Author: Tiago Forte

Topics: Habit, mental models, organizational efficiency

All information is attributed to the author. Except in the case where we may have misunderstood a concept and summarized incorrectly. These notes are only for reference and we always suggest reading from the original source.

Contents

The Promise of a Second Brain

Part One: The Foundation – Understanding What’s Possible

Chapter 2. What Is a Second Brain?

Chapter 3. How a Second Brain Works

Part Two: The Method – The Four Steps of CODE

Chapter 4. Capture – Keep What Resonates

Chapter 5. Organize – Save for Actionability

Chapter 6. Distill – Find the Essence

Chapter 7. Express – Show You Work

Part Three: The Shift – Making Things Happen

Chapter 8. The Art of Creative Execution

Chapter 9. The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers

Chapter 10. The Path of Self-Expression

The Promise of a Second Brain

Building a Second Brain system:

• Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds.
• Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently.
• Save your best thinking so you don’t have to do it again.
• Connect ideas and notice patterns across different areas of your life so you know how to live better.
• Adopt a reliable system that helps you share your work more confidently and with more ease.
• Turn work “off” and relax knowing you have a trusted system keeping track of all the details.
• Spend less time looking for things, and more time doing the best, most creative work you are capable of.

Part One: The Foundation – Understanding What’s Possible

Chapter 2. What Is a Second Brain?

Information overload has resulted in society-wide poverty of attention. Every minute we spend trying to remember things could be better spent inventing, telling stories, recognizing patterns, following intuition, collaborating, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories, etc.

The commonplace book was a diary used to track thoughts/personal reflections. The digital commonplace book is what is being referred to as a “second brain”.

In the professional world:

• It’s not 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.

Using a digital second brain means you no longer need to try to remember anything and the notes you make will build towards projects without the need to prepare for them. Your brain will no longer be the bottleneck to your potential.

Chapter 3. How a Second Brain Works

Second Brain Superpower #1: Make Our Ideas Concrete

Write notes down to make them visual, making the ideas tangible, observable, rearrangeable, and editable.

Second Brain Superpower #2: Reveal New Associations Between Ideas

“Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.” – Nancy C. Andreasen.

Mix up the order of diverse ideas until something unexpected occurs.

Second Brain Superpower #3: Incubate Our Ideas Over Time

Don’t fall for recency bias. Allow for a slow burn.

Second Brain Superpower #4: Sharpen Our Unique Perspectives

When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with. If you run out of inspiration, find more examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mind maps, conversation notes, and quotes.

Choosing a Notetaking App: The Neural Center of Your Second Brain

E.g., Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, Apple Notes, Notion, Roam, Evernote, etc., digital notes apps have four powerful characteristics that make them ideal for building a Second Brain. They are:

• Multimedia: A notes app can store a wide variety of different kinds of content in one place.
• Informal: Notes are inherently messy, so there’s no need for perfect spelling or polished presentation. 
• Open-ended: Taking notes is a continuous process that never really ends, and you don’t always know where it might lead. 
• Action-oriented: Personal notes don’t need to be comprehensive or precise. They are designed to help you quickly capture stray thoughts so you can remain focused on the task at hand.

Remembering, Connecting, Creating: The Three Stages of Personal Knowledge Management

You can use your second brain as a memory aid, a way to think deeper and connect ideas together, and be creative.

The CODE Method: The Four Steps to Remembering What Matters

Capture: Keep What Resonates

• We need to curate the information we find every day. Only capture the ideas and concepts we feel are noteworthy. These ideas are usually counterintuitive, unusual, useful, or interesting. Look for the feeling of curiosity as a guide.

Organize: Save for Actionability

• Don’t create a perfect hierarchy of folders for every possible note. This is time-consuming and requires way too much effort.
• 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?”
• Organizing for action gives you a sense of tremendous clarity, because you know that everything has a purpose. You know that it aligns with your goals and priorities. 

Distill: Find the Essence

• Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. 
• Give your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.

Express: Show Your Work

• Capturing, organizing, and distilling are geared toward sharing your ideas, story, and your own knowledge with others.
• Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—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.

Part Two: The Method – The Four Steps of CODE

Chapter 4. Capture – Keep What Resonates

Knowledge assets come from the external world or your inner thoughts. External knowledge could include:

• Highlights
• Quotes
• Bookmarks and favorites – Links to interesting content you find on the web or favorited social media posts.
• Voice memos
• Meeting notes
• Images
• Takeaways: Lessons from courses, conferences, or presentations.

New ideas and realizations from your inner world could include:

• Stories
• Insights
• Memories
• Reflections
• Musings

Choose two to three kinds of content from the lists above that you already have the most of and value. 

There are four kinds of content that aren’t well suited to notes apps:

• Sensitive information you’d like to keep secure. 
• A special format or file type better handled by a dedicated app.
• Large files. Notes apps are made for short, lightweight bits of text and images, and their performance will suffer if you save large files in them.
• Collaborative projects. Notes apps are perfectly suited for individual, private use, which makes them less than ideal for collaboration. 

Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity.

What are the questions you’ve always been interested in? 

His recommendations:

• 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.
• Don’t worry about getting the list perfect (this is just a first pass).
• Phrase them as open-ended questions.

Don’t save entire chapters of a book, don’t save complete transcripts of interviews, don’t save entire websites.

Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?

Keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories. Any time you need a break, a new perspective, or a dash of motivation, you can look through it.

Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?

Sometimes you come across a piece of information you know might come in handy. A statistic, a reference, research finding, or a helpful diagram.

Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?

No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime of conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned.

Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe (confirmation bias).

If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it?

Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know. 

When you use up too much energy taking notes, you have little left over for adding value: making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories, and creating new ideas. Make reading a habit by making it effortless and enjoyable.

When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why.

Ways of capturing notes:

• Ebook apps, which often allow you to export your highlights or annotations.
• “Read later” apps that allow you to bookmark content.
• Notes apps that come preinstalled on mobile devices.
• 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.
• Audio/voice transcription apps.
• Third-party services, integrations, and plug-ins that automate exporting content.

Popular ways of using capture tools:

• Capturing passages from ebooks.
• Capturing excerpts from online articles or web pages.
• Capturing quotes from podcasts.
• Capturing voice memos.
• Capturing parts of YouTube videos: Almost every YouTube video has an automatically generated transcript. 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.
• Capturing content from other apps.

Generation Effect: When people actively generate a series of words (speaking or writing), more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words. Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” ideas.

Writing about one’s inner experiences leads to drops in doctor visits, improved immune systems, and reductions in distress. 

We escape the “reactivity loop”—the hamster wheel of urgency, outrage, and sensationalism that characterizes so much of the Internet. The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst.

Chapter 5. Organize – Save for Actionability

The Cathedral Effect

The environment we find ourselves in shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.

Organizing for Action: Where 99 Percent of Notetakers Get Stuck (And How to Solve It)

As you begin to capture your ideas in a consistent way, 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.

However, you’ll run into a new problem: what to do with all this valuable material you’ve gathered. 

Tiago created the PARA, which 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.

• It organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is. The project becomes the main unit of organization for your digital files. 
• Instead of inventing a completely different organizational scheme for every place you store information, PARA can be used across any software program, platform, or notetaking tool. 

How PARA Works: Priming Your Mind (and Notes) for Action

1. Projects: Short-term efforts that you’re working on.

• They have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. 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.”
• Knowing which projects you’re currently committed to is crucial to being able to prioritize your week, plan your progress, and say no to things that aren’t important.

2. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time.

Areas of your personal life could include:

• Activities or places you are responsible for (Home/apartment; Cooking; Travel; Car).
• People you are responsible for or accountable to (Friends; Kids; Spouse; Pets).
• Standards of performance you are responsible for (Health; Personal growth; Friendships; Finances).

In your job or business:

• Departments or functions you are responsible for (Account management; Marketing; Operations; Product development).
• People or teams you are responsible for or accountable to (Direct reports; Manager; Board of directors; Suppliers).
• Standards of performance you are responsible for (Professional development; Sales and marketing; Relationships and networking; Recruiting and hiring).

3. Resources: Topics 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.

• Projects that are completed or canceled.
• Areas of responsibility that you are no longer committed to maintaining.
• Resources that are no longer relevant.

Move Quickly, Touch Lightly

Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?” Create folders for each of your active projects in your notes app and begin to fill them with the content related to those projects.

Questions to ask yourself to help you think of your projects:

• What’s on your mind: What’s worrying you that you haven’t taken the time to identify it as a project? What needs to happen that you’re not making consistent progress on?
• What do you need to follow up on from the past? What needs planning and preparation for the future?
• What actions are you already taking that are actually part of a bigger project you’ve not yet identified? What communication or follow-up actions you’ve scheduled with people are actually part of a bigger project?
• Look at your computer desktop, downloads folder, documents folder, bookmarks, emails, or open browser tabs: What are you keeping around because it is part of a larger project?

Chapter 6. Distill – Find the Essence

Your notes are like unfinished pieces of raw material. They require refinement to turn them into valuable knowledge assets.

How easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful?

Highlighting 2.0: The Progressive Summarization Technique

• Highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note. Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.
• Save important details, bolden the main points, highlight the main message of those points, then write an executive summary of those points.
• If you want to revisit these ideas, you can then customize how much time you want to dedicate to the subject.

The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers

• Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting
• Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind
• Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult. Rely on intuition.

Chapter 7. Express – Show You Work

Intermediate Packets (IP) are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work (a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call).

There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work:

• Distilled notes.
• Outtakes.
• Work-in-process.
• Final deliverables.
• Documents created by others (be sure to reference).

You should always cite your sources and give credit where credit is due. 

Instead of waiting, you can choose to work on an IP that you can get done within your current free time. 

Intermediate Packets increase the quality of your work by allowing you to collect feedback more often. Instead of laboring for weeks in isolation, you craft one small building block and get outside input before moving forward.

Eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. 

Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output

Different kinds of documents and other content that you probably regularly produce:

• Web or social media bookmarks.
• Journal or diary entries.
• Highlights or underlined passages in books or articles.
• Messages, photos, or videos posted on social media.
• Slides or charts from presentations.
• Diagrams, mind maps, or other visuals on paper or in apps.
• Recordings of meetings, interviews, talks, or presentations.
• Answers to common questions you receive via email.
• Written works, such as blog posts or white papers.
• Documented plans and processes such as agendas, checklists, templates, or project retrospectives.

If you break down a project into concrete chunks, the components that you’ll need become clear:

• A conference agenda
• A list of interesting breakout sessions
• A checklist for streaming the keynote sessions
• An email announcing the conference to your network
• An invitation for people to be speakers or panelists
• A conference website

How to Resurface and Reuse Past Work

Retrieval Method #1: Search

You don’t have to open and close individual notes one at a time. Every note in your Second Brain is already “open,” and you can view or interact with its contents with a mere click or tap.

Retrieval Method #2: Browsing

Browsing allows us to gradually home in on the information we are looking for, starting with the general and getting more and more specific. This kind of browsing uses older parts of the brain that developed to navigate physical environments, and thus comes to us more naturally.

Retrieval Method #3: Tags

You can perform a search and see all those notes together in one place. The main weakness of folders is that ideas can get siloed from each other, making it hard to spark interesting connections. Tags can overcome this limitation by infusing your Second Brain with connections, making it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns that defy simple categorization.

Retrieval Method #4: Serendipity

Make sure to look through related categories, such as similar projects, relevant areas, and different kinds of resources.

Serendipity is amplified by visual patterns. Save text notes and images too. Our brains are naturally attuned to visuals.

When you present an idea to another person, their reaction is inherently unpredictable. They will often be completely uninterested in an aspect you think is utterly fascinating; they aren’t necessarily right or wrong, but you can use that feedback either way. The reverse can also happen. You might think something is obvious, while they find it mind-blowing.

Three Stages of Expressing: What Does It Look Like to Show Our Work?

• Remember: Retrieve an Idea Exactly When It’s Needed
• Connect: Use Notes to Tell a Bigger Story
• Create: Complete Projects and Accomplish Goals Stress-Free

Creativity Is Inherently Collaborative

You Only Know What You Make

To make an idea stick, you have to engage with it. We learn by making things—before we feel ready, before we have it completely figured out, and before we know where it’s going.

Part Three: The Shift – Making Things Happen

Chapter 8. The Art of Creative Execution

The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas, so the process is spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try.

Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is truly essential. It is about narrowing the range of possibilities so that you can make forward progress. Convergence allows our work to take on a life of its own and become something separate from ourselves.

1. The Archipelago of Ideas: Give Yourself Stepping-Stones

To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch into convergence mode and link them in order.

Digitally outline advantages:

• More malleable and flexible.
• Can link to more detailed content.
• Interactive and multimedia.
• Searchable.
• Accessed and edited from anywhere.

2. The Hemingway Bridge: Use Yesterday’s Momentum Today

The Hemingway Bridge is a way of making each creative leap from one island to the next less dramatic and risky: you keep some energy and imagination in reserve and use it as a launchpad for the next step in your progress.

Reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes:

• Write down ideas for next steps.
• Write down the current status.
• Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away.
• Write out your intention for the next work session.
• Send off your draft or beta or proposal for feedback.

3. Dial Down the Scope: Ship Something Small and Concrete

When the full complexity of a project starts to reveal itself, most people choose to delay it. We tell ourselves we just need more time, but the delay ends up creating more problems. We start to lose motivation as the time horizon stretches out. Things get lost or go out of date. Collaborators move on, technology becomes obsolete and needs to be upgraded, and random life events interfere. 

Not all the parts of a project are equally important. By dropping or reducing or postponing the least important parts, we can unblock ourselves and move forward even when time is scarce.

Whatever you are building, there is a smaller, simpler version of it that would deliver much of the value in a fraction of the time.

Examples:

• If you want to write a book, write a series of online articles outlining your main ideas or start with a social media post explaining the essence of your message.
• If you want to deliver a workshop for paying clients, you could host a free workshop at a local meetup, or start with a group exercise or book club for a handful of colleagues or friends.
• If you’d like to make a short film, start with a YouTube video. 
• If you want to design a brand identity for a company, start with a mock-up of a single web page. 

Divergence and convergence are not a linear path, but a loop: once you complete one round of convergence, you can take what you’ve learned right back into a new cycle of divergence.

Move Fast and Make Things

Make an outline with your goals, intentions, questions, and considerations for the project. Start by writing out anything already on your mind, and then peruse your PARA categories for related notes and Intermediate Packets. These could include points or takeaways from previously created notes, inspiration from models or examples you want to borrow from, or templates you can use to follow best practices.

Useful questions to ask:

• Is there a book or article you could extract some excerpts from as inspiration?
• Are there websites that might have resources you could build upon?
• Are there podcasts by experts you could subscribe to and listen to while commuting or doing household chores?
• Are there relevant IPs buried in other projects you’ve worked on in the past?

Be sure to keep notes on anything you learn or discover, or any new Intermediate Packets you might want to seek out. Once your biological brain is primed by this first pass through your notes, you’ll start to notice signs and clues related to it everywhere you look.

Chapter 9. The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers

Mise en place: A philosophy and mindset embodied in a set of practical techniques—as a chef’s “external brain.” It gives them a way to externalize their thinking into their environment and automate the repetitive parts of cooking so they can focus completely on the creative parts.

The three habits most important to your Second Brain include:

• Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work.
• Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything.
• Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

The Project Checklist Habit: The Key to Starting Your Knowledge Flywheel

What most people are missing is a feedback loop: a way to recycle the knowledge that was created from past efforts.

Checklist #1: Project Kickoff

1. Capture 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.

• As you move through this checklist, you are making a plan for how to tackle the project, not executing the project itself. You should think of this five-step checklist as a first pass, taking no more than twenty to thirty minutes.

Here are some other options:

• Answer premortem questions: What do you want to learn? What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer? What is most likely to fail?
• Communicate with stakeholders: Explain to your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., what the project is about and why it matters.
• Define success criteria: What needs to happen for this project to be considered successful? What are the minimum results you need to achieve, or the “stretch goals” you’re striving for?
• Have an official kickoff: Schedule check-in calls, make a budget and timeline, and write out the goals and objectives to make sure everyone is informed, aligned, and clear on what is expected of them. 

Checklist #2: Project Completion

1. Mark project as complete in task manager or project management app.

2. Cross out the associated project goal and move to “Completed” section.

• If successfully achieved it, what factors led to that success? How can I repeat or double down on those strengths? If I fell short, what happened? What can I learn or change to avoid making the same mistakes next time?

3. Review Intermediate Packets and move them to other folders.

4. Move project to archives across all platforms.

5. If the project is becoming inactive: add a current status note to the project folder before archiving.

• Answer postmortem questions.
• Communicate with stakeholders.
• Evaluate success criteria.
• Why or why not? 
• Officially close out the project and celebrate.

