In Three Points:

  • Attention is our most valuable asset, and our ability to direct our attention is our most valuable skill.
  • Our Second Brain aims to build a system that frees our attention for our creative pursuits.
  • When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start researching. You need that research to be already done.

A note is a discrete and contextually complete “knowledge building block” interpreted through your perspective and stored outside your brain.

A note is an atomic unit. It is valuable and contains all the context required to make sense. It can be combined with other notes like LEGO. It can be thought of as a knowledge-building block.

The four capabilities that our second brain allows us to perform are:

  • Making our ideas concrete
  • Revealing new associations between concepts (this is creativity)
  • Incubating our ideas over time
  • Sharpening our unique perspective

Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections

– Nancy C. Andreasen

In our second brain, we can mix up and combine the order of our notes to create something original; the more diverse the input and variety of notes, the more authentic the output will be.

Without a second brain, when we start a task, we use only the ideas we have at that moment. This is called recency bias.

If you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it’s not a sign that you aren’t innovative; it just means you don’t have enough creative material to work with.

A second brain will evolve from being a primary memory tool to a thinking tool.

There are four steps to building a second brain: capture, organise, distil and express (CODE)

Capture

Only capture what is truly noteworthy, remarkable or insightful.

Keep what resonates safely. Protect these notes like the valuable resources they are.

It’s up to you to control the flow of information into your second brain. You decide what information you want more or less of and what you do with the information.

Notes can be captured from a variety of sources, both internal and external:

  • highlights
  • voice memos
  • meeting notes
  • insights
  • musings
  • reflections

Feynman strategy: You constantly keep a dozen of your biggest questions or favourite problems in your mind. When anything happens, you ask yourself if this sheds any insight on one of your problems. This enables creativity because you are drawing knowledge from multiple different sources. Some examples of these problems are:

  • What does it look like to go from mindless consumption to meaningful creation?
  • How can I go to bed early instead of watching TV?
  • How do I start reading books I already have instead of buying more books?

When capturing notes, you must realize that not all information has equal value. Some info will resonate more with you, and that’s a good sign it is worth capturing.

Consider yourself a curator of valuable information and pick and choose only the most helpful information to capture as notes.

These are some good questions to ask to determine if a note is valuable:

  • Does it inspire me?
  • Is it useful?
  • Is it personal?
  • Is it surprising?

Recording surprising information as notes is valuable for broadening your range of thinking; if some information isn’t surprising, you probably already know it. These notes help change the way you think.

Record anything that resonates with you. Neuroscientific studies have shown us that emotions organise, not disrupt, rational thinking. Learning to listen to your internal voice of intuition is incredibly important, and use that as a note-taking guide.

When capturing a note, capture the source information such as the original website or book, the author, the title of the piece, the publisher and the publishing date.

Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking.

Studies show that journaling your inner thoughts leads to fewer doctor visits, improved immune system and reduced stress.

Always ask yourself, “What would this look like if it was easy?”. For example, when developing your capturing tools, ask yourself what the best capturing system would look like, and then find the tools that facilitate as close a process as possible to your ideal.

Organise

Organise your notes to be actionable. These notes aim not to accumulate but to help you progress toward your goals, so everything should be actionable.

The environment we find ourselves in has a powerful influence on shaping our minds. For example, lofty architecture promotes more abstract thinking. We need to take control of our virtual environments and create a space that supports our best creative thinking. Otherwise, the time we spend working will feel taxing and distracting.

To get the most out of the information we capture, we need to organise it by how actionable it is. The PARA method gives us a layer of directories based on actionability. Projects are the most actionable items, followed by long-term areas of commitment, fields of interest and a folder for archived items.

Framing your work in terms of specific concrete projects will give you a quick boost in productivity.

Separating the capture phase from the organising stage of note-taking is essential. Capture should be done super quickly without thinking of where something belongs. The organising can come later when there is time to reflect on how a note could affect your projects, areas and fields.

The goal of organising knowledge is to move projects forward. We aren’t hoarding notes for the sake of it. Learning is best applied through execution. If your note-taking process isn’t moving projects forward, it wastes the time you should spend on those projects.

Completed projects are oxygen for your second brain. The PARA framework isn’t just about organising notes; it’s about identifying the most critical structures of your life so you can stay focused on them while pushing unimportant stuff away.

We don’t think well when a bunch of old or unimportant stuff crowds our virtual space. So, if you have many old folders and structures on your desktop, move them all to the archive. You won’t lose them and will clear up space for what’s important. Then, use the PARA framework for your new, fresh space.

It doesn’t matter how organised your workspace is if it doesn’t help move projects along. So, treat the organisation as a constant work in progress. Make sure to prioritise completing projects.

