← the shelf

1. Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.I

2. practice of keeping personal notes also arose in other countries, such as biji in China (roughly translated as “notebook”), which could contain anecdotes, quotations, random musings, literary criticism, short fictional stories, and anything else that a person thought worth recording. In Japan, zuihitsu (known as “pillow books”) were collections of notebooks used to document a person’s life.

   in the margincommonplace books became common in many cultures

3. The Superpowers of a Second Brain There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

4. This is a remarkable aspect of one of the most famous scientific discoveries of the last century: at the decisive moment, even highly trained scientists deeply familiar with mathematical and abstract thinking turned to the most basic, ancient medium available: physical stuff.

5. A recent study from Princeton University found that there is a certain kind of job that is least likely to be automated by machines in coming years. Surprisingly, it wasn’t jobs that required advanced skills or years of training that were predicted to fare best. It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”5 In other words, the jobs that are most likely to stick around are those that involve promoting or defending a particular perspective. Think of a fundraising organizer sharing stories of the impact their nonprofit has made, a researcher using data to back up their interpretation of an experiment, or a project manager citing a couple of key precedents to support a decision. Our careers and businesses depend more than ever on our ability to advance a particular point of view and persuade others to adopt it as well.6

6. While your Second Brain is made up of all the tools you use to interact with information, including a to-do list, a calendar, email, and reading apps, for example, there is one category of software I recommend as the centerpiece of your Second Brain: a digital notetaking app.I

7. Introducing The CODE Method: The Four Steps to Remembering What Matters To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.

8. The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside. When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level. Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful. Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.

   in the marginCapture only what resonates

9. Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. It might take hundreds of pages and thousands of words to fully explain a complex insight, but there is always a way to convey the core message in just a sentence or two. Einstein famously summarized his revolutionary new theory of physics with the equation E=mc2. If he can distill his thinking into such an elegant equation, you can surely summarize the main points of any article, book, video, or presentation so that the main point is easy to identify.

   in the marginDistill

10. This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.V

11. What Not to Keep The examples I’ve shared may seem so expansive that you’re wondering if there is anything you shouldn’t keep in your Second Brain. In my experience, there are four kinds of content that aren’t well suited to notes apps: Is this sensitive information you’d like to keep secure? The content you save in your notes is easily accessible from any device, which is great for accessibility but not for security. Information like tax records, government documents, passwords, and health records shouldn’t be saved in your notes. Is this a special format or file type better handled by a dedicated app? Although you could save specialized files such as Photoshop files or video footage in your notes, you’ll need a specialized app to open them anyway, so there’s no benefit to keeping them in your notes. Is this a very large file? Notes apps are made for short, lightweight bits of text and images, and their performance will often be severely hampered if you try to save large files in them. Will it need to be collaboratively edited? Notes apps are perfectly suited for individual, private use, which makes them less than ideal for collaboration. You can share individual notes or even groups of notes with others, but if you need multiple people to be able to collaboratively edit a document in real time, then you’ll need to use a different platform.

12. Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4: You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” 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.

13. he was eating in the student cafeteria when someone tossed a dinner plate into the air—a Cornell cafeteria plate with the university seal imprinted on one rim—and in the instant of its flight he experienced what he long afterward considered an epiphany. As the plate spun, it wobbled. Because of the insignia he could see that the spin and the wobble were not quite in synchrony. Yet just in that instant it seemed to him—or was it his physicist’s intuition?—that the two rotations were related. After working the problem out on paper, Feynman discovered a 2-to-1 ratio between the plate’s wobble and spin, a neat relationship that suggested a deeper underlying principle at work. When a fellow physicist and mentor asked what the use of such an insight was, Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance... I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?” He was following his intuition and curiosity. But it did end up having importance, with his research into the equations underlying rotation informing the work that ultimately led to him receiving the Nobel Prize.

14. Notice that some of these questions are abstract, while others are concrete. Some express deep longings, while others are more like spontaneous interests. Many are questions about how to live a better life, while a few are focused on how to succeed professionally. The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in. The power of your favorite problems is that they tend to stay fairly consistent over time. The exact framing of each question may change, but even as we move between projects, jobs, relationships, and careers, our favorite problems tend to follow us across the years. I recommend asking your family or childhood friends what you were obsessed with as a kid. Those very same interests probably still fire your imagination as an adult. Which means any content you collect related to them will likely be relevant far into the future as well.

15. Take a moment now to write down some of your own favorite problems. Here are my recommendations to guide you: Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child (often you’ll continue to be fascinated with the same things as an adult). Don’t worry about coming up with exactly twelve (the exact number doesn’t matter, but try to come up with at least a few). Don’t worry about getting the list perfect (this is just a first pass, and it will always be evolving). Phrase them as open-ended questions that could have multiple answers (in contrast to “yes/no” questions with only one answer). Use your list of favorite problems to make decisions about what to capture: anything potentially relevant to answering them. Use one of the capture tools I recommend later in this chapter, or in the Second Brain Resource Guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources.

16. 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.

17. it’s so important to take on a Curator’s Perspective—that we are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information we choose to let into our lives.

18. information theorist Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you.7 If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it?

19. If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowly quiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is telling you, the inner voice will grow stronger. You’ll start to hear it in all kinds of situations. It will guide you in what choices to make and which opportunities to pursue. It will warn you away from people and situations that aren’t right for you. It will speak up and take a stand for your convictions even when you’re afraid.

20. It’s a good idea to capture key information about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title of the piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published.III Many capture tools are even able to identify and save this information automatically. Also, it’s often helpful to capture chapter titles, headings, and bullet-point lists, since they add structure to your notes and represent distillation already performed by the author on your behalf.

    in the marginpractical tip on what to capture

21. No matter how many different kinds of software you use, don’t leave all the knowledge they contain scattered across dozens of places you’ll never think to look. Make sure your best findings get routed back to your notes app where you can put them all together and act on them.

22. First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words. Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, like practicing a dance routine or shooting hoops, which makes them far more likely to stick.

23. Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking.

24. In a wide range of controlled studies, writing about one’s inner experiences led to a drop in visits to the doctor, improved immune systems, and reductions in distress. Students who wrote about emotional topics showed improvements in their grades, professionals who had been laid off found new jobs more quickly, and staff members were absent from work at lower rates. The most amazing thing about these findings is that they didn’t rely on input from others. No one had to read or respond to what these people wrote down—the benefits came just from the act of writing.

    in the marginprofessional and health benefits associated with writing down thoughts and feelings

25. On average I capture just two notes per day—what are two ideas, insights, observations, perspectives, or lessons you’ve encountered today that you could write down right now?

26. externalized forms” such as speaking or writing,

27. We know that the details of lighting, temperature, and the layout of a space dramatically affect how we feel and think. 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.

28. The intention here is not to use a single software program, but to use a single organizing system,

29. Projects at work: Complete web-page design; Create slide deck for conference; Develop project schedule; Plan recruitment drive. Personal projects: Finish Spanish language course; Plan vacation; Buy new living room furniture; Find local volunteer opportunity. Side projects: Publish blog post; Launch crowdfunding campaign; Research best podcast microphone; Complete online course.

