Building a Second Brain
A book by Tiago Forte about personal knowledge management systems and how to store information so that it's easy to recall in the appropriate context.
The idea is to create the digital equivalent of a "commonplace book," which was a notebook used by the educated class during the Industrial Revolution to take notes on everything they were reading, and reorganize and rehash them as their understanding of the world evolved.
Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.
Goal: shift your attention from the public and novel (memes, hot takes, scandalous headlines) to the timeless and private.
A single note should be a discrete "knowledge building block," which stands on its own and can be combined with other blocks in interesting and novel ways.
The four main capabilities of a second brain:
- Making our ideas concrete.
- Revealing new associations between ideas.
- Incubating our ideas over time.
- Sharpening our unique perspectives.
The three stages of personal knowledge management:
- Remembering
- Connecting
- Creating
The CODE Method
How to remember what matters:
- Capture: keep what resonates
- Organize: save for actionability
- Distill: find the essence
- Express: show your work
PARA organizing system
Purpose: organizing information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.
- Projects: works in progress, personal or professional
- Areas: parts of life you are responsible for
- Resources: personal library of references
- Archives: no longer actionable but still within reach
You only have to answer one question:
In which project will this be most useful?
Intermediate packets
Break up work into atomic deliverables rather than one large deliverable. e.g. a paragraph instead of an essay. If you break down your work into smaller intermediate packets it's easier to progress steadily toward your larger goal, and the individual pieces may be reusable or useful later. This makes you more interruption-proof, and able to make better use of smaller chunks of time.
Creativity
Use your second brain to feed a Divergence and convergence loop.
progressive summarization
The act of taking raw highlights or notes and distilling them down into more and more succinct ideas over a few passes, and revising them as part of a regular note review session.