Building a Second Brain

At one point some of my colleagues asked me to teach them my organizing methods. I found that virtually all of them already used various productivity tools, such as paper notepads or the apps on their smartphones, but that very few did so in a systematic, intentional way. They tended to move information around from place to place haphazardly, reacting to the demands of the moment, never quite trusting that they’d be able to find it again. Every new productivity app promised a breakthrough, but usually ended up becoming yet another thing to manage.

In other words, Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity.

Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too. With a notes app, you can always save links back to the original content if you need to review your sources or want to dive deeper into the details in the future.

As you consume a piece of content, listen for an internal feeling of being moved or surprised by the idea you’re taking in. This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.” You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.

Examples of areas from your personal life could include: Activities or places you are responsible for: Home/apartment; Cooking; Travel; Car. People you are responsible for or accountable to: Friends; Kids; Spouse; Pets. Standards of performance you are responsible for: Health; Personal growth; Friendships; Finances.

In your job or business: Departments or functions you are responsible for: Account management; Marketing; Operations; Product development. People or teams you are responsible for or accountable to: Direct reports; Manager; Board of directors; Suppliers. Standards of performance you are responsible for: Professional development; Sales and marketing; Relationships and networking; Recruiting and hiring.

the moment you first capture an idea is the worst time to try to decide what it relates to. First, because you’ve just encountered it and haven’t had any time to ponder its ultimate purpose, but more importantly, because forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process.

Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind. Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable. Resources may become actionable depending on the situation. Archives remain inactive unless they are needed.

In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives.

Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. Yet this is exactly the way most people organize their files and notes—keeping all their book notes together just because they happen to come from books, or all their saved quotes together just because they happen to be quotes.

Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,* 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 challenging tasks.

Picasso’s act of distillation involves stripping away the unnecessary so that only the essential remains. Crucially, Picasso couldn’t have started with the single line drawing. He needed to go through each layer of the bull’s form step-by-step to absorb the proportions and shapes into his muscle memory.

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible.

Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes. If you try to do it with every note up front, you’ll quickly be mired in hours of meticulous highlighting with no clear purpose in mind. You can’t afford such a giant investment of time without knowing whether it will pay off.

For example, when I’m preparing to write a blog post or article, I’ll usually start by highlighting the most interesting points from a group of notes that I think will be relevant to the topic at hand. That way I have a predictable, not-too-difficult task to get me warmed up for writing,

You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. You have no idea what your future self will need, want, or be working on. This assumption forces you to be conservative in the time you spend

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. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.

Our creativity thrives on examples. When we have a template to fill in, our ideas are channeled into useful forms instead of splattered around haphazardly.

Reframing your productivity in terms of Intermediate Packets is a major step toward this turning point. 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 can decide each time you begin to work which mode you want to be in, which gives you the answers to the questions above. 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.

The more imaginative and curious you are, the more diverse your interests, and the higher your standards and commitment to perfection, the more difficult you will likely find it to switch from divergence mode into convergence mode.

sufficiently productive. Building a Second Brain is not just about downloading a new piece of software to get organized at one point in time; it is about adopting a dynamic, flexible system and set of habits to continually access what we need without throwing our environment (and mind) into chaos.

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.

Here’s my checklist: 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.

There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually. There’s no need to clear your inbox frequently; unlike your to-do list, there’s no negative consequence if you miss a given note. There’s no need to review or summarize notes on a strict timeline; we’re not trying to memorize their contents or keep them top of mind. When organizing notes or files within PARA, it’s a very forgiving decision of where to put something, since search is so effective as a backup option.

We have to remember that we are not building an encyclopedia of immaculately organized knowledge. We are building a working system. Both in the sense that it must work, and in the sense that it is a regular part of our everyday lives. For that reason, you should prefer a system that is imperfect, but that continues to be useful in the real conditions of your life.

In a 1966 book,* the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi made an observation that has since become known as “Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.” Polanyi observed that there are many tasks we can easily perform as humans that we can’t fully explain. For example, driving a car or recognizing a face. We can try to describe how we do these things, but our explanations always fall far short. That’s because we are relying on tacit knowledge, which is impossible to describe in exact detail. We possess that knowledge, but it resides in our subconscious and muscle memory where language cannot reach.

Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems. Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping.

Schedule a Weekly Review. Put a weekly recurring meeting with yourself on your calendar to begin establishing the habit of conducting a Weekly Review. To start, just clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week.