30. In the case of finances, you may have notes from calls with your financial advisor, receipts or invoices for business purchases, and your monthly household budget, among many other kinds of information. You might also have more speculative information to manage, like financial projections, research on personal finance software, and data on investment trends you’re keeping an eye on.

31. 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.

    in the marginall about what you are responsible for based on your expectations from your self and your standards to embody

32. In other words, you are always trying to place a note or file not only where it will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest.

33. The archives are like the freezer—items are in cold storage until they are needed, which could be far into the future. Resources are like the pantry—available for use in any meal you make, but neatly tucked away out of sight in the meantime. Areas are like the fridge—items that you plan on using relatively soon, and that you want to check on more frequently. Projects are like the pots and pans cooking on the stove—the items you are actively preparing right now.

34. When it comes to our personal knowledge, there is no such assigned spot. We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is always changing. Sometimes we can receive one text message or email and the entire landscape of our day changes. Because our priorities can change at a moment’s notice, we have to minimize the time we spend filing, labeling, tagging, and maintaining our digital notes. We can’t run the risk of all that effort going to waste. Any piece of information (whether a text document, an image, a note, or an entire folder) can and should flow between categories. You might save a note on coaching techniques to a project folder called “Coaching class,” for a class you’re taking. Later, when you become a manager at work and need to coach your direct reports, you might move that note to an area folder called “Direct reports.” At some point you might leave that company, but still remain interested in coaching, and move the note to resources. One day you might lose interest in the subject altogether and move it to the archives. In the future, that note could find its way all the way back to projects when you decide to start a side gig as a business coach, making that knowledge actionable once again.

35. The first is that 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.

36. Second, I learned that creating new things is what really matters.

37. Although you can and should use PARA across all the platforms where you store information—the three most common ones besides a notetaking app are the documents folder on your computer, cloud storage drives like Dropbox, and online collaboration suites like Google Docs—I recommend starting with just your notes app for now.

38. you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of four-letter frameworks. Researchers have called it the “Magic Number 4” because it is the highest number that we can count at a glance and hold in our minds without extra effort.

39. 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.

40. There is one more layer we can add, though it is quite rarely needed. For only the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words. The best sign that a fourth layer is needed is when I find myself visiting a note again and again, clearly indicating that it is one of the cornerstones of my thinking. Looking only at the points I’ve previously bolded and highlighted in layers two and three makes it far easier to write this summary than if I was trying to summarize the entire article all at once.

41. your own words, define any unusual terms you’re using, and think about how your future self, who may not remember anything about this source, might interpret what you’re writing.

42. as I prepared to take on this major financial commitment, not to mention the responsibility of managing a direct report. Luckily, I had a handful of highly actionable notes saved in a resource folder called “Hiring.” To get started, I moved the entire folder from resources to projects. Then I spent about thirty minutes to review the notes it contained and highlight the most relevant takeaways. Those highlights were the starting point for the hiring process I ended up using for my own business,

43. Picasso’s Secret: Prune the Good to Surface the Great We can look at masters of creativity throughout history to see how distilling their ideas shaped their work. One of Pablo Picasso’s most famous drawings, created in 1945 and known as Picasso’s Bull, offers a master class in how distillation works. It is a sequence of images that he drew to study a bull’s essential form. The process of distillation happens in every art form, but this example is unusual in that Picasso preserved each step of his process.

44. Starting with the top left image and moving across and down, Picasso deconstructed the shapes of the bull one step at a time. In the first couple of drawings, he adds more detail. The horns are fuller, the tail becomes three-dimensional, and the hide has more depth and texture. Picasso is starting by building up detail so that he has more options to choose from when it comes time to take some away. The process of distillation begins with the fourth image. He outlines the main muscles of the animal using sharp white lines. Soft curves become more angular, and the animal as a whole starts to take on a more geometric look. In the fifth and sixth images, the drawing starts to become radically simplified as Picasso drops most of the detail in the bull’s head and further simplifies its horns, tail, and legs. A thick white line representing the bull’s center of gravity is added, cutting across the animal from front to back. By the last few images, the bull has become nothing more than an interconnected series of simple, black-and-white shapes. The legs have become single lines. Solid blocks of color define the front and back of the animal. In the final drawings, even those details are abstracted away. We end with a drawing that is nothing but a single, continuous stroke, which somehow still manages to capture the very essence of the bull.6

45. Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly. To be clear, it takes skill and courage to let the details fall away.

46. Remember that notes are not authoritative texts. You don’t need to and shouldn’t include every tiny detail. They are more like bookmarks peeking out from the pages of a book on the shelf, signaling to you, “Hey! There’s something interesting here!” You will always be able to go back and review the full, original source if needed. Your notes only solve the problem of rediscovering those sources when you need them.

47. helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. If you save a series of excerpts from a book amounting to five hundred words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty. This isn’t an exact science, but if you find yourself highlighting everything, this rule should give you pause.

48. wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use. 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, the same way an athlete might have a warm-up and stretching routine. When I’m about to get on a call with my lawyer, I’ll often prepare by highlighting my notes from our last call and drawing out decision points and action items into an agenda. He always thinks I’m well prepared, when in fact I just want to finish the call quickly to minimize the time I’m being billed for! 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 summarizing notes, doing so only when it’s virtually guaranteed that it will be worth it. The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it. This ensures that the notes you interact with most often will naturally become the most discoverable in a virtuous cycle.

49. When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.VIII You can prepare in advance for the future challenges and opportunities you don’t even yet know you’ll face, by taking advantage of the effort you’re already spending reading books, learning new things, and simply being curious about the world around you. To put what you’ve just learned into practice immediately, find an interesting piece of content you consumed recently, such as an article, audiobook, or YouTube video. This could be content you’ve captured already and organized in one of your PARA folders. Or it could be a new piece of content floating around your email inbox or in a read later app. Start by saving only the best excerpts from that piece of content in a new note, either using copy-paste or a capture tool. This is layer one, the initial excerpts you save in your Second Brain. Next, read through the excerpts, bolding the main points and most important takeaways. Don’t make it an analytical decision—listen for a feeling of resonance and let that be your guide for what to bold. These bolded passages are layer two. Now read through only the bolded passages, and highlight (or, if your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, underline) the best of the best passages. The key here is to be very picky: the entire note may have only a few highlighted sentences, or even just one. Not only is that fine, it…

50. like to think of layer one as the “soil”—an excerpt from a source or my own thinking (whether as words, drawings, images, or audio) I initially capture into my notes. They are like the ground on which my understanding will be built. Layer two is “oil,” as in “I’ve struck oil!,” conveniently represented by black, bolded text. Layer three is “gold,” which is even more valuable, and shines in highlighter yellow in many apps. Layer four is the “gems,” the most rare and illuminating finds that I’ve distilled in my own words as an executive summary.

51. principle is called stigmergy—to leave “marks” on the environment that make your future efforts easier. It is a strategy used by ant colonies to find food. If an ant finds a food source, it will bring a piece of it back to the colony, while leaving a special pheromone along the trail. Other ants can follow this trail to find the food for themselves, enabling a multitude of ants to quickly find and collect new sources of food.

