Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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Evaluate your current notetaking practices and areas for potential improvement using our free Productivity Potential Quiz . 12. Join the PKM community 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. What does our motivation depend on? Mostly, on making consistent progress. We can endure quite a bit of stress and frustration in the short term if we know it’s leading somewhere. So much of what we call “organizing” is essentially procrastination in disguise. We tell ourselves we’re “getting ready” or “doing research,” pretending like it’s progress. When in reality, we are seeking any little thing we can polish or tidy to avoid having to face the task we are dreading. Which brings us to our second problem: without a list of individual projects, you can’t connect your current efforts to your long-term goals.

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. 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 with one of my current projects?’” Building a Second Brain is about how to capture, remember, and benefit from the vast quantities of information around us by building a personal system for knowledge management.I began to call the system I had developed my Second Brain and started a blog to share my ideas about how it worked. These ideas resonated with a much wider audience than I ever expected, and my work was eventually featured in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Fast Company, and Inc., among others. An article I wrote about how to use digital notetaking to enhance creativity went viral in the productivity community, and I was invited to speak and teach workshops at influential companies like Genentech, Toyota, and the Inter-American Development Bank. In early 2017, I decided to create an online course called “Building a Second Brain” to teach my system on a wider scale. II In the years since, that program has produced thousands of graduates from more than one hundred countries and every walk of life, creating an engaged and inquisitive community where the lessons in this book have been honed and refined. The value in the course therefore, is in the accountability and community aspects of it. So if you think that’s worth the price-tag, then I’d highly recommend signing up, and I’ll see you in the live sessions.

Finally, you have archives , which include anything from the previous three categories that is no longer active, but you might want to save for future reference: Building A Second Brain is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks.”In its most practical form, creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected.” If we use busy as an excuse for not doing something what we are really saying is that it’s not a priority. Simply put: You don’t find the time to do something; you make the time to do things. But then without realizing it, we took that same approach into adulthood. We continued to categorize our documents and files according to incredibly broad subjects like “Marketing,” “Psychology,” “Business,” or “Ideas.”