Building a Second Brain  🔗 **Source:** [Building a Second Brain]() ## Highlights - So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety. - Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done - Human capital includes “the knowledge and the knowhow embodied in humans—their education, their experience, their wisdom, their skills, their relationships, their common sense, their intuition.”1 - Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.I - Note: Information overwhelm is real and addicting. In a quest to pass a little time, we consume more information. We have access to near boundless quantities of information, and yet seldom do the work of synthesizing or creating the information that is uniquely in our own perspective. - The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need. In the professional world: It’s not at all 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. - For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. - There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives. - Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively. - mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges. The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge. - recency bias.4 We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. - digital notes apps have four powerful characteristics that make them ideal for building a Second Brain. - Multimedia: Just like a paper notebook might contain drawings and sketches, quotes and ideas, and even a pasted photo or Post-it, a notes app can store a wide variety of different kinds of content in one place, so you never need to wonder where to put something. - Informal: Notes are inherently messy, so there’s no need for perfect spelling or polished presentation. This makes it as easy and frictionless as possible to jot things down as soon as they occur to you, which is essential to allow nascent ideas to grow. - Open-ended: Taking notes is a continuous process that never really ends, and you don’t always know where it might lead. Unlike more specialized kinds of software that are designed to produce a specific kind of output (such as slide decks, spreadsheets, graphics, or videos), notes are ideal for free-form exploration before you have a goal in mind. - Action-oriented: Unlike a library or research database, 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, and creating. - called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express. - The best way to organize your notes is to 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?” - shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.V - we also need information to live: to understand and adapt to our environment; to maintain relationships and cooperate with others; and to make wise decisions that further our interests. - Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me? - Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful? - Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal? - Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising? - Capture What Resonates - Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives—make - Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories. - Projects have a couple of features that make them an ideal way to organize modern work. First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, 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.” - This is basically a catchall for anything that doesn’t belong to a project or an area and could include any topic you’re interested in gathering information about. - Discoverability is an idea from information science that refers to “the degree to which a piece of content or information can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system.” - 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. - bold the main points within the note. This could include keywords that provide hints of what this text is about, phrases that capture what the original author was trying to say, or sentences that especially resonated with me even if I can’t explain why. - Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,IV instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools. It gives you a practical, easy thing to do that adds value even when you don’t have the energy for more - Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly. - each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. - wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use. - The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. - When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.VIII - If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences. - creative process is fueled by attention at every step. It is the lens that allows us to make sense of what’s happening, to notice what resources we have at our disposal, and to see the contribution we can make. - The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world. - For example, 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. Any note can potentially be used as an Intermediate Packet in some larger project or goal. - Serendipity takes a few different forms when it comes to retrieval. - First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good idea to keep your focus a little broad. - Second, serendipity is amplified by visual patterns. - Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element of serendipity. - 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 - The fundamental difficulty of creative work is that we are often too close to it to see it objectively. Getting feedback is really about borrowing someone else’s eyes to see what only a novice can see. - You will begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas. - find yourself returning to again and again. These are the cornerstones of your work on which everything else is built, but you can’t usually know which notes are cornerstones up front. You discover them by sharing your ideas with others, and seeing which ones resonate with them. - Everything Is a Remix - Instead of thinking of your job in terms of tasks, which always require you to be there, personally, doing everything yourself, you will start to think in terms of assets and building blocks that you can assemble. - You Only Know What You Make - taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. - what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. - begin unlocking your full creative potential. - We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. - A creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence. You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible. - The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas, so the process is necessarily spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander. - 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 and end up with a final result you are proud of. Convergence allows our work to take on a life of its own and become something separate from ourselves. - If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model of divergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template for the creative process in our time. - The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. - Distill and Express, are about convergence. - In divergence mode, you want to open up your horizons and explore every possible option. Open the windows and doors, click every link, jump from one source to another, and let your curiosity be your guide for what to do next. - If you decide to enter convergence mode, do the opposite: close the door, put on noise-canceling headphones, ignore every new input, and ferociously chase the sweet reward of completion. Trust that you have enough ideas and enough sources, and it’s time to turn inward and sprint toward your goal. - 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 decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense. - An Archipelago of Ideas separates the two activities your brain has the most difficulty performing at the same time: choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing). - He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.IV - You can think of a Hemingway Bridge as a bridge between the islands in your Archipelago of Ideas. You may have the islands, but that is just the first step. The much more challenging work is linking them together into something that makes sense, whether it is a piece of writing, the design of an event, or a business pitch. - 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. - Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. - Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect. - Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing. - Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach. - Dialing Down the Scope recognizes that not all the parts of a given 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. - 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. Keep alternating back and forth, making iterations each time until it’s something you can consider “done” or “complete” and share more widely. - Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks… It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity. —James Clear, author of Atomic Habits - Being organized is a habit—a repeated set of actions you take as you encounter, work with, and put information to use. If we’re constantly scrambling to find our notes, drafts, brainstorms, and sources, not only do we waste precious time, but we also sabotage our momentum. At each step of CODE, there are habits that can help us be more organized so that our creativity has space to arise. - Project Kickoff Checklist comes in. Here’s my own checklist: Capture my current thinking on the project. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project. - questions I use to prompt this initial brainstorm: 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? - Answer premortemI 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. I find that doing an official kickoff is useful even if it’s a solo project! - Mark project as complete in task manager or project management app. Cross out the associated project goal and move to “Completed” section. Review Intermediate Packets and move them to other folders. Move project to archives across all platforms. If project is becoming inactive: add a current status note to the project folder before archiving. - Answer postmortem questions: What did you learn? What did you do well? What could you have done better? What can you improve for next time? Communicate with stakeholders: Notify your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., that the project is complete and what the outcomes were. Evaluate success criteria: Were the objectives of the project achieved? Why or why not? What was the return on investment? Officially close out the project and celebrate: Send any last emails, invoices, receipts, feedback forms, or documents, and celebrate your accomplishments with your team or collaborators so you receive the feeling of fulfillment for all the effort you put in. - Clear my email inbox. Check my calendar. Clear my computer desktop. Clear my notes inbox. Choose my tasks for the week. - Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks. - Noticing that an idea you have in mind could potentially be valuable and capturing it instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s nothing.” Noticing when an idea you’re reading about resonates with you and taking those extra few seconds to highlight it. Noticing that a note could use a better title—and changing it so it’s easier for your future self 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 so you don’t have to start it from scratch. Noticing a chance to merge similar content from different notes into the same note so it’s not spread around too many places. Noticing when an IP that you already have could help someone else solve a problem, and sharing it with them, even if it’s not perfect. - Keep what resonates (Capture) Save for actionability (Organize) Find the essence (Distill) Show your work (Express)