No matter how small a project is, completing it creates momentum and can be a stepping-stone to much larger accomplishments. Your second brain is a tool for producing creativity and products. Don’t let the organisation hinder the overall goal.

Always think about the smallest, most straightforward step I can take to move me in the right direction.

Distill

Distill your notes down to their raw essence.

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

– Lao Tzu

We can systematically gather building blocks from our readings and research and combine and distil them into something richer, more exciting and impactful.

Our notes are things for use, not just to be collected.

We sometimes have key ideas that grab our attention at the moment that we obsess over and seem life-changing, but we forget them over time. Our job as note-takers is to preserve these ideas and ensure the enthusiasm survives over time.

A technique for summary is the Progressive Summary. It is a layered approach to distilling a note. It starts with a note that may include an overview of a book, article or other material. Each time we access the note, we summarize the note further. The first time the note is accessed, we bold (roughly 10%) of the note. The next time it is accessed, we highlight a tenth of the bolded bits. After highlighting, we can summarise and add the highlighted bits to the top of the note.

With a Progressive Summary, we can include a note with its entire context and a summary that can be read in ~30 seconds. We can zoom in on the details of the note by reading just the outline, the highlighted parts, the bold bits, or the entire text.

You may want the full details the first time you read a Progressive Summary, but you may only want a revised refresher on subsequent visits. With a Progressive Summary, you can customise how much attention you spend on a note, given how much energy and time you have.

With a Progressive Summary, you never lose any detail in your note. It’s always there, but it’s only present when necessary.

The highlights of your Progressive Summary are like signposts that can help you navigate the notes and create connections and associations.

For example, one day, the author was on a road trip and listening to a podcast he had not heard of before. He was surprised at how interesting and relevant it was. As soon as he arrived at his destination, he wrote down a summary of what he remembered and turned it into a Progressive Summary. This works because the most exciting details stick in your mind for an hour or a day after consuming them.

The result of the creative process can be products so simple they look like anyone could have made them. That simplicity masks the effort and mastery required to get there.

Progressive Summaries are not a method for remembering as much as possible; they are for forgetting as much as possible. As your ideas become distilled, they naturally improve because you drop the mere good parts and let the great parts stand out.

You shouldn’t start on a layer of a Progressive Summary until you are ready to use the note in one of your creative works. This is because it takes much more effort to distil notes than capture or organise them. We want to spend our effort only on what we know will be valuable, so we don’t distil until we are ready to use the note.

When preparing to create a piece of work, do a layer of Progressive Summarising on a few notes that you think will be relevant. That way, you get some ideas for your work immediately.

When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.

Express

As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource.

– Tiago Forte

We can fall into hoarding notes and information, but this is not what the second brain is about. We need to shift as much time as possible from consuming to creating.

The ability to strategically and intentionally allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in the modern world. We need to aggressively protect and guard our attention like the precious attention it is.

Our Second Brain aims to build a system that frees up our attention for our creative pursuits.

When working on a project, we focus on getting to a final product without realising that the intermediate work in the process is also valuable. We keep work in the process only in our heads and discard it when the project is complete.

If we consider our attention an asset in our knowledge work, we cannot allow our intermediate work to be lost and our attention wasted. We need to find a way to recycle our intermediate work.

Expressing your work is about refusing to wait until everything is perfect before sharing your work.

It isn’t enough to break work down into smaller pieces. We need a system to manage those small pieces, recycle them, and recombine them in future work. We need to build a framework for handling these Intermediate Packets of work.

There are four benefits of managing Intermediate Packets of work:

  • You become interruption-proof because you focus only on a small packet at a time.
  • You can make meaningful progress in shorter amounts of time.
  • Intermediate Packets increase the quality of work by allowing you to collect feedback quickly.
    • An Intermediate Packet should have higher quality standards than a dispensable work-in-process item.
  • Eventually, you will create enough Intermediate Packets to complete entire projects by assembling previously created Intermediate Packets.

You can sit down and purposefully create Intermediate Packets, but chances are you already make them in your day-to-day life, and all you need to do is start collecting and packaging them.

Studies have shown that humans prefer to search through a directory structure in many situations rather than use ctrl-p-like search. Manual navigation gives people control over folder and file names, providing contextual clues for what to look for next.

When searching for relevant Intermediate Packets, looking for some out-of-the-ordinary connections between Packets is often valuable, as these associations can lead to creative ideas.

When starting a project, looking in five or six of your PARA folders for something relevant is often good.

It’s much easier to show someone something small and ask for feedback than with a larger item. This is why Intermediate Packets can be so helpful.

Intermediate Packets allow you to think of ideas as connected networks of notes rather than isolated ideas.

Everything creative is a remix of other works. The wider the variety of inputs and sources, the more creative and original your results will become.

Reframing your productivity regarding Intermediate Packets requires thinking of building blocks and assets instead of tasks and more tasks.

Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action.

– Tiago Forte

The Art of Creative Execution

You can plan to be creative. Creativity and organisation complement each other. You can prepare for creative time by ensuring you have all the source material ready when it comes time to be creative.

The product of creativity is constantly changing and trending (think TikTok videos, Instagram, and LinkedIn articles), but the creative process is constant across creative mediums.

The creative process is an iteration between a divergent and convergent approach.

During the divergent process, you consider as many options and gather as many sources as possible. The process is necessarily spontaneous, chaotic and messy.

During the convergent process, you eliminate as many options as possible, make trade-offs and do distillation.

The Capture and Organise step of CODE is part of the divergent process, while the distil and expressing are part of the convergent process.

You can decide which way you work when you distinguish between the two work modes. This affects how you work. In the divergent mode, you can follow every link, go down rabbit holes, and be open to new sources. In a convergent manner, you must be ruthlessly focused on completing the project. In the convergent stage, you should block yourself off from all distractions; you should already have everything you need to complete the project so you can turn off your phone, disconnect your computer from the internet, let your family know you should be disturbed for the next hour and get to work.

When you sit down to complete a project, it can be tempting to do more research because this feels productive, when, in fact, this pulls you out of the convergent mode and into the divergent way where you are unlikely to finish your project. It’s just a sophisticated form of procrastination.

It is tough to operate simultaneously in both the convergent and divergent states of mind because the divergent state requires you to be open to new ideas. In contrast, the convergent state requires you to focus on completing tasks.

Here are some recommendations for navigating the difficulties of staying in the convergent mode and completing projects:

  • Build islands of ideas that you can hop across to complete your project. In the divergent state, gather sources and ideas that will form the backbone of your work (make sure any links in these sources do not link to the outside world, only your second brain). Once you have assembled these ideas, enter the convergent mode and assemble them into an outline that makes sense. These islands separate the two ways of creativity. Choosing the topics of your works is divergent, and arranging or sequencing the ideas is convergent.
  • The “Hemingway Bridges’ is a technique where you spend the last five to ten minutes of your convergent effort documenting the status of your effort. Record what to do next, your current status, and important details you must remember when you start the project again. This way, you can return to a project in a day, week or month and pick right back up where you left off. Another thing you can do before you stop working on a project is send a draft to a college for feedback. When you return the next day, you will have new, fresh ideas about continuing your progress.
  • Dial down the scope of your project to ensure it can be completed quickly and you can get feedback quickly. When the full complexity of projects is revealed, people tend to become discouraged and start procrastinating and moving back to a divergent state. Creating small scopes and using Intermediate Packets is an antidote to this happening.
    • Creativity has a chicken and egg problem: when you start, you don’t know what you should create until you’ve got feedback, but you need to have begun to receive feedback. Working in small steps using Intermediate Packets helps protect against this.

You should be able to set a time for fifteen or twenty minutes and make a first pass at a project. You should already have the material to turn off the internet and prevent yourself from researching. Your scope should be sufficiently small so that you can make considerable progress (a first draft) in just twenty minutes.

What is the smallest version of this project I could complete to get feedback?

The Essential Habits of Digital Organisers

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

Your second brain is for enhancing your productivity and your creativity.

Being organised isn’t a trait you’re born with or a matter of finding the right tools/apps. It is a habit. A repeatable set of actions you take as you encounter, work with, and put information to use.

Building a second brain is about creating an adaptable and flexible system of habits to continually access what you need without throwing your mind into chaos.

Habits should create boundaries of time, space, and intention—around the state of mind you want to protect and promote.

Three habits are most important for building a second brain:

  • Pre-project and post-project checklists
  • Weekly and monthly reviews
  • Noticing habits

The pre-project checklist is a way of recycling knowledge created as part of past projects. The way most people launch a project is haphazard and informal; this has the potential of not utilising the attention and time you have spent previously on this new project. Some items that may make up your pre-project checklist are:

  • Capturing your raw thoughts and ideas about the project.
  • Reviewing folders and tags from your PARA folders that may be relevant
  • Searching for related items across all folders
    • Suppose you have used the curator perspective (described in the capture section). In that case, all of your notes should be high quality, and searching through them should be much more relevant than searching through the internet, which is filled with distractions, ads, misleading titles, and fluffy, useless content.
  • Moving anything interesting into a new project folder
  • Creating an outline of collected notes and planning the project
  • Answer premortem questions:
    • What do you want to learn?
    • What is the most significant source of uncertainty
  • Define success criterium

This pre-project checklist shouldn’t take more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

You can treat your attention as an asset that gets invested and produces returns that get reinvested.