52. The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blank page, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth. Professional creatives constantly draw on outside sources of inspiration—their own experiences and observations, lessons gleaned from successes and failures alike, and the ideas of others. If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.

53. If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear.

54. There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work: Distilled notes: Books or articles you’ve read and distilled so it’s easy to get the gist of what they contain (using the Progressive Summarization technique you learned in the previous chapter, for example). Outtakes: The material or ideas that didn’t make it into a past project but could be used in future ones. Work-in-process: The documents, graphics, agendas, or plans you produced during past projects. Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered as part of past projects, which could become components of something new. Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can reference and incorporate into your work.

55. If you’re reading how-to articles in your free time, you can save the best tips in your notes and turn them into distilled notes for when it’s time to put them to use. If you’re writing an essay and decide to cut a paragraph, you can save those outtakes in case you ever write a follow-up. If you are in product development and create a detailed set of requirements, you can save that work-in-process as a template for future products. If you’re a management consultant, you can save the slides you presented to an executive team as a final deliverable, and reuse them for similar presentations. If you’re a lab scientist and a colleague designs the perfect lab protocol, you can reuse and improve that document for your own use (with their permission, of course).

56. You should always cite your sources and give credit where credit is due. A scientist doesn’t obscure her sources—she points to them so others can retrace her footsteps. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and it’s smart to build on the thinking they’ve done rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

57. Second, you’ll be able to make progress in any span of time. Instead of waiting until you have multiple uninterrupted hours—which, let’s face it, is rare and getting rarer—you can look at how many minutes you have free and choose to work on an IP that you can get done within that time, even if it’s tiny.

58. Third, Intermediate Packets increase the quality of your work by allowing you to collect feedback more often.

59. You’ll find that people give much better feedback if they’re included early, and the work is clearly in progress.

60. Fourth, and best of all, eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. This is a magical experience that will completely change how you view productivity. The idea of starting anything from scratch will become foreign to you—why not draw on the wealth of assets you’ve invested in in the past? People will marvel at how you’re able to deliver at such a high standard so consistently. They’ll wonder how you find the time to do so much careful thinking, when in fact you’re not working harder or longer—all you’re doing is drawing on a growing library of Intermediate Packets stored in your Second Brain. If they are truly valuable assets, then they deserve to be managed, just like any other asset you possess.

61. By “thinking small,” you can focus on creating just one IP each time you sit down to work, without worrying about how viable it is or whether it will be used in the exact way you envisioned. This lens reframes creativity as an ongoing, continual cycle of delivering value in small bits, rather than a massive all-consuming endeavor that weighs on you for months.

62. Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output

63. Consider the different kinds of documents and other content that you probably regularly produce as part of your normal routines: Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media Journal or diary entries with your personal reflections Highlights or underlined passages in books or articles Messages, photos, or videos posted on social media Slides or charts included in presentations Diagrams, mind maps, or other visuals on paper or in apps Recordings of meetings, interviews, talks, or presentations Answers to common questions you receive via email Written works, such as blog posts or white papers Documented plans and processes such as agendas, checklists, templates, or project retrospectives While you can sit down to purposefully create an IP, it is far more powerful to simply notice the IPs that you have already produced and then to take an extra moment to save them in your Second Brain.

64. Let’s look at an example: planning a large conference. If it’s a brand-new event, or you’ve never organized a conference before, it might seem like you have to produce everything from scratch. However, if you break down that mega-project into concrete chunks, suddenly the components that you’ll need become clear: A conference agenda A list of interesting breakout sessions A checklist for streaming the keynote sessions An email announcing the conference to your network An invitation for people to be speakers or panelists A conference website These are some of the building blocks that you’ll need to be able to run the conference.

65. The conference agenda could easily be modeled on an agenda from a different conference, with the topics and speaker names switched out. You could start compiling a list of potential breakout sessions, adding any topic suggested by others that strikes you as interesting. You might have a checklist for delivering effective keynotes left over from a live event you’ve organized in the past. Emails can draw on an archive of examples you’ve saved from other conferences you’ve attended. Screenshots of conference websites you admire are the best possible starting point for designing your own.

66. Our creativity thrives on examples.

67. How to Resurface and Reuse Your Past Work

68. These are some of the most valuable connections—when an idea crosses the boundaries between subjects. They can’t be planned or predicted. They can emerge only when many kinds of ideas in different shapes and sizes are mixed together. This inherent unpredictability means that there is no single, perfectly reliable retrieval system for the ideas contained in your notes. Instead, there are four methods for retrieval that overlap and complement one another. Together they are more powerful than any computer yet more flexible than any human mind. You can step through them in order until you find what you’re looking for. Those four retrieval methods are: Search Browsing Tags Serendipity

69. Retrieval Method #1: Search

70. Search should be the first retrieval method you turn to. It is most useful when you already know more or less what you’re looking for, when you don’t have notes saved in a preexisting folder, or when you’re looking for text, but as with every tool, it has its limitations. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, don’t have a preexisting folder to look through, or are interested in images or graphics, it’s time to turn to browsing.

71. Retrieval Method #2: Browsing

72. As powerful as search can be, studies5 have found that in many situations people strongly prefer to navigate their file systems manually, scanning for the information they’re looking for. Manual navigation gives people control over how they navigate, with folders and file names providing small contextual clues about where to look next.6 Browsing allows us to gradually home in on the information we are looking for, starting with the general and getting more and more specific. This kind of browsing uses older parts of the brain that developed to navigate physical environments, and thus comes to us more naturally.II

73. Sometimes it’s very clear which area of your business a note is related to, but often you have no idea where to put it. Many notes end up being useful in completely unexpected ways. We want to encourage that kind of serendipity, not fight it! It is for the unforeseen and the unexpected that tags really shine.

74. Retrieval Method #3: Tags

75. For example, maybe you work in customer service and notice that the same questions from customers keep coming up again and again. You might decide to write a Frequently Asked Questions page and add it to your company website. That is a project, but not one that you previously recognized and started gathering materials for. You might have various notes that you want to draw on to design this page, but don’t want to move them from the project, area, and resource folders where they’re currently located. It’s time for tags. You could take fifteen minutes and perform a series of searches for terms relevant to the FAQs you’ll be writing. For any useful note you find, apply a tag called “FAQ” while leaving it right where you found it. Once you’ve found enough material to work with, you can perform a single search—for the “FAQ” tag—and instantly see all the notes you’ve tagged collected in one place. Now you are free to review them more closely, highlight any specific points you want to use, and move those points into an outline to guide your writing.

76. I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational system. 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.III

77. Retrieval Method #4: Serendipity

78. First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good idea to keep your focus a little broad.

79. When starting a project, I’ll often look at five or six PARA folders just in case they contain something useful. Since you’ve carefully curated the contents of these folders, you won’t be faced with too much material in any given one. If you’re using Progressive Summarization to distill your notes, as explained in Chapter 6, you can focus only on the highlighted passages and review notes far faster than having to read every word. It usually takes me less than thirty seconds on average to review a highlighted note, which means I can set aside just ten minutes and review twenty of them or more.

