Tiago Forte

A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

Building a Second Brain

For the first time in history, we have instantaneous access to the world's knowledge. There has never been a better time to learn, to create and to improve ourselves. Yet, rather than being empowered by this information, we're often left feeling overwhelmed, paralysed by believing we'll never know or remember enough. This eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you can easily create your own personal system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain. A trusted and organised digital repository of your most valued ideas, notes and creative work, a Second Brain gives you the confidence to tackle your most important projects and ambitious goals. From identifying good ideas, to organising your thoughts, to retrieving everything swiftly and easily, it puts you back in control of your life and information. Discover the full potential of your ideas and make powerful, more meaningful improvements in your work and life by Building a Second Brain.

Nikkita

My father planned for creativity. He strategized his creativiy When it was time to make progress on a painting, he gave it his full focus, but that wasn't the only time he exercised his imagina- tion. Much of the rest of the time he was collecting, sifting through, reflecting on, and recombining raw material from his daily life so that when it came time to create, he had more than enough raw material to work with. This attention to organizing his creative intu- ences fueled a prolific body of work made up of thousands of paint- ings created over decades, while still allowing him plenty of time to attend our soccer games, cook delicious meals, and travel widely as a family. 

Indrashish Ghosh

Information becomes knowledge - personal, embodied, verified-only when we put it to use.

A common challenge for people who are curious and love to learn is that we can fall into the habit of continuously force-feeding ourselves more and more information, but never actually take the next step and apply it.

Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notesyou are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.

Thoughtfully and intentionally spend time building up a system which works for you

You will have a system that supports you when you are forgetful and unleashes you when you are strong.

Off load some of the mental load into the system 

It is about optimising a system outside yourself, a system not subject to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free

Take notes to make your future self have access to it when needed

To be able to make use of information we value, we need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self. 

Progressive summarization/distillation is an easy way to maximize ROI and increase the usefulness of notes.

Chris Klein

Progressive Summarization is the technique I teach to distill notes down to their most important points. It is a simple process of taking the raw notes you've captured and organized and distilling them into usable material that can directly inform a current project. Progressive Summarization takes advantage of a tool and a habit that we are all intimately familiar with -highlighting-while lever- aging the unique capabilities of technology to make those highlights far more useful than anything you did in school. The technique is simple: you 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 in several "layers." Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.

Let your gut decide what is worth to keep, analyzing it will take too much of your energy. 

Felix

We know from neuroscientific research that "emotions organize rather than disrupt rational thinking" When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why. I often find that a piece of content resonates with me in ways I can't fully explain in the moment, and its true potentiall only becomes clear later on.

Jens Franke

A knowledge building block is discrete. It stands on its owh and has intrinsic value, but knowledge building blocks can also be combined into something much greatera report, an argument, a proposal, a story.

Travis Well

Information isn't a luxury—it is the very basis of our survival.

It points out useful techniques on how you can leverage your personal knowledge system to be more productive, creative and focused on what you want to achieve. It also encourages sharing, not just being a hoarder of information.

Arm E

Good book if you want to take your personal knowledge management into a more systematic level.

I’d read a tiny bit of Forte’s work prior to this, so I looked forward to the book being a worthwhile deep dive into the philosophy and framework of the second brain… hopefully (for the student’s sakes) what the several-hundred-dollar course Forte offers instead. 

I would have appreciated this more if it were much smaller, cut into a third so what remains is something like: introductory chapter on the psychology behind the need for a system, explain CODE and PARA, summarize common pitfalls and how to move past them, closing chapter. 

I did thoroughly appreciate Forte using women artists and makers almost exclusively as his creative success examples as most tech-y self-help-y authors (I am talking directly to you, Cal Newport) struggle to mention one, much less feature multiple. 

skully

I’d read a tiny bit of Forte’s work prior to this, so I looked forward to the book being a worthwhile deep dive into the philosophy and framework of the second brain… hopefully (for the student’s sakes) what the several-hundred-dollar course Forte offers instead. 

I would have appreciated this more if it were much smaller, cut into a third so what remains is something like: introductory chapter on the psychology behind the need for a system, explain CODE and PARA, summarize common pitfalls and how to move past them, closing chapter. 

I did thoroughly appreciate Forte using women artists and makers almost exclusively as his creative success examples as most tech-y self-help-y authors (I am talking directly to you, Cal Newport) struggle to mention one, much less feature multiple. 

This book is not much, I don't know why it mentions too much storytelling and what is really interesting is not detailed.

Martin Morales

The book is ok. Better than I thought because I had really low expectations. I could recommend it to someone who can feel overwhelmed by the amount of information that’s out there, and doesn’t really know what to do with it. For productivity nerds like me, I could only recommend the Chapter 8 on “The Art of creative execution”. Everything else, you could simply skim.

