- A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
Introduction: The Promise of a Second Brain
- Personal knowledge management helps us harness the full potential of what we know
- Technology is not just a storage medium but a tool for thinking
- 'Second Brain' = digital archive of your most valuable memories, ideas, and knowledge to help you do your job, run your business, and manage your life without having to keep every detail in your head
- People who continue to rely on their fragile biological brains will become ever more overwhelmed by the explosive growth in the complexity of our lives
Part One: The Foundation - Understanding What's Possible
Chapter 1: Where It All Started
- 'Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.' - David Allen, author of Getting Things Done
- You know the feeling of satisfaction when you are the only one in the room who remembers an important detail?
- A collection of notes can be a business asset
- The impact of his Second Brain: when he was forgetful, it always remembers, when he lost his way, it reminded him where they were going, when he felt stuck and at a loss for ideas, it suggested possibilities and pathways
- People use various productivity tools, such as paper notepads or the apps on their smartphones, but not in a systematic or intentional way. They move information around from place to place haphazardly, react to demands in the moment, never quite trusting they'll be able to find it again
Chapter 2: What Is a Second Brain?
- Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively
- New York Times reports we consume 5x more information every day than we did in 1986
- Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something
- Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files
- A report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems. Incredibly, only 56 percent of the time are they able to find the information required to do their jobs
- In other words, we go to work five days per week, but spend more than one of those days on average just looking for the information we need to do our work
- It’s time to acknowledge that we can’t “use our head” to store everything we need to know and to outsource the job of remembering to intelligent machines. We have to recognize that the cognitive demands of modern life increase every year, but we’re still using the same brains as two hundred thousand years ago, when modern humans first emerged on the plains of East Africa
- Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories
- 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 centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”
- Once our notes and observations become digital, they can be searched, organized and synced across all our devices, and backed up to the cloud for safekeeping. Instead of randomly scribbling down notes on pieces of paper, hoping we’ll be able to find them later, we can cultivate our very own “knowledge vault” so we always know exactly where to look
- “There is a gaping opportunity to consolidate our myriad marginalia* into an even more robust commonplace book. One searchable, always accessible, easily shared and embedded amongst the digital text we consume.” - Craig Mod
- In school or courses you take, it can be used to take notes for studying. At work, it can help you organize your projects. At home, it can help you manage your household
- However you decide to use it, your Second Brain is a private knowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth, not just a single use case. It is a laboratory where you can develop and refine your thinking in solitude before sharing it with others. A studio where you can experiment with ideas until they are ready to be put to use in the outside world. A whiteboard where you can sketch out your ideas and collaborate on them with others.
- A calendar app is an extension of your brain’s ability to remember events, ensuring you never forget an appointment.
- It’s time to add digital notes to our repertoire and further enhance our natural capabilities using technology.
- Nowadays, almost everyone needs a way to manage information.
- More than half the workforce today can be considered “knowledge workers”—professionals for whom knowledge is their most valuable asset, and who spend a majority of their time managing large amounts of information. In addition, no matter what our formal role is, all of us have to come up with new ideas, solve novel problems, and communicate with others effectively. We have to do these things regularly, reliably, not just once in a while.
- Knowledge begins with the simple, time-honored practice of taking notes.
- For many people, their understanding of notetaking was formed in school. You were probably first told to write something down because it would be on the test. This implied that the minute the test was over, you would never reference those notes again. Learning was treated as essentially disposable, with no intention of that knowledge being useful for the long term.
- When you enter the professional world, the demands on your notetaking change completely. The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need.
- In the professional world:
- It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on.
- No one tells you when or how your notes will be used.
- The “test” can come at any time and in any form.
- You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place.
- You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them.
- Knowledge building blocks can also be combined into something much greater—a report, an argument, a proposal, a story
- Like the LEGO blocks you may have played with as a kid, they can be rapidly searched, retrieved, moved around, assembled, and reassembled into new forms without requiring you to invent anything from scratch
- Technology doesn’t just make notetaking more efficient. It transforms the very nature of notes. No longer do we have to write our thoughts on Post-its or notepads that are fragile, easy to lose, and impossible to search. Now we write notes in the cloud, and the cloud follows us everywhere. No longer do we have to spend countless hours meticulously cataloging and transcribing our thoughts on paper. Now we collect knowledge building blocks and spend our time imagining the possibilities for what they could become.
