I came across the mention of the book “Building a Second Brain” on one of the social media shares by one of the popular influencers the evoked my interest. Prior to beginning this book, I had read Getting Things Done and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, both of which fall into the same category of decluttering one’s environment. As per my opinion, this book will provide a transformational experience to anyone who has read the other two books and have implemented atleast a few things from them.

Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent on the thinking that only humans can do. This includes inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, and testing theories. It’s time to acknowledge that we can’t “use our head” to store and recall everything we need to know. We need to start outsourcing the job of remembering to intelligent machines.

For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”. It is a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. Once you digitize your notes and observations, you can search, organize, sync them across all your devices, and back them up to the cloud for safekeeping.

As this way of working with information continues over days, weeks and months, the way your mind works begins to change. Your second brain becomes like a mirror, teaching you about yourself and reflecting back to you the ideas worth keeping and acting on. Thus, your mind starts to lean on it to remember more than you ever could, resulting in more productivity and also a fulfilling life.

Creativity

Creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected. By keeping diverse kinds of material in one place, we facilitate this connectivity and increase the likelihood that we will notice an unusual association. These diverse kinds of material include, screenshots from an interesting Youtube video and a tweet sitting next to a quote from a philosophy book. An audio memo might be saved next to a link of a helpful website etc. Digital notes are virtual tools that you can use to turn vague concepts into tangible entities, which you can observe, rearrange, edit, and combine.

During brainstorming, the chances that the most creative and innovative approaches instantly come to our mind is not high. We tend to favor the ideas, solutions and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. Now imagine if you were to draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination in the form of second brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for long term. This support system can benefit us by coming out with the most creative and innovative ideas.

Three stages of progress

People who make use of the second brain ,i.e, the personal knowledge management system go through the following three stages as per the author.

  • Remembering
  • Connecting
  • Creating

The first way that people make use of their second brain is as a memory aid. They use their digital notes to save facts and ideas that they would have trouble recalling other wise.

The second way that people use their second brain is to connect ideas together. Their second brain evolves from being primarily a memory tool to becoming a thinking tool. A piece of advice from a mentor comes in handy as they encounter a similar situation on a different team or situation.

The third and final way that people use their second brain is for creating new things. They realize that they have a lot of knowledge on a subject and decide to turn it into something concrete and shareable. Having a lot of support material gives them the courage to put their ideas out there and have a positive impact on others.

CODE

Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express (CODE) is a map for navigating the endless streams of information that we come across every day.

Capture: Keep what resonates

Every time we turn on our smartphone or PC, information immediately immerses us. However, we cannot consume every bit of the information stream. The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside. Thus, we can improve our ability to take better notes by training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us. You are what you consume, and that applies just as much to information as to nutrition. You can use capture tools to capture passages from ebook, excepts from online articles, quotes from podcasts to name a few. Refer to the link to find the best capture tools as provided by the author here.

Organize: Save for Actionability

Most people tend to organize information by subject. However, when it comes to digital notes, the best way to organize your notes is to organize for action according to the active projects that you are working right now. Organizing for action gives you a sense of tremendous clarity, because everything that you are keeping actually has a purpose.

Distill: Find the Essence

As per the author, once your notes are organized based on action, you will begin to notice patterns and connections between them. Every idea has an essence, i.e, the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. Your notes will be useless if you cannot decipher them in the future. By highlighting the takeaways, you will be able to remind yourself what the notes is about. Thus you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.

Express: Show your work

All the previous steps are geared towards one ultimate purpose ,i.e, sharing your ideas, your own story and your own knowledge with others. Most of us fall into the category of continuously force feeding ourselves with information. However, we never take the next step and apply this information. The author recommends us to shift our time and effort from consuming to creating.

PARA

The author refined, simplified, and tested an action-based approach to organize files and notes with thousands of people. This system called PARA can be used to organize four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.

PARA can handle it all regardless of your profession or field. It organizes information based on how actionable it is, and not what kind of information it is. Organizing by actionability counteracts our tendency to constantly procrastinate and postpone our aspirations to some far-off future. PARA pulls these distant dreams into the here and now. It helps us realize that we already have much of the information we need to get started.

Progressive summarization

This is a simple process of taking the raw notes that you have captured and organized. You then distill the notes down to their most important points.

