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What’s in a second brain?
Building a “second brain” is just a fancy term for keeping a digital note system where you save the stuff you learn. If you’ve heard any of these: Personal Knowledge Management, Atomic Notes, Smart notes or Zettlekasten, it’s all basically the same idea - the knowledge you attain should accrete in such a way that you can leverage it to inspire and inform future work.
It’s a pretty cool idea.
However, the modern note taker quickly hits two fundamental questions:
- How do I organize my notes so I can find them easily and predictably when I need them?
- How do I take useful notes with minimal effort?
Tiego Forte brings together 2 separate 4-letter frameworks to help out. His solutions are PARA and CODE.
P.A.R.A = Where to put your notes
I eventually named this organizing system PARA which stands for the four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose
You put all your notes into 4 root folders that organize everything by decreasing order of urgency:
- Projects - active things with an end date
- Areas - ongoing zones of responsibility like health, finances, professional development
- Resources - Research on topics of interest that you will access if and when they’re relevant to you
- Archives - Stuff that no longer belongs in 1-3 but that you want to always have access to via search
You can use any note taking tool with a basic folder structure and a decent search function: from your computer file system to Google Drive, or something like Obsidian (what I personally use nowadays).
C.O.D.E = How to make your notes not suck
Keep what resonates (Capture). Save for actionability (Organize). Find the essence (Distill). Show your work (Express). If at any point you feel overwhelmed, take a step back and focus on what is immediately necessary: your most important projects and priorities. Scale back to only the notes you need to move those priorities forward. Instead of trying to architect your entire Second Brain system from scratch up front, focus on moving one project at a time through each step from capturing to expressing.
Throughout the week quickly capture useful and interesting notes, ideas, and highlights into an inbox so it doesn’t slow you down. Process them weekly or so to distill down just the interesting, provocative stuff that resonated with you so they’re useful and consumable when you need them.
Only save what’s relevant
[Realize] that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you… You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.
Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?
I’m a recently-recovering digital pack rat. It’s easy to save a whole article or highlight a whole paragraph, so why not capture every bit of knowledge that might be useful later?
Well, if you save a big ole’ block of text that means you’ve gotta read it later to sort out what (if anything) is useful. You’re deferring the analytical work for future you (boo!). By introducing that friction, you lower the chances you’ll ever actually use it.
What’s worse is that saving things feel good. It feels productive, even if you’re not actually producing anything yet. Between completion bias and self-sabotage you might be less likely to actually create anything at all if you invest too much energy in researching and note-taking instead of creating.
Only saving what’s useful to you right now keeps you focused and your notes tidy. Do it for your future self.
Progressive summarization
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. 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.
For example - take a quick pass over a note and only highlight the most relevant sentences. Then take another pass and bold the most important words within those highlights. For extra credit, write a 1-2 line executive summary at the top in your own words.
You can do this in one go when processing your notes - or clean up the note iteratively a bit at a time each time you touch it. Whatever works for you.
Organizing - don’t use tags, use folders instead
It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your folders. However, tags can come in handy in specific situations when the two previous retrieval methods aren’t up to the task, and you want to spontaneously gather, connect, and synthesize groups of notes on the fly.
Classic debate - tags vs folders. I’ve consistently been team folder but always little tag-curious. I tried a few tag systems over the years but nothing really stuck until I stopped overthinking it. My folders are a very general organization system. I keep them broad so that I don’t have to think too much about which folder is the right home. Then I sometimes sprinkle a few tags on top if there’s a theme I’m seeing emerge that I might want to check out later. I’ve stopped overthinking it, and it’s great. Any tool with autocomplete for your existing tags is all you need.
How to use your past notes to kick start a new project
Here’s his advice for how to bring everything together and actually produce some real work from all your notes:
- Don’t try to explore and create in the same session
- First, divergently explore what you’ve already captured, do research, get inspiration
- Then, converge into an “Archepelago of ideas” to frame your writing
Separate the divergent work (research) from convergent work (synthesis)
What I learned from my father is that by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done. We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. I learned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine that systematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of our awareness.
Convergent vs divergent thinking are two separate modes. We’re better at seeing connections and coming up with solutions to problems when we take each mode one at a time. First brainstorm and get everything out on the table. Then examine each piece for connections, see how they fit, and what to throw away.
Avoid the blank slate by exploring what you’ve already got
Here are some 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?
First, I review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Second, I look through any existing folders that might contain information relevant to the new project I’m starting, including related templates, outlines, and outtakes from previous projects. PARA and Progressive Summarization really come in handy here.
Search for related terms across all folders. The third step is to perform searches for any notes I might have missed. Sometimes there are valuable ideas buried in unexpected places, which I may not find through browsing alone.
Bringing it together into an Archepelago of Ideas
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.
We’ll forgive the cute metaphor for being a little cheesy but it gets the point across.
Practical tips for day-to-day work
Wrapping up with a few practical tips for building and using your system in the trenches
It’s okay to use multiple tools
Instead of inventing a completely different organizational scheme for every place you store information, which creates a tremendous amount of friction navigating the inconsistencies between them, PARA can be used everywhere, across any software program, platform, or notetaking tool. You can use the same system with the same categories and the same principles across your digital life. You’ll always need to use multiple platforms to move your projects forward. No single platform can do everything. The intention here is not to use a single software program, but to use a single organizing system, one that provides consistency even as you switch between apps many times per day. A project will be the same project whether it’s found in your notes app, your computer file system, or your cloud storage drive, allowing you to move seamlessly between them without losing your train of thought. By structuring your notes and files around the completion of your active projects, your knowledge can go to work for you, instead of collecting dust like an “idea graveyard.” The promise of PARA is that it changes “getting organized” from a herculean, never-ending endeavor into a straightforward task to get over with so you can move on to more important work.
I used to think of duplication like a sin (call it trauma from growing up as a software engineer in the heyday of DRY) so the thought of mirroring my system across multiple tools never occurred to me. Honestly, it’s pretty liberating.
Mix your media
This is the main reason we put all sorts of different kinds of material, on many subjects and in diverse formats, all jumbled together in our Second Brain. We are creating a soup of creative DNA to maximize the chance that new life emerges.
When you’re working on a project feel free to cross the streams. Don’t be shy to include screen shots, links to video clips, pdfs, or whatever formats you find when doing research all in the same place. You never know what might spark serendipity.
Clutter creates mental friction
People need clear workspaces to be able to create. We cannot do our best thinking and our best work when all the “stuff” from the past is crowding and cluttering our space. That’s why that archiving step is so crucial: you’re not losing anything, and it can all be found via search, but you need to move it all out of sight and out of mind.
So true. This also applies to the physical world. When my home office, desk, or digital workspace is cluttered it’s so much harder to think. It’s worth 5 minutes or less to just clear stuff out so you can get to work.
Best advice in the book
My mentor advised me to “move quickly and touch lightly” instead. To look for the path of least resistance and make progress in short steps. I want to give the same advice to you: don’t make organizing your Second Brain into yet another heavy obligation. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?”
Now go forth, and create.