80. Second, serendipity is amplified by visual patterns. This is why I strongly suggest saving not only text notes but images as well (which is difficult to do in other kinds of software such as word processors). Our brains are naturally attuned to visuals. We intuitively absorb colors and shapes in the blink of an eye, using far less energy than it takes to read words. Some digital notes apps allow you to display only the images saved in your notes, which is a powerful way of activating the more intuitive, visual parts of your brain.

81. Three Stages of Expressing: What Does It Look Like to Show Our Work?

82. Patrick used this realization to change his creative process. He began recording his conversations using an automatic transcription app on his smartphone, allowing him to be fully present with grieving families knowing he had every word captured. He saved all the transcripts from his conversations, plus obituaries, photos, and other related documents into the PARA project folder for each memorial, so he could see it all in one place. Instead of spending five to seven hours at the end of all his interviews to distill everything he had heard, he began spending fifteen minutes after each interview to highlight only the parts that resonated.

83. Creativity Is Inherently Collaborative

84. It is much easier to show someone a small thing, and ask for their thoughts on it, rather than the entire opus you’re creating. It’s less confronting to hear criticism on one small aspect of your work, at an early stage when you still have time to correct it, than getting a negative reaction after months of effort. You can use each little piece of intermediate feedback to refine what you’re making—to make it more focused, more appealing, more succinct, or easier to understand.

85. The fundamental difficulty of creative work is that we are often too close to it to see it objectively. Getting feedback is really about borrowing someone else’s eyes to see what only a novice can see. It’s about stepping outside your subjective point of view and noticing what’s missing from what you’ve made.

86. Once you understand how incredibly valuable feedback is, you start to crave as much of it as you can find. You start looking for every opportunity to share your outputs and gain some clarity on how other people are likely to receive it. These moments are so important that you will begin changing how you work in order to get feedback as early and often as possible, because you know it is much easier to gather and synthesize the thoughts of others than to come up with an endless series of brilliant thoughts on your own. You will begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.

87. Everything Is a Remix

88. Kitbashing is a practice used in making small-scale models for action movies like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. To stay within time and budget, model makers buy prefabricated commercial kits and recombine them into new models for their sets. Instead of fabricating new pieces from scratch, these premade parts—from models of World War II flak cannons, US Navy battleships, fighter planes, T-34 tanks, and submarines—can be used to add texture and fine detail to special effects scenes in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost it would normally take. Adam Savage, host of the popular MythBusters television show and a skilled model maker, noted that because these pieces are so versatile, “There were some kits to which you would return repeatedly.” As part of the team at Industrial Light & Magic, the studio behind many special effects films, he relied on a particular kit that found its way into almost every model the team ever built.7 Don’t take the work of others wholesale; borrow aspects or parts of their work. The shape of a banner on a web page, the layout of a slide, the style of a song—these are like the ingredients you put in a blender before hitting the button and mixing it into your own recipe. Of course, cite all your sources and influences, even if you don’t strictly have to. Giving credit where credit is due doesn’t lessen the value of your contribution—it increases it.

89. I remember the first time someone referred to what I do as “your work.” It dawned on me that I had a body of work that stood on its own, that had an identity distinct from mine.

90. 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.

91. As the potential of your intellectual assets becomes apparent, you’ll start to look for any way to spend your time creating such assets and avoid one-off tasks whenever possible. You will start to seek out ways of acquiring or outsourcing the creation of these assets to others, instead of assuming you have to build them all yourself. These changes will enable you to get things done at a pace that is far beyond what mere “productivity tips” can ever achieve.

92. Your Turn: You Only Know What You Make

93. My favorite quote about creativity is from the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.” To truly “know” something, it’s not enough to read about it in a book. Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action. Thoughts are fleeting, quickly fading as time passes. To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it. You have to get your hands dirty and apply that knowledge to a practical problem. We learn by making concrete things—before we feel ready, before we have it completely figured out, and before we know where it’s going. It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential.

94. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.

95. You could draw on the insights and life experiences you’ve written about in your notes to write a blog post or record a YouTube video to help people who are facing a similar challenge.

96. THREE The Shift Making Things Happen

97. Building a Second Brain is really about standardizing the way we work, because we only really improve when we standardize the way we do something. To get stronger, you need to lift weights using the correct form. A musician relies on standardized notes and time signatures so they don’t have to reinvent the basics from scratch every time. To improve your writing, you need to follow the conventions of spelling and grammar (even if you decide to break those rules for special effect down the road).

98. The creative process is ancient and unchanging. It was the same thousands of years ago as it is today. There are lessons we can learn on that deeper level that transcend any particular medium and any particular set of tools. One of the most important patterns that underlies the creative process is called “divergence and convergence.”II

99. Divergence and Convergence: A Creative Balancing Act

100. A creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence. You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible. Like Taylor Swift’s notes, Twyla Tharp’s box, Francis Ford Coppola’s prompt book, or Octavia Butler’s commonplace notebooks, you begin to gather different kinds of outside inspiration, expose yourself to new influences, explore new paths, and talk to others about what you’re thinking. The number of things you are looking at and considering is increasing—you are diverging from your starting point. The activity of divergence is familiar to all of us: it is the classic whiteboard covered in sketches, the writer’s wastepaper basket filled with crumpled-up drafts, and the photographer with hundreds of photos laid out across the floor. The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas, so the process is necessarily spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander.

101. As powerful and necessary as divergence is, if all we ever do is diverge, then we never arrive anywhere. Like Francis Ford Coppola highlighting certain passages and crossing out others in The Godfather novel, at some point you must start discarding possibilities and converging toward a solution. Otherwise, you will never get the rewarding sense of completion that comes with hitting “send” or “publish” and stepping back from the canvas or screen knowing you got the job done. 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 you are proud of. Convergence allows our work to take on a life of its own and become something separate from ourselves.

102. If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model of divergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template for the creative process in our time. The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence. They help us shut the door to new ideas and begin constructing something new out of the knowledge building blocks we’ve assembled.

103. The Three Strategies I Use to Bring Creative Work Together

104. 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.

105. 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. It’s painful to cut off options and choose one path over another. There is a kind of creative grief in watching an idea that you know is full of potential get axed from a script or a story. This is what makes creative work challenging.

106. When you sit down to finish something—whether it’s an explanatory email, a new product design, a research report, or a fundraising strategy—it can be so tempting to do more research. It’s so easy to open up dozens of browser tabs, order more books, or go off in completely new directions. Those actions are tempting because they feel like productivity. They feel like forward progress, when in fact they are divergent acts that postpone the moment of completion.

107. 1. The Archipelago of Ideas: Give Yourself Stepping-Stones

108. The technique is named after a quote by Steven Johnson, the author of a series of fascinating books on creativity, innovation, and the history of ideas.1 As Johnson wrote: Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

109. An archipelago is a chain of islands in the ocean, usually formed by volcanic activity over long spans of time. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are an archipelago of eight major islands extending over about 1,500 miles of the Pacific Ocean.

