Building a Second Brain

What it is

Tiago Forte's method for keeping what you read, learn and think in a system outside your head, so that it is there when you need it. The point isn't to collect notes. It is to make things with them.

What stayed with me

• CODE. Capture, Organise, Distill, Express. Keep what resonates, put it where it will be used, boil it down, and then make something with it. The last step is the one that counts.
• PARA. Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Organise by how soon you will act on something, not by subject. A note goes wherever you will next use it.
• Progressive summarisation. Don't summarise a note on the day you save it. Each time you come back, highlight the best of the last pass. The effort gets spent only on notes that turned out to matter.
• Intermediate packets. Work in small pieces you can reuse: an outline, a snippet, a diagram, a list of sources. Then nothing starts from a blank page.
• Capture less than you think. Keep what surprises you, what is useful and what is personal. Saving everything is the same as saving nothing.
• Twelve favourite problems. Borrowed from Richard Feynman: carry a dozen open questions around, and test everything new against them.

Where it shows up for me

This site is partly a second brain turned outward. The posts and these book notes are plain files in a folder, sitting next to the code, and writing one is the "express" step. It is also how I think about small tools: a script that solved a problem once is a packet worth keeping.

Who I'd hand it to

Anyone with hundreds of bookmarks and nothing to show for them. Skim the advice about specific apps; the method will outlast them.