A Weekly Review Template: Reset to Avoid Overwhelm

1. Clear email inbox.

2. Check the calendar.

3. Clear computer desktop.

4. Clear notes inbox.

5. Choose tasks for the week.

A Monthly Review Template: Reflect for Clarity and Control

1. Review and update goals.

2. Review and update project list.

3. Review areas of responsibility.

4. Review someday/maybe tasks.

5. Reprioritize tasks.

The Noticing Habits: Using Your Second Brain to Engineer Luck

• Noticing that an idea you have in mind could potentially be valuable.
• Noticing when an idea you’re reading about resonates with you and highlighting it.
• Noticing that a note could use a better title and changing it so it’s easier to find it.
• Noticing you could move or link a note to another project or area where it will be more useful.
• Noticing opportunities to combine two or more Intermediate Packets into a new, larger work.
• Noticing a chance to merge similar content from different notes into the same note.
• Noticing when an IP that you already have could help someone else solve a problem, and sharing it with them.

There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually.

There’s no need to clear your inbox frequently; unlike your to-do list, there’s no negative consequence if you miss a given note.

There’s no need to review or summarize notes on a strict timeline; we’re not trying to memorize their contents or keep them top of mind.

When organizing notes or files within PARA, it’s a very forgiving decision of where to put something, since search is so effective as a backup option.

Chapter 10. The Path of Self-Expression

The Fear Our Minds Can’t Do Enough

The greater the burden you place on your biological brain to give you everything you want and need, the more it will struggle under the weight of it all. The more time your brain spends striving to achieve and overcome and solve problems, the less time you have left over for imagining, creating, and simply enjoying the life you’re living.

Once your biology is no longer a bottleneck in your potential, you’ll be free to expand the flow of information as much as you want.

You’ll become a curator of perspectives, free to pick and choose the beliefs and concepts that serve you best in any given situation.

Making the shift to a mindset of abundance is about letting go of the things we thought we needed to survive but that no longer serve us and giving up low-value work that gives us a false sense of security. It’s about putting down the protective shield of fear that tells us we need to protect ourselves from the opinions of others, because that same shield is keeping us from receiving the gifts they want to give us.

The Shift from Obligation to Service

You are under no obligation to help others. Sometimes it’s all you can do to take care of yourself. However, as people collect more and more knowledge in their Second Brain the inner desire to serve slowly comes to the surface. Faced with the evidence of everything they already know, suddenly there’s no longer any reason to wait.

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? 

Problems in society like poverty, injustice, and crime. Problems in the economy like inequality, educational deficits, and workers’ rights. Problems in organizations like retention, culture, and growth. Problems in the lives of people around you that your product or service or expertise could solve, helping them communicate, learn, or work more effectively.

As you build your Second Brain, you will collect many facts and figures, but they are just a means to an end: discovering the tacit knowledge that lives within you. It’s in there, but you need external hooks to pull it out and into your conscious awareness. If we know more than we can say, then we need a system for continuously offloading the vast wealth of knowledge we’ve gained from real life experience.

Summary

CODE:

• Keep what resonates (Capture)
• Save for actionability (Organize)
• Find the essence (Distill)
• Show your work (Express)

Where you want to be in the near future:

• Are you hoping to remember more? Focus on developing the practice of capturing and organizing your notes according to your projects, commitments, and interests using PARA.
• Are you hoping to connect ideas and develop your ability to plan, influence, and grow in your personal and professional life? Experiment with consistently distilling and refining your notes using Progressive
• Summarization and revisiting them during weekly reviews.
• Are you committed to producing more and better output with less frustration and stress? Focus on creating one Intermediate Packet at a time and looking for opportunities to share them.

12 practical steps to start:

1. Decide what you want to capture. Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. Identify two to three kinds of content that you already value to get started with.

2. Choose your note taking app. If you don’t use a digital notes app, get started with one now. 

3. Choose a capture tool. 

4. Set up the four folders of PARA (Projects; Areas; Resources; Archives) and, with a focus on actionability, create a dedicated folder (or tag) for each of your currently active projects. 

5. Identify your twelve favorite problems. Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping.

6. Automatically capture your ebook highlights. 

7. Practice Progressive Summarization. Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes.

8. Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on (Intermediate Packet). Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback.

9. Make progress on one deliverable. Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and, using the Express techniques of Archipelago of Ideas, Hemingway Bridge, and Dial Down the Scope, see if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain.

10. Schedule a Weekly Review. Put a weekly recurring meeting with yourself on your calendar to begin establishing the habit of conducting a Weekly Review. To start, just clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week. 

11. Assess your notetaking proficiency (Buildingasecondbrain.com/quiz).

12. Join the PKM community. There’s nothing more effective for adopting new behaviors than surrounding yourself with people who already have them.