110. Here’s an example of an Archipelago of Ideas note I created to help me write an in-depth article on commonplace books: The underlined links (which appear in green in my notes) are the sources I’m drawing on as research. Clicking a link will lead me not to the public web, where I can easily get distracted, but to another note within my Second Brain containing my full notes on that source.III There I will find all the details I might need, as well as a link back to the original work for my citations. Below each source, I’ve copied and pasted only the points I specifically want to use in this particular piece of writing. This Archipelago of Ideas includes external sources as in my example above, but also notes I’ve taken based on my own thoughts and experiences. This gives me the best of both worlds: I can focus only on the relevant points right in front of me, but all the other details I might need are just a click away. The bolds and highlights of Progressive Summarization help me quickly determine which parts are most interesting and important at a glance.

111. An Archipelago of Ideas separates the two activities your brain has the most difficulty performing at the same time: choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing). The reason it is so difficult to perform these activities simultaneously is they require different modes: selection is divergent, requiring an open state of mind that is willing to consider any possibility. Sequencing is convergent, requiring a more closed state of mind focused only on the material you already have in front of you.

112. 2. The Hemingway Bridge: Use Yesterday’s Momentum Today

113. Besides his prolific works, Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.” He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.IV

114. Instead of burning through every last ounce of energy at the end of a work session, reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes: Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect. Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing. Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach.

115. To take this strategy a step further, there is one more thing you can do as you wrap up the day’s work: send off your draft or beta or proposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend, family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still a work-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. The next time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input and suggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.

116. 3. Dial Down the Scope: Ship Something Small and Concrete

117. “Dial Down the Scope.” “Scope” is a term from project management that has been adopted by software developers, from whom I learned it while working in Silicon Valley.

118. The solution that software teams landed on to deal with this kind of ballooning complexity is to “dial down the scope.” Instead of postponing the release of the app, which might prove disastrous in the face of looming competition and only delays the learning they need, the development team starts “dialing down” features as the release date approaches. The social network gets postponed to a future version. The progress charts lose their interactive features. The gym finder gets canceled completely. The first parts to be dialed down are the ones that are most difficult or expensive to build, that have the most uncertainty or risk, or that aren’t central to the purpose of the app. Like a hot-air balloon trying to take off, more and more features get thrown overboard to lighten the load and get the product off the ground. Any features that don’t make it into this version can always be released as part of future software updates.

119. When the full complexity of a project starts to reveal itself, most people choose to delay it. This is true of projects at work, and even more true of side projects we take on in our spare time. We tell ourselves we just need more time, but the delay ends up creating more problems than it solves. We start to lose motivation as the time horizon stretches out longer and longer. Things get lost or go out of date. Collaborators move on, technology becomes obsolete and needs to be upgraded, and random life events never fail to interfere. Postponing our goals and desires to “later” often ends up depriving us of the very experiences we need to grow. The problem isn’t a lack of time. It is that we forget that we have control over the scope of the project. We can “dial it down” to a more manageable size, and we must if we ever want to see it finished. Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time. You can’t wait until everything is perfect. There will always be something missing, or something else you think you need. Dialing Down the Scope recognizes that not all the parts of a given project are equally important.

120. Your Second Brain is a crucial part of this strategy, because you need a place to save the parts that get postponed or removed. You might cut sentences or entire pages from an article you’re writing, or delete scenes from a video you’re making, or drop parts of a speech when you’re trying to keep within your allotted time. This is a completely normal and necessary part of any creative process. That doesn’t mean you have to throw away those parts. One of the best uses for a Second Brain is to collect and save the scraps on the cutting-room floor in case they can be used elsewhere. A slide cut from a presentation could become a social media post. An observation cut from a report could become the basis for a conference presentation. An agenda item cut from a meeting could become the starting point for the next meeting. You never know when the rejected scraps from one project might become the perfect missing piece in another.

121. Knowing that nothing I write or create truly gets lost—only saved for later use—gives me the confidence to aggressively cut my creative works down to size without fearing that I’ve wasted effort or that I’ll lose the results of my thinking forever. Knowing that I can always release a fix, update, or follow up on anything I’ve made in the past gives me the courage to share my ideas before they’re perfectly ready and before I have them all figured out.

     in the marginakin to a social safety net

122. Whatever you are building, there is a smaller, simpler version of it that would deliver much of the value in a fraction of the time. Here are some examples: If you want to write a book, you could dial down the scope and write a series of online articles outlining your main ideas. If you don’t have time for that, you could dial it down even further and start with a social media post explaining the essence of your message. If you want to deliver a workshop for paying clients, you could dial it down to a free workshop at a local meetup, or dial it down even further and start with a group exercise or book club for a handful of colleagues or friends. If you’d like to make a short film, start with a YouTube video, or if that’s too intimidating, a livestream. If it’s still too much, record a rough cut on your phone and send it to a friend. If you want to design a brand identity for a company, start with a mock-up of a single web page. Even easier, start with a few hand-drawn sketches with your ideas for a logo. How can you know which direction to take your thinking without feedback from customers, colleagues, collaborators, or friends? And how can you collect that feedback without showing them something concrete? This is the chicken-and-egg problem of creativity: you don’t know what you should create, but you can’t discover what people want until you create something. Dialing Down the Scope is a way of short-circuiting that paradox and testing the waters with something small and…

123. Divergence and convergence are not a linear path, but a loop: once you complete one round of convergence, you can take what you’ve learned right back into a new cycle of divergence. Keep alternating back and forth, making iterations each time until it’s something you can consider “done” or “complete” and share more widely.

124. Divergence and Convergence in the Wild: Behind the Scenes of a Home Project

125. Between managing the business and our household, my time was incredibly scarce as we began the remodel. Whenever I could, I would highlight and distill the last few notes I’d captured and leave my future self a brief note about where I left off. I used a series of Hemingway Bridges to string together many such windows of time that otherwise wouldn’t have been of much productive use.

126. Your Turn: Move Fast and Make Things

127. Make an outline with your goals, intentions, questions, and considerations for the project. Start by writing out anything already on your mind, and then peruse your PARA categories for related notes and Intermediate Packets. These could include points or takeaways from previously created notes, inspiration from models or examples you want to borrow from, or templates you can use to follow best practices. Here are some useful questions to ask as you conduct your search: Is there a book or article you could extract some excerpts from as inspiration? Are there websites that might have resources you could build upon? Are there podcasts by experts you could subscribe to and listen to while commuting or doing household chores? Are there relevant IPs buried in other projects you’ve worked on in the past? Some material you find will be very succinct and highly polished, while some might be quite rough. It doesn’t matter—your only goal is to get all the potentially usable material in one place. Move all the notes and IPs you might want to use into a new project folder. Set a timer for a fixed period of time, such as fifteen or twenty minutes, and in one sitting see if you can complete a first pass on your project using only the notes you’ve gathered in front of you. No searching online, no browsing social media, and no opening multiple browser tabs that you swear you’re going to get to eventually. Only work with what you already have. This first pass could be a plan, an agenda, a…

128. You are only creating the first iteration—a draft of your essay, a sketch of your app, a plan for your campaign. Ask yourself, “What is the smallest version of this I can produce to get useful feedback from others?”