Raúl Barroso Moreno

I've always been interested in using technology efficiently to save my thoughts and notes. I have not been successful—my system works but to an extent. The method in this book is similar to what I've used but significantly builds on it. I want to try it and see if I won't get as lost as my system. He encourages using labels or tags in notes, which I've always struggled with. I believe this can help a great deal to find messages related to a subject but not in the project I'm working on. We shall see if I can successfully use this to my advantage. He encourages forgetting information and letting your second brain remember it instead of hoarding it. I like that idea.

I'm glad I read this book, and I will likely go back and reread it in the future. I will check out the recourses page he provides to see if I can find a program that will suit my needs. He encourages changing them from time to time, depending on the current project, and right now, I think that would be a good idea for me. The programs I used for myself when I was teaching worked well, but as I quit that job to pursue a different career path, I think it's time to change the system, as what I am using now is not optimized for my current position.

Frank Enns

I've always been interested in using technology efficiently to save my thoughts and notes. I have not been successful—my system works but to an extent. The method in this book is similar to what I've used but significantly builds on it. I want to try it and see if I won't get as lost as my system. He encourages using labels or tags in notes, which I've always struggled with. I believe this can help a great deal to find messages related to a subject but not in the project I'm working on. We shall see if I can successfully use this to my advantage. He encourages forgetting information and letting your second brain remember it instead of hoarding it. I like that idea.

I'm glad I read this book, and I will likely go back and reread it in the future. I will check out the recourses page he provides to see if I can find a program that will suit my needs. He encourages changing them from time to time, depending on the current project, and right now, I think that would be a good idea for me. The programs I used for myself when I was teaching worked well, but as I quit that job to pursue a different career path, I think it's time to change the system, as what I am using now is not optimized for my current position.

Too much storytelling to explain the system, which could have been way more distilled, even a list of bullet points. The system itself is good though and the book is worth a quick read.

Eneko Uruñuela

Julien Sobczak

An indispensable resource for curious people.

There are few books about commonplace books, despite being a key element of successful nonfiction authors. "Building a Second Brain" builds on this long-lasting technique to introduce his system CODE (Collect, Organize, Distill, Express), which puts in perspective the same old ideas to better understand their potential.

The author focuses on building a digital collection of notes. Principles apply to any note-taking application, and as the author mentions, trusting the process is always preferable to finding the "best" tool.

I appreciate how the author modernizes the classic idea not just for writers but for any knowledge workers. You can store illustrations, sounds, or anything that resonate with you to produce any kind of work. Your second brain is a great tool to act.

I recently read the excellent "How to Take Smart Notes", which is cited in this book. I still find it more inspiring than "Building a Second Brain" but it narrows too much the usability of the commonplace book to students, researchers, or writers. "Building a Second Brain" goes a step beyond. It will help you survive the increasing flow of information and make the most of it to create something new. Indispensable.

I was fairly skeptical about this when I started, but I came away with a bunch of concrete things to try, and a lot of this really resonated. I’ll be very curious to revisit this in a year or so and see how much of it sticks.

Katy Watkins

Some really good points and when I heard about PKM, the hairs on my arm literally stood on end. A really good article and theory, stretched too thin in a book

Kyla Sweet

Rohini Anandamurugan

I definitely think that this is one of the better books in this genre, with very sensible takeaways. However, the last few chapters were quite unnecessary and trite.

Half of the book is full of filler. Honestly, this is one of those books that can be summarized in 20-50 pages at most. It was a drag to finish it. I can't say it was also helpful or taught a new technique. It definitely wasn't for me. 

Fatih Arslan

Valuable advice, hidden in too many words

Patrick Baumann

erin alise 

Sergio Lopes

Leo Vogel

Alper Silistre

Erik Horton

Rebeca Keren Nuñez

De internationale bestseller voor lezers van Grip en Getting Things Done. Vergeet niets en bereik alles met je tweede brein!

Je probeert je iets belangrijks te herinneren, maar je kunt er maar niet op komen. Herkenbaar? Vast, want we worden tegenwoordig overspoeld door e-mails, podcasts, artikelen, appjes en video’s, maar kunnen al deze kennis niet onthouden – laat staan gebruiken.

Tiago Forte leert je hoe je een tweede brein kunt bouwen: een bewezen succesvol systeem van digitale tools waarmee je al je ideeën kunt sorteren, beheren en bewaren. Zo kun je je brein eindelijk gebruiken waarvoor het bedoeld is: creatief nadenken en inzichten genereren. Dit toegankelijke boek helpt je kalmer, creatiever en productiever te worden. Zeg stress vaarwel en leer slimmer te werken!

Building a Second Brain A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

Reviews

Highlights