Book Review: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

How often have we watched a documentary, read an article, or taken a course and were able to retain the information for a long period of time? Today, while we are able to benefit from the unprecedented amount of information all around us, being able to retain this information has become a difficult task.

So is there a way to store this abundant information in a more efficient manner?

In his book, Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte talks about the concept of building a second brain which will help you to capture, organize, and share your ideas and insights using digital notes.

Now, we know that digital notes is not a new concept, so what makes this book different?

Well, the book focuses on structure, it focused on being willing enough to put in the effort to build and organize digital lives in a structured way so that the information stored becomes actionable.

The essence of this book is focused on two concepts:

1. CODE (Capture, Organise, Distill, Express): this is a robust system to get you to take actions on capturing, organizing, distilling and expressing
2. and, PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives): a revolutionary system on how you approach information and research to accomplish your goals.

CODE

1. Capture

In this stage, you capture all your information in the form of digital notes, but there are few rules here so that you don’t end of capturing everything in a haphazard manner.

• Capture information that is important (trust your intuition) and interesting
• Highlight and save snippets
• Capture no more than 10% of the source
• Don’t overthink if it’s really important. You can save some videos and resources that can be helpful later on
• Use efficient resources to capture information such as web clippers, screenshot tools etc.

2. Organize

Instead of dumping all your information, Organize helps you structure it in the form of a PARA also known as folders:

• Active Projects Folder : These are your Active Projects which has deadlines, specific tasks to be completed and are usually between 5 to 15 projects.
• Areas Folder: You will have your long-term and future goals related to health, physique, finance stored here.
• Resources Folder: Miscellaneous resources for hobbies, life hacks, topics that interest you and information you may want to reference at some point in the future.
• Archives Folder: Any projects you’re not actively working on or is cancelled or deferred can be placed here.

3. Distill

This stage is about revisiting the information that is stored, any sort of information should be reread, and you should be able to extract the core message. This stage covers Progressive Summarization in 4 steps,

Once you have captured 10% interesting information bits in the form of a raw format from a resource, you will continue highlight passages. Once this is completed it’s time to refine them. Read the material again and bold the really important parts. Once you have done this there’s still room for improvement which means more highlighting. Often you will come across lengthy notes which means you can create an executive summary and try to describe what the note is about.

4. Express

After gathering knowledge you need to make the best use of what’s in your second brain and create new value out of it.

Create intermediate chunks of work that you can reuse in future projects. Start delivering your work in increments, and look back at your intermediate packets and find ways to incorporate them into your work.

As your information storage system grows, you’ll need to learn how to find information quickly and efficiently. To make this possible, make digital notes easily searchable, browse your second brain and check your files often, add a relevant #tag to every resource you find.

Just like your physical brain, your second brain is highly personal. The precise steps of creating and using one will depend on your working style, personality, and specific needs.

A second brain will help you organize everything going on in your life!