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

by Tiago Forte

The first is that people need clear workspaces to be able to create.

archiving step is so crucial: you’re not losing anything, and it can all be found via search,

projects. Once you have a home for something,

the highest number that we can count at a glance and hold in our minds without extra effort.

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.

salacious

Indecent interest on sexual matters

cold? In my experience, life is constantly pushing and pulling us away from our priorities.

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.

highlighting the most important points. Highlighting is an activity that everyone understands, takes hardly any additional effort, and works in any app you might use.

each note is like a product you are creating for the benefit of that future customer.

Distillation is at the very heart of all effective communication.

Progressive Summarization takes advantage of a tool and a habit that we are all intimately familiar with—highlighting—while leveraging the unique capabilities of technology to make those highlights far more useful than anything you did in school.

the best stuff always sticks in your mind for an hour or two.

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.

when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly.

I’ll often prepare by highlighting my notes from our last call and drawing out decision points and action items into an agenda.

Think of a storyteller who captivates you with every word. Their story is well distilled, with unnecessary details stripped away. Think about the last time you were entranced by a drawing

Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities. Notetaking gives you a way to deliberately practice the skill of distilling every day.

Distilling makes our ideas small and compact, so we can load them up into our minds with minimal effort.

skill you can become better at over time. The more you exercise your judgment, the more efficient and enjoyable your notetaking will become because you know that every minute of attention you invest is creating lasting value. There are few things more satisfying than the feeling of making consistent progress.

successful. Her teachers at Garfield Elementary School

change in order to survive. Her stories allowed her

imperative

Crucial

The idea of dividing our work into smaller units isn’t new. You’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times: if you’re stuck on a task, break it down into smaller steps.

you then need a system for managing those pieces.

Reusing Intermediate Packets of work frees up our attention for higher-order, more creative thinking.

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

A scientist doesn’t obscure her sources—she points to them so others can retrace her footsteps.

All we are doing is adding a little bit of structure and intentionality to how we use them: capturing them in one place, such as a digital notes app, so we can find them with a search; organizing them according to our projects, areas, and resources, so we have a dedicated place for each important aspect of our lives; and distilling them down to their most essential points, so they can be quickly accessed and retrieved.

Summary

Getting feedback is really about borrowing someone else’s eyes to see what only a novice can see. It’s about stepping outside your subjective point of view and noticing what’s missing from what you’ve made.

Giving credit where credit is due doesn’t lessen the value of your contribution—it increases it.

Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks . . . It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.

Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention our most valuable skill.

Knowledge is the only resource that gets better and more valuable the more it multiplies.

Now we can speak the same language, coordinate our efforts, and share our progress in applying it. Knowledge becomes more powerful as it spreads.