- We have reached an inflection point, where technology has become sufficiently advanced and user-friendly that we can integrate it with our biological brains. Computers have become smaller, more powerful, and more intuitive, to the point that they are unmistakably an essential component of how we think
Chapter 3: How a Second Brain Works
- 'It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember.' - Abhinavagupta
- Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively
- Creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected
- Just like a paper notebook might contain drawings and sketches, quotes and ideas, and even a pasted photo or Post-it, a notes app can store a wide variety of different kinds of content in one place, so you never need to wonder where to put something
- Personal notes are designed to help you quickly capture stray thoughts so you can remain focused on the task at hand
- Digital notes supercharge the timeless benefits of paper notes with the incredible capabilities of technology—searching, sharing, backups, editing, linking, syncing between devices, and many others. Digital notes combine the casual artistry of a daily sketchbook with the scientific power of modern software
- It’s not about having the perfect tools—it’s about having a reliable set of tools you can depend on, knowing you can always change them later
- The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid. They use their digital notes to save facts and ideas that they would have trouble recalling otherwise: takeaways from meetings, quotes from interviews, or the details of a project, for example
- You might email yourself a quick note, brainstorm some ideas in a document, or highlight quotes in a book you’re reading, but that information probably remains disconnected and scattered
- The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside
- The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now
- Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?”
- 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
- Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory
- You already put in so much effort to keep track of all the information you need for your studies, your job, or your business. All you need is a slightly more intentional, more deliberate way to manage that information, plus a few practical habits to ensure it gets done
Part 2: The Method - The Four Steps of CODE
- CODE: Capture, Organize, Distill, Express
Chapter 4: Capture—Keep What Resonates
- External knowledge: highlights of insightful passages from books and articles you read, quotes from podcasts or audiobooks you listen to, bookmarks and links to interesting content you find on the web or favorite social media posts, voice memos or clips recorded on your mobile device as notes to self, meeting notes on what was discussed during meetings or phone calls, images or photos or other images that you find inspiring or interesting, takeaways or lessons from courses, conferences, or presentations you've attended
- Internal knowledge: stories, favorite anecdotes, insights, small and big realizations you have, memories, experiences from your life that you don't want to forget, reflections, personal thoughts and lessons written in a journal or diary, musings, random 'shower' ideas that pop into your head
- We need an external medium in which to see our ideas from another vantage point, and writing things down is the most effective and convenient one ever invented
- Information like tax records, government documents, passwords, and health records shouldn't be saved in your notes
- Capture criteria: does it inspire me? Is it useful? Is it personal? Is it surprising?
- 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
- No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime of conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned. No one else values the small moments of your days quite like you do
- Claude Shannon's simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you
- 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
- By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions
- The secret to making reading a habit is to make it effortless and enjoyable
- It’s a good idea to capture key information about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title of the piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published
- It’s often helpful to capture chapter titles, headings, and bullet-point lists, since they add structure to your notes
- Often ideas occur to us at the most random times—during our commute, while watching TV, when we’re playing with our kids, or in the shower
- Your Second Brain gives you a place to corral the jumble of thoughts tumbling through your head and park them in a waiting area for safekeeping
- First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,” 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
- Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking
- Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’re already having. It’s about squeezing more juice out of the fruit of life, savoring every moment to the fullest by paying closer attention to the details
Chapter 5: Organize—Save for Actionability
- 'Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.' - Gustave Flaubert
- You’ll start to pay closer attention to the books you read, the conversations you have, and the interviews you listen to, knowing that any interesting idea you encounter can be reliably saved and utilized. You no longer have to hope that you’ll remember your best ideas—you can ensure that you will
- PARA: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives
- PARA is an organizing system based on projects
- It assumes you are currently working on a certain set of projects, and that your information should be organized to support them
- What if you aren't working on a project currently?
1. Projects: short-term efforts in your work or life that you're working on now
- They have a beginning and an end
- The have a clear outcome in order for them to be marked as complete
2. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time
- Areas can be activities, places, people, teams, departments, functions, and standards of performance you are responsible for
3. Resources: Topic or interests that may be useful in the future
- What topics are you interested in?
- What subjects are you researching?
- What useful information do you want to be able to reference?
- Which hobbies or passions do you have?
4. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories
- Things completed or put on hold
- The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goals forward, not get a PhD in notetaking
- 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
- 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. That’s why that archiving step is so crucial
- Start by creating the folders for PARA. And then start with the Projects folder and the Archive filder
Chapter 6: Distill—Find the Essence
- 'To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.' - Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher
- Keep your executive summary succinct. Use your own words, define any unusual terms you’re using, and think about how your future self, who may not remember anything about this source, might interpret what you’re writing
- Progressive summarization: excerpts, bold, highlight, executive summary
- Often your own thoughts need some distillation before you can take action on them
- In our daily conversations, the ability to be succinct without missing key details is what leads to exciting conversations that leave both people feeling enlivened. Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities
- The effort we put into Progressive Summarization is meant for one purpose: to make it easy to find and work with our notes in the future
Chapter 7: Express—Show Your Work
- Octavia's (Octavia Estelle Butler) three rules for herself:
1. Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with.
2. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open.
3. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”
- If you’re stuck on a task, break it down into smaller steps
- Our time and attention are scarce, and it’s time we treated the things we invest in—reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides—as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch
- People give much better feedback if they’re included early, and the work is clearly in progress
- I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational system. It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your folders. However, tags can come in handy in specific situations when the two previous retrieval methods aren’t up to the task, and you want to spontaneously gather, connect, and synthesize groups of notes on the fly
- It is much easier to show someone a small thing, and ask for their thoughts on it, rather than the entire opus you’re creating
- See yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas
- It is by sharing our ideas with other people that we discover which ones represent our most valuable expertise.
- Giving credit where credit is due doesn’t lessen the value of your contribution—it increases it
- Having a Second Brain where all your sources are clearly documented will make it much easier to track them down and include those citations in the finished version
Part Three: The Shift - Making Things Happen
Chapter 8: The Art of Creative Execution
- First you diverge and then you converge
- Capture and Organize are divergence
- Distill and Express are convergence
- When you sit down to finish something it can be so tempting to do more research. Those actions are tempting because they feel like productivity. They feel like forward progress, when in fact they are divergent acts that postpone the moment of completion
- Major advantages of digital outlines over paper:
- A digital outline is far more malleable and flexible—you can rearrange and expand on them, add bolding and highlights, and edit them after the fact as your thinking changes
- The outline can link to more detailed content—instead of trying to cram every last point onto the same page, you can link to both your own private notes and public resources on the web, which helps avoid overloading the outline with too much detail
- The outline is interactive and multimedia—you can add not only text, but images, GIFs, videos, attachments, diagrams, checkboxes, and more
- The outline is searchable—even if it gets long, you have a powerful search feature to instantly call up any term you’re looking for
- The outline can be accessed and edited from anywhere—unlike a piece of paper in a notebook, your outline is instantaneously synced to every one of your devices, and it can be viewed, edited, and added to from anywhere
- The Hemingway Bridge: Ernest Hemingway would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear
- Dial down the scope to shop something small and concrete
- Tips on organizing a project
- Pick one project
- Make an outline with your goals, intentions, questions, and considerations
- Move notes and IP you might want to use into the new project folder
- List open questions, remaining to-dos, new avenues to explore, people to consult, etc.
- Share what you've produced for feedback
- Keep notes on anything you learn or discover
Chapter 9: The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers
- '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.' - James Clear, author of Atomic Habits
- When we are organized and efficient, that creates space for creativity to arise
- Being organized is a habit —a repeated set of actions you take as you encounter, work with, and put information to use. If we’re constantly scrambling to find our notes, drafts, brainstorms, and sources, not only do we waste precious time, but we also sabotage our momentum
- The three habits most important to your Second Brain include:
1. Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work.
- Checklist #1: Project Kickoff
1. Capture my current thinking on the project.
- What do I already know about this project?
- What don’t I know that I need to find out?
- What is my goal or intention?
- Who can I talk to who might provide insights?
- What can I read or listen to for relevant ideas?
2. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes.
3. Search for related terms across all folders.
4. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder.
5. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.
- Checklist #2: Project Completion
- This is one of the best reasons to keep our projects small: so that we get to feel a fulfilling sense of completion as often as possible.
- We want to learn from the experience and document any thinking that could add value in the future
1. Mark project as complete in task manager or project management app
2. Cross out the associated project goal and move to 'Completed' section
3. Review Intermediate Packers and move them to other folders
4. Move project to archives across all platforms
5. If project is becoming inactive: add a current status note to the project folder before archiving
2. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything.
- David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, recommends using a Weekly Review to write down any new to-dos, review your active projects, and decide on priorities for the upcoming week
- Monthly review template:
1. Review and update my goals
2. Review and update my project list
3. Review my areas of responsibility
4. Review someday/maybe tasks
5. Reprioritize tasks
3. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.
