Building a Second Brain
Old principles for a modern knowledge worker
Introduction
We live in a world where information is more and more abundant but wisdom appears to be scarcer and scarcer. The current estimates say that we consume on average 34 gigabytes of information per day, or the equivalent of 174 newspapers. But are we actually doing better things with all this information, compared to the pre-internet era? How well are we consuming and processing this impressive amount of knowledge at our disposal?
Many of us (including myself) have felt what many call information overload: we consume too much content but we feel as if nothing sticks and we don’t know what to do with all of it. To make things even worse, having a system to process information is becoming more and more important over time, since now almost any type of (office) work can be labeled as “knowledge” work: you take concepts as inputs and convey them in a shareable form for your clients, bosses or colleagues, being rewarded based on the quality and consistency of these outputs.
Looking for help on this subject, i came across the work of Tiago Forte, author of the famous book Building a Second Brain, that teaches a simple yet powerful set of principles to better manage our relationship with information and knowledge.
The Method
It all starts by rethinking note-taking, and simply getting used of writing things down on what Tiago calls a Commonplace Book, which is simply a physical or digital journal in which you have to write all the things that in any moment seem important and resonate with you. It’s actually something many emblematic thinkers, like Marcus Aurelius or Leonardo Da Vinci, have been doing since thousands of years. Don’t worry if the structure of what you write is not perfect, the important thing is getting in the habit of saving your thoughts in a place that’s not your brain, which is very bad at storing information and should be used only to process it. Think of this Commonplace Book like an inbox, in which all the information have to stay before being put to good use sometime in the future. The approach revolves around a timeless and important concept: the moment you encounter a concept is the worst to decide how you will use it.
But how can a messy inbox turn into a steady, curated and wonderful stream of creative output? In the book, Tiago explains a method summarised with the acronym CODE, which stands for Caprure, Organise, Distill and Express. Let’s deep dive on them individually.
Capture
As already mentioned, you need to start capturing anything that resonates with your interest. Any book you read, any video you watch or simply any thought you might have under the shower, find the time to quickly write it down on your inbox. Depending on which app or tool you use, there are some shortcuts you can implement, like recording and transcribing voice memos, reading apps that automatically synch with your note-taking app of choice, and many more. The important thing though lays in the approach: you need to get used to writing down what’s important and free your mind from the task of storing information.
Organise
Ok, so you’ve written and captured all your interesting ideas, and now? Normally, many people start clustering them by context, creating a “book notes” list, a “thoughts” one, and so on. I personally was one of these people. Tiago, on the other hand, suggests another interesting paradigm: to organise and catalogue notes by actionability: that means, putting them already in the place where they could become more useful for our future self (remember, you’re managing your notes to be able to work on them easily in the future, not to let them seat in your folders in perpetuity). This can be achieved through another acronym-defined rule called PARA, that represents the four possible locations any of our notes can go into, ordered from the most to the least actionable: Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive:
Projects have a specific goal, with a clear definition and deadline sometimes in the future, and is usually made of a series of consecutive or parallel tasks. Projects don’t have to be limited only to your current job, instead you should try to create ones for your personal life too. These can be things like renovating your house, buying a new car or (in my case) creating a personal blog. In this way, every time I encounter an interested article on writing or creating a website I immediately put the note in this project, giving it a sense of utility. When possible, put your efforts under a precise project, it will give them concreteness and help you stay more productive.
For every part of your life in which you have to keep certain standards, and no deadlines can be set, there should be one of more Areas. This can be for example your “Health”, your “Family”, or your “Travelling” bucket. Take some time to think about how you can split your life into these different sections and use them to organise notes that are not immediately actionable.
Resources are single topics of interest, like “meditation”, “gardening” and so on. If a note doesn’t fall in any active project or area of your life, but it can relate to one of your resources, put it there. It will become useful when you’ll sit down 6 months from now to write your first blog post on the best gardening books you’ve ever read.
If a note doesn’t have its place in any project, area or resource, but you still want to keep it for an hypothetical future reason, put it in the Archive. At least your mind can be freed from remembering it, and if you’re using a digital system you can always use the search function to retrieve it.
When taking some time to organise your files, you should proceed in this exact order. So first, think about which current project might benefit from it. If nothing comes to mind, understand if some area (first) or resource (second) may include it. In case there’s no place for it, put in the archive or ask yourself if it’s absolutely necessary to keep that note. If not, delete it (removing is always better than adding).
Distill
Raw notes, even if perfectly organised and assigned to the right place, can be difficult to use. Imagine you’ve gathered 5 essays of 10-pages each for your future blog post on meditation. If, after reading them the first time, you just let them sit on your Second Brain’s folder, you’re not being so kind to your future self. By that time you’ll sit down to write, you’ll have probably forgot much of them, and you’ll have to re-read all of them before creating your piece. Distilling means extracting the main concepts from a note, in order to make the life of your future self easier. Tiago suggests a technique called “Progressive Summarization” for this purpose: the first time you read a piece, highlight the main sentences. The second time you encounter it, maybe while you’re browsing your notes looking for inspiration, read only the highlighted parts and make a summary of only those, marking the text in bold. The third time, maybe when you’re ready to use the note for your article, take the bolded sentences and summarise them in an executive summary, at the beginning of the note. What you’re doing is increasing the note’s discoverability, or the easiness with which you can zoom-in (reading only the summary) or zoom-out (deep diving on the specific paragraphs). Moreover, I find the task of summarising a note before writing a good warm-up before doing a writing session, lowering the risk of suffering from the blank sheet paralysis.
Express
This is the most difficult, yet the most powerful step. To really master a concept you need to put it in a shareable and self-sufficient form, even if you’re not publishing it. This will help you fill the gaps in your knowledge, and will give you a sense of purpose that will help you follow all the previous steps (hint: this is also part of the reason I’m writing this posts). It’s not necessary to commit to writing an article for anything you want to remember, but try to give your notes a shareable form, even if you’re keeping them private.
Conclusion
These are the key pillars for implementing a set of process that will allow you to have a healthy relationship with your knowledge, and increase the quantity and quality of your creative output without feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information you put in. As for everything in life, embrace it with patience and focus on the approach more than the single tricks or apps.
Having said that, I personally use Notion to manage my second brain. It’s an incredibly flexible note-taking app, that allows you to structure the pages, tables and processes with complete freedom. I started by buying a template (I’m not affiliated) from the productivity goat Thomas Frank, and then adapted to my needs. Let me know if you want me to deep dive on my specific system, I might deep dive on it in future posts or videos ;)
Riccardo