129. If you find that you can’t complete the first iteration in one sitting, start by building a Hemingway Bridge to the next time you can work on it. List open questions, remaining to-dos, new avenues to explore, or people to consult. Share what you’ve produced with someone who can give you feedback while you’re away and save their comments in a new note in the same project folder. You can collect this feedback in a private conversation with a trusted colleague, or publicly on social media at full blast, or anywhere in between. Pick a venue for sharing that you feel comfortable with. If you feel resistance to continuing with this project later, try Dialing Down the Scope. Drop the least important features, postpone the hardest decisions for later, or find someone to help you with the parts you’re least familiar with.

130. first learned about the model of divergence and convergence from Design Thinking, an approach to creative problem-solving that emerged out of the Stanford Design School and was further popularized by the innovation consultancy IDEO starting in the 1980s and 1990s.

131. The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and 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. You can think of these habits as the “maintenance schedule” of your Second Brain. Just like you have a maintenance schedule for your car, which advises you to regularly change the oil, rotate the tires, and change the air filters, your Second Brain occasionally needs a tune-up to ensure it’s in good working order.

132. The Project Checklist Habit: The Key to Starting Your Knowledge Flywheel

133. What most people are missing, however, is a feedback loop—a way to “recycle” the knowledge that was created as part of past efforts so it can be used in future ones as well. This is how investors think about money: they don’t get the profits from one investment and immediately spend it all. They reinvest it back into other investments, creating a flywheel so their money builds on itself over time.

134. This is exactly how I want you to treat your attention—as an asset that gets invested and produces a return, which in turn can be reinvested back into other ventures. This is how you can ensure your knowledge grows and compounds over time like a high-yield asset.

135. Two places where the paths diverge, and you have the chance to do something different than you’ve done before. Those two moments are when a project starts, and when it finishes. For the former, I’ll introduce you to the Project Kickoff Checklist, and for the latter, the Project Completion Checklist.

136. This is where the Project Kickoff Checklist comes in. 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.

137. 1. Capture my current thinking on the project.

138. 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?

139. 2. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes.

140. I choose a handful of folders that seem most relevant to what I’m starting, including in projects, areas, resources, and archives. Then I quickly scan any notes inside that look interesting, taking care to keep the momentum going so I don’t get bogged down anywhere. Now is not the time to go on tangents that will only distract me from moving forward.

141. Search for related terms across all folders.

142. 5. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.

143. create an outline (an Archipelago of Ideas) for the project. My goal is to end up not just with a loose collection of ideas. It is to formulate a logical progression of steps that make it clear what I should do next.

144. as you move through this checklist is that you are making a plan for how to tackle the project, not executing the project itself. You should think of this five-step checklist as a first pass, taking no more than twenty to thirty minutes. You’re only trying to get a sense of what kind of material you already have in your Second Brain. Once you do, you’ll have a much better sense of how much time it will take,

145. Checklist #2: Project Completion

146. Calls and meetings seem to stretch on forever, which means we rarely get to celebrate a clear-cut victory and start fresh. This is one of the best reasons to keep our projects small: so that we get to feel a fulfilling sense of completion as often as possible.

147. This is where the Project Completion Checklist is essential. It’s a series of steps you can take to decide if there are any reusable knowledge assets worth keeping, before archiving the rest. The only way that the Kickoff Checklist we just looked at will be feasible is if you’ve previously taken the time to save and preserve material from past projects. 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.

148. 2. Cross out the associated project goal and move to “Completed” section.

149. Each project I work on usually has a corresponding goal. I keep all my goals in a single digital note, sorted from short-term goals for the next year to long-term goals for years to come.

150. I like to take a moment and reflect on whether the goal I initially set for this project panned out. If I successfully achieved it, what factors led to that success? How can I repeat or double down on those strengths? If I fell short, what happened? What can I learn or change to avoid making the same mistakes next time? The amount of time you spend thinking about these questions depends on the size of the project. A massive team endeavor might justify hours of in-depth analysis, while a small personal side project might deserve only a few minutes of reflection.

151. I also like to cross out the goal and move it to a different section called “Completed.” Any time I need some motivation, I can look through this list and be reminded of all the meaningful goals I’ve achieved in the past. It doesn’t matter if the goal is big or small—keeping an inventory of your victories and successes is a wonderful use for your Second Brain.

152. 4. Move project to archives across all platforms. Fourth, it’s time to move the project folder to the archives in my notes app, as well as any other platforms I used during the project. For me, this usually includes my computer’s documents folder and my cloud storage drive.

153. 5. If project is becoming inactive: add a current status note to the project folder before archiving.

154. I add a new note to the project folder titled “Current status,” and jot down a few comments so I can pick it back up in the future. For example, in a few bullet points I might describe the last actions I took, details on why it was postponed or canceled, who was working on it and what role they played, and any lessons or best practices learned. This Hemingway Bridge gives me the confidence to put the project on ice knowing I can bring it back to life anytime.

155. Allen recommends using a Weekly Review to write down any new to-dos, review your active projects, and decide on priorities for the upcoming week. I suggest adding one more step: review the notes you’ve created over the past week, give them succinct titles that tell you what’s inside, and sort them into the appropriate PARA folders. Most notes apps have an “inbox” of some kind where new notes collect until they’re ready to be reviewed. This “batch processing” takes only seconds per note, and you can complete it within a few minutes.

156. A Weekly Review Template: Reset to Avoid Overwhelm

157. usually complete every three to seven days depending on how busy a given week is. The point isn’t to follow a rigid schedule, but to make it a habit to empty my inboxes and clear my digital workspaces on a regular basis to keep them from getting overwhelmed.

158. I keep this checklist on a digital sticky note on my computer, so I can easily refer to it. Clear my email inbox. Check my calendar. Clear my computer desktop. Clear my notes inbox. Choose my tasks for the week.

159. 1. Clear my email inbox.

160. Any action items I find get saved in my task manager, and any notes I capture get saved in my notes app.

161. 2. Check my calendar.

162. I typically look at the last couple of weeks in case there’s anything I need to follow up on, and the upcoming couple of weeks in case there’s anything I need to prepare for. Once again, anything I need to act on gets saved in my task manager, and any notes get captured in my notes app.

163. 3. Clear my computer desktop.

164. Any files potentially relevant to my projects, areas, or resources get moved to the appropriate PARA folders in my computer’s file system.

165. 4. Clear my notes inbox.

166. At this point I’ll batch process them all at once, making quick, intuitive decisions about which of the PARA folders each note might be relevant to, and creating new folders as needed. There is no “correct” location for a given note, and search is incredibly effective, so I put it in the first place that occurs to me.

167. It is a simple and practical process of going through my notes inbox, giving each note an informative title, and moving them into the appropriate PARA folders. I don’t highlight or summarize them. I don’t try to understand or absorb their contents. I don’t worry about all the topics they could potentially relate to. I want to save all that thinking for the future—for a time and place when I know what I’m trying to accomplish and am seeking a knowledge building block to help me get there faster.

168. 5. Choose my tasks for the week.

169. By this point, there are likewise a number of tasks that I’ve captured from my email, calendar, desktop, and notes, and I take a few minutes to sort them into the appropriate projects and areas. The final step of my Weekly Review is to select the tasks I’m committing to for the upcoming week.

170. A Monthly Review Template: Reflect for Clarity and Control

171. It’s a chance to evaluate the big picture and consider more fundamental changes to your goals, priorities, and systems that you might not have the chance to think about in the busyness of the day-to-day. Here’s mine: Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks.

172. 1. Review and update my goals.

173. I ask myself questions like “What successes or accomplishments did I have?” and “What went unexpectedly and what can I learn from it?” I’ll take some time to cross off any completed goals, add any new ones that have emerged, or change the scope of goals that no longer make sense.

174. 2. Review and update my project list.

175. I’ll review and update my project list. This includes archiving any completed or canceled projects, adding any new ones, or updating active projects to reflect how they’ve changed. I will also update the folders in my notes app to reflect these changes.

176. 3. Review my areas of responsibility.

177. I’ll think about the major areas of my life, such as my health, finances, relationships, and home life, and decide if there’s anything I want to change or take action on. This reflection often generates new action items (which go into my task manager) and new notes (which get captured in my notes app). Area notebooks often contain notes that become the seeds of future projects. For example, I used an area folder called “Home” to collect photos for the home studio remodel I mentioned previously. Even before it was an active project, that broader area gave me a place to collect ideas and inspiration so it was ready and waiting the moment we decided to get started.

178. 4. Review someday/maybe tasks.

179. “Someday/maybe” is a special category for things I’d like to get to someday, but not in the near future. Things like “Learn Mandarin” and “Plant an orchard.” These kinds of future dreams are important to keep track of, but you don’t want them cluttering your priorities today. I’ll take a few minutes to go through my “someday/maybe” tasks just in case any of them have become actionable. For example, when my wife and I settled down and became homeowners, our dream of getting a dog, which was impossible while moving from one apartment to another, suddenly came within reach. I had already saved a few notes on the kinds of dogs we should consider

180. 5. Reprioritize tasks.

181. The Noticing Habits: Using Your Second Brain to Engineer Luck

182. It is in some ways the most important category, but also the least predictable. I call them “noticing” habits—taking advantage of small opportunities you notice to capture something you might otherwise skip over or to make a note more actionable or discoverable. Here are some examples:

183. Noticing that a note could use a better title—and changing it so it’s easier for your future self to find it.

184. Noticing opportunities to combine two or more Intermediate Packets into a new, larger work so you don’t have to start it from scratch. Noticing a chance to merge similar content from different notes into the same note so it’s not spread around too many places. Noticing when an IP that you already have could help someone else solve a problem, and sharing it with them, even if it’s not perfect.

185. It’s crucial to stay organized, but it needs to be done a little at a time in the flow of our normal lives. It needs to be done in the in-between moments of moving your projects forward as you notice small opportunities for improvement.

186. You decide to visit Costa Rica on your next vacation, so you move a note with useful Spanish phrases from your “Languages” resource folder to a “Costa Rica” project folder to aid in your trip.

187. You schedule the next in a series of workshops you are facilitating and move a PDF with workshop exercises from an area folder called “Workshops” to a new project folder for the specific workshop you’re planning.

188. You notice that you need to buy a new computer because your current one is getting too slow, so you move some articles you’ve saved from the “Computer research” resource folder to a new project folder called “Buy a new computer.”

189. When you make your digital notes a working environment, not just a storage environment, you end up spending a lot more time there. When you spend more time there, you’ll inevitably notice many more small opportunities for change than you expect. Over time, this will gradually produce an environment far more suited to your real needs than anything you could have planned up front.

190. Your Turn: A Perfect System You Don’t Use Isn’t Perfect

191. There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually.

192. 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.

193. 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.

194. 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.

195. 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.

196. For most of history, humanity’s challenge was how to acquire scarce information. There was hardly any good information to be found anywhere. It was locked up in difficult-to-reproduce manuscripts or stuck in the heads of scholars. Access to information was limited, but that wasn’t a problem for most people. Their lives and livelihoods didn’t require much information. Their main contribution was their physical labor, not their ideas.

197. Mindset Over Toolset—The Quest for the Perfect App

198. You adopted a default “blueprint” for how you treated incoming information—with anticipation, fear, excitement, self-doubt, or some complex mix of feelings that is unique to you. That default attitude to information colors every aspect of your life. It is the lens through which you studied for classes and took tests in school. It set the stage for the kinds of jobs and careers you pursued. At this very moment, as you read these words, that default attitude is working in the background. It is telling you what to think about what you’re reading—how to interpret it, how to feel about it, and how it applies to you.

199. Lessons from art, philosophy, and history will intermingle to give you epiphanies about how the world works.

200. Amelia is a skilled leadership coach who runs a clinic teaching leaders how to manage their nervous systems to improve their well-being and effectiveness. Imagine how many more people she can reach with her expertise now that she sees the Internet as a source of wisdom and connection, not just noise. How does such a dramatic change happen? Amelia didn’t necessarily learn a new fact that she didn’t know before. She took on a new perspective. She chose to look at the world through a different lens—the lens of appreciation and abundance. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.

201. Giving Your First Brain a New Job

202. orchestrating and managing the process of turning information into results. We’re asking your biological brain to hand over the job of remembering to an external system, and by doing so, freeing it to absorb and integrate new knowledge in more creative ways.

203. The Shift from Scarcity to Abundance

204. How do you know when you’ve begun making the shift to this new identity I’ve described? The biggest shift that starts to occur as soon as you start creating a Second Brain is the shift from viewing the world through the lens of scarcity to seeing it through the lens of abundance.

205. operate in this new world under the assumptions of the past—that information is scarce, and therefore we need to acquire and consume and hoard as much of it as possible. We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: that more is better, without limit.

206. We’ve been taught that information must be jealously guarded, because someone could use it against us or steal our ideas. That our value and self-worth come from what we know and can recite on command. As we saw in the chapter on Capturing, the inclination to amass information can become an end in itself. It is all too easy to default to collecting more and more content without regard to whether it is useful or beneficial to us. This is indiscriminate consumption of information, treating every meme and random post on social media as if it was just as important as the most profound piece of wisdom. It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.

207. It also tells us that we don’t need to consume or understand all of it, or even much of it. All we need is a few seeds of wisdom, and the seeds we most need tend to continually find us again and again. You don’t need to go out and hunt down insights. All you have to do is listen to what life is repeatedly trying to tell you. Life tends to surface exactly what we need to know, whether we like it or not. Like a compassionate but unyielding teacher, reality doesn’t bend or cave to our will. It patiently teaches us in what ways our thinking is not accurate, and those lessons tend to show up across our lives again and again.

208. The Shift from Obligation to Service

209. There is a second shift that occurs when you begin to use your Second Brain not only for remembering, but for connecting and creating. You will transition from doing things primarily out of obligation or pressure to doing things from a spirit of service.

210. I also notice that many people put that desire on hold. They are waiting for a future time when they will have “enough” time, bandwidth, expertise, or resources. That day seems to get continuously postponed as they get new jobs, start new careers, have kids, and simply try to keep up with the demands of life. You are under no obligation to help others. Sometimes it’s all you can do to take care of yourself. Still, I’ve noticed time and again a phenomenon that happens as people collect more and more knowledge in their Second Brain. That inner desire to serve slowly comes to the surface. Faced with the evidence of everything they already know, suddenly there’s no longer any reason to wait.

