BUILDING A SECOND BRAIN (Tiago Forte)
A good general rule: the amount of information you take in each day determines how happy you will be. According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes. A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2 Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.
Have a way to record your ideas quickly when they arrive. Something physical (notebook or paper) might be better than a phone. 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.”
Actually go back and look at your notes or ideas, have a routine to do so. Commonplace books were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world. They drew on their notebooks in conversation and used them to connect bits of knowledge from different sources and to inspire their own thinking.
Your relationship with information should be timeless, not focused on the present moment (a la internet or platforms). Privacy is awesome. Resurrecting the commonplace book allows us to stem the tide, shifting our relationship with information toward the timeless and the private.
If you want to keep this notebook digitally (your knowledge or notes), it needs to live somewhere besides your actual brain. This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas.
This process is something you’ll use and refine your whole life. 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.
Knowledge is your greatest asset, and should be managed in a way that invites further learning. 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 is made up of ‘notes,’ which act as building blocks. For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.
A Note has a wide definition, as a building block. It can be a snapshot from anything - you or something external. By this definition, a note could include a passage from a book or article that you were inspired by; a photo or image from the web with your annotations; or a bullet-point list of your meandering thoughts on a topic, among many other examples. A note could include a single quote from a film that really struck you, all the way to thousands of words you saved from an in-depth book. The length and format don’t matter—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note.
If we don’t take the time to think about why we’re building knowledge and where we want to go, we’ll live with a sense of dissatisfaction. The average person is being overwhelmed by information to a point where their imagination is not functioning well, they aren't being challenged to look further than their current demands.
For example: Nina is a competent, responsible, and hardworking professional. Many people would feel privileged to be in her shoes. There’s nothing wrong with the work she does or the life she leads, yet underneath the respectable exterior, there is something missing. She isn’t meeting her own standards for what she knows she’s capable of. There are experiences that she wants for herself and her family that seem to continuously get postponed, waiting for “someday” when somehow she will have the time and space to make them happen.
It's easy to feel dominated by the internet. You have to fight that. Author Tiago talks about stories from others who basically let their smartphone and Internet dominate them to the point of feeling down about their life. Their stories convey a pervasive feeling of discontent and dissatisfaction—the experience of facing an endless onslaught of demands on their time, their innate curiosity and imagination withering away under the suffocating weight of obligation.
Change your habits with technology: go from killing time (what most people do with technology) to creating value and building your second brain.
Japan, zuihitsu (known as “pillow books”) were collections of notebooks used to document a person’s life. This is what you want to make. Your “notebook.”
Fostering creativity changes the way you look at other things in life. Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.
In our Second Brain we can do the same: mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges. The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge.
Get out of the present moment and get to the timeless stuff. Let yourself draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination.
You need to research more things. The jobs that are most likely to stick around are those that involve promoting or defending a particular perspective. “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic.
When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, get more material. If you’re blocked, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t lost your touch or run out of creative juice. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with. If it feels like the well of inspiration has run dry, it’s because you need a deeper well full of examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes—anything that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in.
Digital notes as more useful than paper. We can supercharge these timeless benefits 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.
More resources for this: You can find a free, continually updated guide to choosing your notes app and other Second Brain tools at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources.
Keep only what resonates. Keep it in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.
Organize your notes and prioritize by IMMEDIATE UTILITY and how soon something can be put into 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?”
Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. 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.
Everything is geared toward one ultimate purpose: sharing. You are sharing your own ideas, your own story, and sharing your own knowledge with others.
Knowledge should help someone do or produce something. Whether your goal is to lose weight, get a promotion at work, start a side business, or strengthen your local community, personal knowledge management exists to support taking action—anything else is a distraction.
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.
Go from Consuming → Creating. Dedicate all of your time and effort to this shift. We all naturally have a desire to create—to bring to life something good, true, or beautiful. It’s a part of our essential nature. Creating new things is not only one of the most deeply fulfilling things we can do, it can also have a positive impact on others—by inspiring, entertaining, or educating them.
Anytime you evaluate, share, teach, record, post, and lobby, you are creating. These are synonyms for the act of expression. They all draw on outside sources for raw material, they all involve a practical process of refinement over time, and they all end up making an impact on someone or something that matters to you.
Knowledge most often shows up as “content”—snippets of text, screenshots, bookmarked articles, podcasts, or other kinds of media. This includes the content you gather from outside sources but also the content you create as you compose emails, draw up project plans, brainstorm ideas, and journal your own thoughts.
Knowledge ‘assets’ you make can come from either the external world or your inner thoughts. Capture all of it. The meaning of a thought, insight, or memory often isn’t immediately clear. We need to write them down, revisit them, and view them from a different perspective in order to digest what they mean to us. It is exceedingly difficult to do that within the confines of our heads. External knowledge could include: Highlights: Insightful passages from books or articles you read. Quotes: Memorable passages from podcasts or audiobooks you listen to. Bookmarks and favorites: Links to interesting content you find on the web or favorited social media posts. Voice memos: Clips recorded on your mobile device as “notes to self.” Meeting notes: Notes you take about what was discussed during meetings or phone calls. Images: Photos or other images that you find inspiring or interesting. Takeaways: Lessons from courses, conferences, or presentations you’ve attended. Stories: Your favorite anecdotes, whether they happened to you or someone else. Insights: The 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.
Take the docs that are confidential and keep it separate. The content you save in your notes is easily accessible from any device, which is great for accessibility but not for security. Information like tax records, government documents, passwords, and health records shouldn’t be saved in your notes.
Scan your Second Brain and new connections will pop up in your mind. Example, ‘he posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he could make a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleled brilliance.’ Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?”
Come up with questions, problems, and challenges that you want to answer. Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child (often you’ll continue to be fascinated with the same things as an adult). Don’t worry about coming up with exactly twelve (the exact number doesn’t matter, but try to come up with at least a few). Don’t worry about getting the list perfect (this is just a first pass, and it will always be evolving). Phrase them as open-ended questions that could have multiple answers (in contrast to “yes/no” questions with only one answer). Use your list of favorite problems to make decisions about what to capture: anything potentially relevant to answering them.
Save random things. I often save screenshots of text messages sent between my family and friends. The small moments of warmth and humor that take place in these threads are precious to me, since I can’t always be with them in person. It takes mere moments, and I love knowing that I’ll forever have memories from my conversations with the people closest to me.
“Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without our conscious awareness.”
Learn to CAPTURE:
•E-book 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.
•When you come across an online article or blog post you want to read, save it to a “read later” app, which is like a digital magazine rack of everything you want to read (or watch or listen to) at some point. Whenever you have some free time (such as on breaks or in the evening after work),
•Capturing quotes from podcasts: Many podcast player apps allow you to bookmark or “clip” segments of episodes as you’re listening to them. Some of them will even transcribe the audio into text, so you can export and search it within your notes.
•Capturing voice memos: Use a voice memo app that allows you to press a button, speak directly into your smartphone, and have every word transcribed into text and exported to your notes.
•Capturing parts of YouTube videos: This is a little-known feature, but almost every YouTube video is accompanied by an automatically generated transcript. Just click the “Open transcript” button and a window will open. From there, you can copy and paste excerpts to your notes.
•Capturing excerpts from emails: Most popular notes apps include a feature that allows you to forward any email to a special address, and the full text of that email (including any attachments) will be added to your notes.
•Capturing content from other apps: You might edit photos in a photos app, or make sketches in a drawing app, or like posts in a social media app. As long as that app has a “share” button or allows for copy-and-paste, you can save whatever you’ve created directly to your notes for safekeeping.
The “Generation Effect”: researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking them or writing them, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words.
Write as much as you can. One of the most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that “translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.”
Don’t use more than 10% of the source material (otherwise it’s just bloated). If you’re looking for a more precise answer of how much content to capture in your notes, I recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most. Any more than that, and it will be too difficult to wade through all the material in the future.
Here’s an old school approach called ‘The Box’. Tharp calls her approach “the box.” Every time she begins a new project, she takes out a foldable file box and labels it with the name of the project, usually the name of the dance she is choreographing. This initial act gives her a sense of purpose as she begins: “The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet.
Here's your new organizing system to use forever: PARA. It stands for the four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.
Keep your projects at the top of mind. Your information should be organized to support them.
If there isn’t a current project that your note would be useful for: we have a couple of other options of where to put it, including dedicated places for each of the main “areas” of your life that you are responsible for, and “resources,” which is like a personal library of references, facts, and inspiration. Over time, as you complete your projects, master new skills, and progress toward your goals, you’ll discover that some notes and resources are no longer actionable. I’ll show you how to move them to your “archives” to keep them out of sight but within easy reach.
Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories.
Projects have a couple of features that make them an ideal way to organize modern work. First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or “publish.”
In our work lives, we have various ongoing areas we’re responsible for, such as “product development,” “quality control,” or “human resources.” These are the job responsibilities that we were hired to take on. Sometimes there are others that we officially or unofficially have taken ownership of over time. Each of these is an example of an area of responsibility, and together they make up the second main category of PARA. All these areas, both personal and professional, require certain information to be handled effectively, but they’re not the same as projects.
[working on the rest of my notes... check back soon!]