The project completion checklist is much the same as the pre-project checklist but can focus on any Intermediate Packets created.

Keep all your goals in two notes. One for short-term goals 1- one for one-year goals, and one for longer-term goals.

In the project completion checklist, you can add tasks for:

  • Answering postmortem questions:
    • What did you learn
    • Was this a success
    • What could you have done better
    • What can you improve on next time
  • Communicate the results and implications to shareholders
  • Evaluate the success criteria
  • Close and celebrate the project

The first draft of the project completed checklist should be completed even faster than the pre-project checklist (fifteen minutes)

Weekly Review sessions are regular check-ins to access what you performed in the week, organise your notes, and set the priorities for the next week.

  • Clear your email inbox.
  • Check your calendar
  • Clear your note inbox
  • Close tasks for the week

A monthly review is similar to a weekly one but more reflective and holistic. It makes sure your work and progress align with your overall goals. You can:

  • Review and update your goals
  • Review and update your project list
  • Review your areas of responsibility
  • Review someday/maybe tasks
  • Reprioritize tasks

The last habit of good note-takers is to notice improvements they could make and practices they can develop to improve their creative and productive processes.

When reorganising your PARA structure, make the habit of making light changes frequently. People feel like they need to set aside hours or days to do a structural re-organisation, but you are less likely to do it if it becomes a chore. Even when you can set aside a long block of time for re-organising, it doesn’t often go well because they get bogged down by minutiae. So don’t aim for a perfect system. Aim for a working system that is constantly evolving and changing.

When you have an environment that facilitates your creative and productive process, you spend a lot more time in it, and you inevitably notice the small opportunities for improvement. You can use seeing habits to “organise as you go.”

The organisation of your Second Brain is also a forgiving task. Notes have no deadlines and don’t go stale because they contain all the context to be useful independently. Therefore, cleaning your note inbox is very forgiving; you can go weeks, months or years without cleaning and still return to a helpful system.

Any system that must be perfect to be reliable is deeply flawed. A perfect design that is too complicated or error-prone to use isn’t valid. So, when building a Second Brain, aim for a working system that you can use to be creative and productive.

The Path of Self-Expression

An idea wants to be shared. And, in sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people.

– Adrienne Maree Brown

Our knowledge is our most valuable asset, and our ability to direct our attention is our most valuable skill.

In the internet age, the challenge isn’t to find information; it is to close off the information stream long enough to create something ourselves.

Building a Second Brain is more about developing a mindset than finding the right tools or apps.

When it comes to completing goals, the more reliance we rely on our biological brain, the more we feel stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed, and the less time we will have left for imagination, creativity and enjoying life.

We use our Second Brain to free up our biological brain for the big picture. This will cause us to start noticing connections we couldn’t see before. You will naturally combine these connections and ideas into new perspectives, theories, and strategies.

Instead of optimising your mind to remember every detail of your life, treat your biological brain as the CEO, directing and orchestrating. Your Second Brain can take on planning and remembering the day-to-day operations.

This transition from depending on your biological brain to your Second Brain can be an identity shift from simply being a passenger and going with the flow to being a directory of your life.

There will also be a shift in mindset from a scarcity mindset to an abundance attitude regarding information. We are conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: we think more is better without limits. We constantly crave more information and believe the information we already have isn’t valuable.

When we switch to an abundance mindset, we realise the world is full of ideas, insights, tools, collaborations and opportunities. We don’t need to hunt down information; we can capture what we already observe. You don’t need to consume all or even much of the information available to you. Just consume the information you want to use.

The purpose of knowledge is sharing. As people develop their second brains, they shift from obligation tasks to service. This is because they feel they have their information under control and are less overwhelmed by the quantity of information they consume and make things perfect before they start sharing. If you have good information then you can share that and help out your friends and families. Knowledge is the only resource that gets more valuable the more there is.

There is no reason not to use your knowledge to start sharing today. Finding your voice and speaking your truth is a radical act of self-worth.

There is no single way to build a Second Brain, so get started and change things as you go along. Feel free to discard any parts that aren’t serving you. Here are some ways to get started:

  • Get inspired by identifying your twelve favourite problems. Save this list as a note and revisit it occasionally with insight you have gained on various problems.
  • Practice Progressive Summarisation
  • Make progress on one deliverable
  • Experiment by making an Intermediate Packet

Come back to Building a Second Brain at various times; there will be parts you missed. You are developing a new relationship with your attention and energy and your Second Brain, which will cause you to read this material through a different lens.

Pursue what excites you. When captivated and obsessed by a story, an idea, or a new possibility, don’t let the moment pass as if it doesn’t matter.

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

McPherson’s Printing Group, 2022