211. The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself? Learning shouldn’t be about hoarding stockpiles of knowledge like gold coins. Knowledge is the only resource that gets better and more valuable the more it multiplies. If I share a new way of thinking about your health, or finances, or business, or spirituality, that knowledge isn’t less valuable to me. It’s more valuable! Now we can speak the same language, coordinate our efforts, and share our progress in applying it. Knowledge becomes more powerful as it spreads.

212. As Ryder Carroll says in The Bullet Journal Method, “Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.” There are people who will be reached only if they are reached by you. People who have no other source for the kind of guidance you can provide. People who don’t know where to look for solutions to problems they might not even know they have. You can be that person for them. You can pay forward some of the immense care that has been poured into you by a lifetime of parents, teachers, and mentors. With mere words, you can open doors to unimaginable horizons for the people around you.

213. The Shift from Consuming to Creating

214. When you encounter an idea that resonates with you, it is because that idea reflects back to you something that is already within you. Every external idea is like a mirror, surfacing within us the truths and the stories that want to be told.

215. “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.

216. This problem—known as “self-ignorance”—has been a major roadblock in the development of artificial intelligence and other computer systems. Because we cannot describe how we know what we know, it can’t be programmed into software. The curse of computer scientists is our blessing, because this tacit knowledge represents the final frontier on which humans outperform machines. The jobs and endeavors that rely on tacit knowledge will be the last ones to be automated.

217. You know things about how the world works that you can’t fully put into words. You understand human nature at a deep intuitive level. You see patterns and connections in your field that no other machine or human can see. Life has given you a set of experiences that provide you with a unique lens on the world. Through that lens you can perceive truths that can have a profoundly positive impact on you and others.

218. What if you have no idea what your “life purpose” is or should be? Self-direction is impossible without self-knowledge. How can you know what you want if you don’t know who you are?

219. The process of knowing yourself can seem mystical, but I see it as eminently practical. It starts with noticing what resonates with you. Noticing what seems to call out to you in the external world and gives you a sense of déjà vu. There is a universe of thoughts and ideas and emotions within you. Over time, you can uncover new layers of yourself and new facets of your identity. You search outside yourself to search within yourself, knowing that everything you find has always been a part of you.

220. I discovered something through that experience: that self-expression is a fundamental human need. Self-expression is as vital to our survival as food or shelter. We must be able to share the stories of our lives—from the small moments of what happened today at school to our grandest theories of what life is about.

221. They think maybe one day they’ll get around to sharing them. I’m here to tell you that there is no reason to wait. The world is desperate to hear what you know. You can change lives by sharing yourself with others.

222. Some of what you say might not resonate with others or provide value to them, but occasionally, you will strike on something—a way of seeing, a perspective, a story—that blows people’s minds and visibly transforms how they see the world. It could be someone you’re having coffee with, a client or customer, or your online followers. In those moments, the vast chasm that separates us as humans is bridged. For a brief moment, you get to feel in your bones that we are all in this together. We are all part of a vast tattered fabric of humanity, and your highest calling is simply to play your part in it.

223. As you begin your journey, here are twelve practical steps you can take right now to get your Second Brain started. Each one of them is a starting point to begin establishing the habits of personal knowledge management in your life:

224. Decide what you want to capture. Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. What do you most want to capture, learn, explore, or share?

225. Practice Progressive Summarization. Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes.

226. Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet. Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback.

227. Make progress on one deliverable. Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and, using the Express techniques of Archipelago of Ideas, Hemingway Bridge, and Dial Down the Scope, see if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain.

228. 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. From there, you can add other steps as your confidence grows.

229. Assess your notetaking proficiency. Evaluate your current notetaking practices and areas for potential improvement using our free assessment tool at Buildingasecondbrain.com/quiz.

230. If I could leave you with one last bit of advice, it is to chase what excites you. When you are captivated and obsessed by a story, an idea, or a new possibility, don’t just let that moment pass as if it doesn’t matter. Those are the moments that are truly precious, and that no technology can produce for you. Run after your obsessions with everything you have. Just be sure to take notes along the way.

231. came to appreciate the incredible power of writing in public through my partnership with David Perell, who teaches people how to do it via his online writing school Write of Passage, which you can learn more about at writeofpassage.school.

232. Lauren, you have played every role a person can play in my life—partner, lover, cofounder, coach, advisor, and now, wife and mother. You became whoever you needed to become, acquired whichever skills were demanded of you, and ventured into one new territory after another, all to help me reach my dreams. There’s nothing more gratifying in my life than watching you grow and evolve into the most inspiring, genuine, open-hearted person I’ve ever met. I consider it my highest privilege to walk alongside you as you step into your greatness.

233. The practice of keeping personal notes also arose in other countries, such as biji in China (roughly translated as “notebook”), which could contain anecdotes, quotations, random musings, literary criticism, short fictional stories, and anything else that a person thought worth recording. In Japan, zuihitsu (known as “pillow books”) were collections of notebooks used to document a person’s life.

     in the margincommonplace books became common in many cultures

234. 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.

     in the marginall about what you are responsible for based on your expectations from your self and your standards to embody

235. As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of four-letter frameworks. Researchers have called it the “Magic Number 4” because it is the highest number that we can count at a glance and hold in our minds without extra effort.

236. I like to think of layer one as the “soil”—an excerpt from a source or my own thinking (whether as words, drawings, images, or audio) I initially capture into my notes. They are like the ground on which my understanding will be built. Layer two is “oil,” as in “I’ve struck oil!,” conveniently represented by black, bolded text. Layer three is “gold,” which is even more valuable, and shines in highlighter yellow in many apps. Layer four is the “gems,” the most rare and illuminating finds that I’ve distilled in my own words as an executive summary.

237. This principle is called stigmergy—to leave “marks” on the environment that make your future efforts easier. It is a strategy used by ant colonies to find food. If an ant finds a food source, it will bring a piece of it back to the colony, while leaving a special pheromone along the trail. Other ants can follow this trail to find the food for themselves, enabling a multitude of ants to quickly find and collect new sources of food.

238. PART THREE The Shift Making Things Happen

239. I first learned about the model of divergence and convergence from Design Thinking, an approach to creative problem-solving that emerged out of the Stanford Design School and was further popularized by the innovation consultancy IDEO starting in the 1980s and 1990s.

240. 4. Review someday/ maybe tasks.

241. “Someday/ maybe” is a special category for things I’d like to get to someday, but not in the near future. Things like “Learn Mandarin” and “Plant an orchard.” These kinds of future dreams are important to keep track of, but you don’t want them cluttering your priorities today. I’ll take a few minutes to go through my “someday/ maybe” tasks just in case any of them have become actionable. For example, when my wife and I settled down and became homeowners, our dream of getting a dog, which was impossible while moving from one apartment to another, suddenly came within reach. I had already saved a few notes on the kinds of dogs we should consider

242. I came to appreciate the incredible power of writing in public through my partnership with David Perell, who teaches people how to do it via his online writing school Write of Passage, which you can learn more about at writeofpassage.school.

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