- An idea you have in mind could potentially be valuable
- An idea you’re reading about resonates with you and taking those extra few seconds to highlight it
- A note could use a better title—and changing it so it’s easier for your future self to find it
- Move or link a note to another project or area where it will be more useful
- Combine two or more Intermediate Packets into a new, larger work so you don’t have to start it from scratch
- Merge similar content from different notes into the same note so it’s not spread around too many places
- An IP that you already have could help someone else solve a problem, and sharing it with them, even if it’s not perfect
- We have to remember that we are not building an encyclopedia of immaculately organized knowledge. We are building a working system. Both in the sense that it must work, and in the sense that it is a regular part of our everyday lives. For that reason, you should prefer a system that is imperfect, but that continues to be useful in the real conditions of your life
Chapter 10: The Path of Self-Expression
- 'An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people.' - Adrienne Maree Brown
- Suddenly, we are all plugged into an infinite stream of data, updated continuously and delivered at light speed via a network of intelligent devices embedded in every corner of our lives
- Value has shifted from the output of our muscles to the output of our brains. Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention our most valuable skill
- Our success in the workforce depends on our ability to make use of information more effectively and to think better, smarter, faster
- We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through
- We’re asking your biological brain to hand over the job of remembering to an external system, and by doing so, freeing it to absorb and integrate new knowledge in more creative ways
- Your Second Brain is always on, has perfect memory, and can scale to any size. The more you outsource and delegate the jobs of capturing, organizing, and distilling to technology, the more time and energy you’ll have available for the self-expression that only you can do
- Indiscriminate consumption of information, treating every meme and random post on social media as if it was just as important as the most profound piece of wisdom is driven by fear and scarcity
- The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself?
- “Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.” - Ryder Carroll, creator of the Bullet Journal Method
- There are people who will be reached only if they are reached by you. People who have no other source for the kind of guidance you can provide. People who don’t know where to look for solutions to problems they might not even know they have. You can be that person for them. You can pay forward some of the immense care that has been poured into you by a lifetime of parents, teachers, and mentors. With mere words, you can open doors to unimaginable horizons for the people around you
- The practice of building a Second Brain is more than the sum of capturing facts, theories, and the opinions of others. At its core, it is about cultivating self-awareness and self-knowledge. When you encounter an idea that resonates with you, it is because that idea reflects back to you something that is already within you
- Self-expression is a fundamental human need. Self-expression is as vital to our survival as food or shelter. We must be able to share the stories of our lives—from the small moments of what happened today at school to our grandest theories of what life is about
- The world is desperate to hear what you know. You can change lives by sharing yourself with others. It takes courage and vulnerability to stand up and deliver your message. It takes going against the grain, refusing to be quiet and hidden in the face of fear.
- 12 steps to get your Second Brain started
1. Decide what you want to capture
2. Choose your notes app
- Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources
3. Choose a capture tool
4. Set up your PARA folders
5. Identify your 12 favorite problems
6. Automatically capture your ebook highlights
- Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources
7. Practice Progressive Summarization
8. Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet
9. Make progress on one deliverable
10. Schedule a weekly review
- Clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week
11. Assess your notetakinng proficiency
12. Join the PKM community
- #PKM, #SecondBrain, #BASB, #toolsforthought
- Chase what excites you
- When you are captivated and obsessed by a story, an idea, or a new possibility, don’t just let that moment pass as if it doesn’t matter. Those are the moments that are truly precious, and that no technology can produce for you. Run after your obsessions with everything you have
Chapter 11: How to Create a Tagging System That Works
- I propose using for tags to track the progress of your notes
- Avoid the trap of “tagging for the sake of tagging.”
- I recommend waiting until you’ve captured hundreds of notes and used them to complete multiple projects before even attempting to use tags
- Three Actionable Approaches to Tagging:
1. Create personalized tags for your use cases
- Tag according to the final product a note will be used in: Presentation, Essay, Report, Website, Project plan, Meeting agenda, or Budget
- Tag according to the kind of information a note contains: Arguments, Theories, Frameworks, Evidence, Claim, Counterpoint, or Question
2. Use tags to track the progress of notes
- Tagging according to its role in a project: Meeting notes, Timeline, Budget, Decision, Action, Idea, or Objective
- Tagging according to the current stage of their workflow: Planned, In process, Waiting for approval, Reviewed, Approved, On hold, or Finished
3. Tag notes retroactively and only as needed
- They allow you to see a cross-section of your notes from a different perspective than the categories of PARA
#SharedFromTwos ✌️