Building a Second Brain Quotes

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“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.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“When it comes to our personal knowledge, there is no such assigned spot. We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is always changing. Sometimes we can receive one text message or email and the entire landscape of our day changes. Because our priorities can change at a moment’s notice, we have to minimize the time we spend filing, labeling, tagging, and maintaining our digital notes. We can’t run the risk of all that effort going to waste.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“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.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“In other words, you are always trying to place a note or file not only where it will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“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.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Once you’ve captured a batch of notes and it’s time to organize them, PARA comes into play. The four main categories are ordered by actionability to make the decision of where to put notes as easy as possible: Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind. Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable. Resources may become actionable depending on the situation. Archives remain inactive unless they are needed.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“This is why it’s so important to separate capture and organize into two distinct steps: “keeping what resonates” in the moment is a separate decision from deciding to save something for the long term.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Where Do I Put This?—How to Decide Where to Save Individual Notes Setting up folders is relatively easy. The harder question that strikes fear into the heart of every organizer is “Where do I put this?”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“These four categories—Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives—make up the four categories of PARA. We’ll explore each of them soon.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capturing content from other apps:”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capturing excerpts from emails:”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capturing parts of YouTube videos:”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capturing voice memos:”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capturing quotes from podcasts:”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capturing excerpts from online articles or web pages:”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capturing passages from ebooks:”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“The most common options include: Ebook apps, which often allow you to export your highlights or annotations all at once. Read later apps that allow you to bookmark content you find online for later reading (or in the case of podcasts or videos, listening or watching). Basic notes apps that often come preinstalled on mobile devices and are designed for easily capturing short snippets of text. Social media apps, which usually allow you to “favorite” content and export it to a notes app. Web clippers, which allow you to save parts of web pages (often included as a built-in feature of notes apps). Audio/voice transcription apps that create text transcripts from spoken words. Other third-party services, integrations, and plug-ins that automate the process of exporting content from one app to another.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Beyond Your Notetaking App: Choosing Capture Tools Now that you know what kinds of material to save in your Second Brain, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty: How does capturing work exactly?”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising? I’ve often noticed that many of the notes people take are of ideas they already know, already agree with, or could have guessed. We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal? One of the most valuable kinds of information to keep is personal information—your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos. Like the age-old practice of journaling or keeping a diary, we can use notetaking to document our lives and better understand how we became who we are.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful? Carpenters are known for keeping odds and ends in a corner of their workshop—a variety of nails and washers, scraps of lumber cut off from larger planks, and random bits of metal and wood. It costs nothing to keep these “offcuts” around, and surprisingly often they end up being the crucial missing piece in a future project.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me? Inspiration is one of the most rare and precious experiences in life. It is the essential fuel for doing your best work, yet it’s impossible to call up inspiration on demand. You can Google the answer to a question, but you can’t Google a feeling.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“This is why it’s so important to take on a Curator’s Perspective—that we are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information we choose to let into our lives.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4: 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!”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“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?”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential