Building a Second Brain and unlock your creative potential

Building a second brain, a book by Tiago Forte

Tell me if this resonates with you.

You have just read an amazing book on mental health or Productivity, one that could potentially be life-changing, or you have read a beautiful article about indoor gardens.

What happens next?

You hope to remember all the stuff you’ve read and use it to enable a decision or to get something done at some point in your life, but you don’t know when.

If it were just a handful of articles and books, it would make perfect sense, but that’s not the case.

We are constantly bombarded with an endless deluge of information in the form of Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, podcasts, Articles, movies, and Online courses.

We are well-intentioned to make mental notes, to use all the information that we gather by spending countless hours consuming said information.

But, over time as days become months, and very soon months become years we lose almost all the information and knowledge that we gathered.

It’s just too much for the Human brain.

Taking notes, saving videos, and bookmarking websites rarely help because they eventually become dark and dense pits of information that overwhelm us every time we see it.

You’d not be the only one to feel anxious when you see a thousand files strewn across your desktop each seeking attention, or a melange of thousand bookmarks that you don’t even consider checking before searching for a website.

The reason all these methods fail is that they’re not organized for actionability

So what do you do?

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

This is where Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) comes into the picture.

Tiago Forte’s book ‘Building a second brain’ is a unique but simple way of managing all the information that we need, to embark on our next project, freeing our minds from the burden of remembering things, and creating bandwidth to engage in more meaningful and creative pursuits.

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle— but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.

Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Extended Mind

Building a second brain by Tiago Forte

A Second Brain is a digital extension of your Brain, one that is constantly with you and is always evolving by forming connections between seemingly diverse pieces of information.

The four steps of Building a Second Brain

CODE

1. Capture – Keep what resonates
2. Organise for Actionability
3. Distill the essence
4. Express – show your work

Capture – Keep what resonates

Everything not saved will be lost.

Nintendo “Quit Screen” message

Capturing ideas that resonate with you is the best place to start the PKM. It usually relates to or addresses a particular aspect of your life, or you’re just curious about it, and in either case, it works for you.

By capturing data and information mindlessly we would end up stockpiling astronomical amounts of data that does not interest us or does not help us.

Organise – Save for actionability

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

The system suggested by Tiago for organizing your notes is called PARA

PARA

1. Projects
2. Areas
3. Resources
4. Archives

Projects are short-term assignments or activities that have an end date and a defined objective. They could be anything that we are undertaking right now. They could be Personal Projects or Professional Projects, such as short-term weight goals, product launch at work, redesigning your bedroom, and so on!

Areas are long-term categories of various aspects of our personal and professional life.

For instance Personal finance, health, relationships, Team Management, Product development, Project Management, and other functions such as marketing and finance and Operations.

These are broader categories that we need to constantly refer to and unlike projects they don’t have an end date. They will be used as long as we are alive.

Resources are individual tools and aids that will help us quickly get help on something related to our projects.

For instance, if you’re currently working on redesigning your bedroom, then we pick that one Instagram post we saved in resources named Bedroom design ideas.

Resources can be anything, it could be a post from Instagram that we save for inspiration or an article about a new technology that piques our interest.

Archives are everything that cannot be categorized into the above three categories, but they should resonate with us and should pique our curiosity otherwise it’s just information hoarding.

Distill – Find the essence

Mindlessly hoarding information without any filtering or distilling is a colossal waste of our time and resources

Every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future self

Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

Progressive Summarisation distills our notes. In this method, we

1. Copy-pasting parts of an article or a post, or save an Instagram post or a youtube video.
2. Bold certain areas of the text we copied, the ones that capture the essence of the article.
3. Highlight the areas in bold to further filter the text, at this level, it’s mostly keywords and phrases.
4. Executive summary of the entire note in not more than a paragraph. The summary is not a mere regurgitation of the material but is really our own understanding of the topic and the note. It includes insights and deductions we draw, and also the connections we make with other areas of our life.

Express – Show your work

“The final stage of the creative process, Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others.“

Tiago Forte, Buildin a Second Brain

Sorry about lifting an entire paragraph from the book, but there is no better way of saying that!

By building your entire Second Brain as discrete Intermediate Packets (IPs) we will be able to share our work more frequently and get feedback as often as possible.

By quantifying our notes into IPs, we also improve their searchability and organization. Eventually, you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs.

Tagging also drastically improves the searchability of our notes.

The Shift – Making things happen

Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.—Silvano Arieti

The art of creative execution is split into two parts. Divergence and Convergence.

Diverging far and wide when researching the topic, being open to as many possibilities as we can, and then Converging which involves eliminating all the possibilities and finalizing one.

It is the most difficult process as it induces some creative grief on cutting down all the possibilities to just a few feasible ones.

Collecting and Organizing come under the Diverging process, whereas Distilling and expressing entail the Convergence part.

There is always some anxiety about starting with a blank page or starting from scratch. This can be avoided by the following three strategies

1. The archipelago of ideas: Use our Second brain to come up with all the resources and tools we need to start the project. It’s like stepping stones, where we leap from one note to another to get our thoughts organized and to get the creative juices flowing.
2. The Hemingway Bridge: Using yesterday’s momentum to drive today’s work. All we need to do is to stop before we have exhausted resources, and then outline a plan for tomorrow, what could be the next steps.
3. Dial down the scope: This is one of the most effective methods of getting creative work done. No matter how large the project is, breaking it down into its elemental parts would make it less daunting, get the wheels going, and easier to ship.

Habits to cultivate

The three habits to cultivate a healthy second brain are

1. Project Checklists: A consistent way to start and end your projects, so that there is more structure and discipline in your process is by having a project Kickoff checklist and a Project completion checklist.
2. Reviews: Weekly and monthly reviews are times when you retrospect on your work, and take notes of all things that worked this time, and the ones that failed. It also helps us reset our files and folders, move all things completed to the archive folder, clear out the inbox and start fresh for our next project.
3. Noticing habits and making connections are perhaps the most important of all. The small acts that constantly make our second brain ever so slightly more searchable and organized. There is no perfect system, and even to aspire for a perfect system is a waste of too many resources, instead of acknowledging that our second brain is a constant work in progress and is an evolving model, we are psychologically more likely to use it.

This book has had a profound effect on the way I manage my personal knowledge and reduced the anxiety of losing notes or the stress of organizing everything to perfection.

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