need to know, whether we like it or not.

Like a compassionate but unyielding teacher, reality doesn’t bend or cave to our will. It patiently teaches us in what ways our thinking is not accurate, and those lessons tend to show up across our lives again and again.

Making the shift to a mindset of abundance is about letting go of the things we thought we needed to survive but that no longer serve us. It means giving up low-value work that gives us a false sense of s...

As Ryder Carroll says in The Bullet Journal Method, “Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.”

You have everything you need to give back and be a force for good in the world. It all starts with knowledge, and you have at your disposal an embarrassment of riches.

“Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.”

How can you know what you want if you don’t know who you are?

This isn’t a “take it or leave it” ideology where you must accept all of it or none of it. If any part doesn’t make sense or doesn’t resonate with you, put it aside.

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 you’ve realized or discovered. There’s nothing more effective for adopting new behaviors than surrounding yourself with people who already have them.

Look to see how I can join personal knowledge management groups

chase what excites you.