Layer one captures a few key excerpts of the article and includes a link to the original article at the bottom. To enhance the discoverability of this note, you can add a second layer of distillation. Here, the main points that provide hints of what the text is about needs to be bolded. For the notes that are especially long, interesting or valuable, the author suggests adding a third layer of highlighting. For this, you can use the “highlighting” feature available in most of the note-taking apps. This will often amount to just one or two sentences that encapsulate the message of the original source. A helpful rule of thumb that the author provides is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10 to 20 percent of the previous layer.

To avoid revisiting your notes and spending extra time deciphering their contents, this method can be highly effective. Focusing only on the bolded and highlighted points, as seen in layers two and three, makes it much easier to interpret the notes than rereading the entire article.

Intermediate packets

The idea of breaking down your work into smaller chunks is nothing new. However, it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces, you need a system for managing the pieces as well. The author calls the small pieces of WIP (Work In Progress) items as intermediate packets. The intermediate packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your whole work. You can use any note as an intermediate step in a larger project or goal. Like LEGO blocks, the more pieces you have, the easier it is to build something interesting.

The author provides information on the five types of intermediate packets that you can use to create and reuse in your work.

  • Distilled notes: Books or articles that you have read and distilled.
  • Outtakes: The material or ideas that did not make it into your past project.
  • WIP: The documents or other materials that you produced during your past projects.
  • Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you have delivered as part of your past projects.
  • Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by your team or other stakeholders that you can refer to and incorporate into your work.

I guess our ability to quickly tap into these creative assets and combine them into something new will make all the difference in whatever we do.

Process of retrieval

There is no single, perfectly reliable retrieval system for the ideas contained in your notes. Instead, there are four methods suggested by the author that overlap and complement one another. The methods are as follows:

  • Search: You can use the search function in your notes app as a quick, iterative approach to find the necessary information. If you’re unsure what to look for or interested in images or graphics, you can start browsing.
  • Browsing: The notes apps offer a variety of features that allow you to easily browse through the hierarchy of folders. This browsing can be based on date created, image only view etc. Some of the notes may end up being useful in unexpected ways, which is where the tags will be helpful.
  • Tags: Tags are the labels that you apply to certain notes regardless of where they are located. The main weakness of folders is that the ideas can get siloed from each other. Here, tags help in infusing your second brain with connections. Tags make it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns that defy simple categorization.
  • Serendipity: This mysterious method is about creating the environment for ideas to jump out at you. The ideal conditions for the ideas to arise is to put all sorts of different kinds of material, on many subjects and in diverse formats, all jumbled together in your second brain. While using this method don’t restrict your search to that specific folder, instead look through related category projects or resources. Because visual patterns amplify serendipity, the author recommends saving images as well. Lastly, sharing our ideas with others for feedback also introduces an element of serendipity.

Divergence and Convergence

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, but if all we do is divergence, then we never arrive anywhere. However, 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.

The model of convergence and divergence is fundamental to all creative work. It’s a pattern we can observe across any creative field. For example, writers diverge by collecting raw material for the story they want to tell. This is followed by converge by making outlines, laying out plot points, and writing a first draft. We can overlay this model with the four steps of CODE to come up with a powerful template for the creative process. The first two steps of CODE ,i.e, Capture and Organize, make up divergence, while the final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence.

Divergence and convergence are not a linear path, but a loop. Once you complete one round of convergence, you can take what you have learned right back into a new cycle of divergence.

Routine Actions

The second brain is a practical system for enhancing your productivity and creativity. “Being organized” isn’t a personality trait that you are born with, nor is it merely about finding the right apps or tools. It is a habit of a repeated set of actions you take as you encounter, work with and put information to use. The author recommends three types of habits to incorporate into your routine. These habits help keep your second brain functional and relevant over time.

  • Project checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work.
  • Weekly & Monthly reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything.
  • Noticing habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

When you turn your digital notes into a working environment rather than just a storage space, they become much more useful. As a result, you naturally start spending a lot more time there. Since this will turn out to align with your real needs, you need to use the habit of “organize as you go”.

Your second brain starts as a system to support you and your goals. You can easily leverage it to support others and their dreams. In doing so, you become a force for good in the world.

You can evaluate your current notetaking proficiency by making use of the free assessment tool provided by the author here.

Further Reading: