We each have a “robotic” level of consciousness that helps operate as a machine or what we can call a taskmaster. It is that part of our brains that can handle the various things in life that do not take much thought and interaction once you have learned the skill.
When we learn to type or drive a car or learn a new language, we have to do it painfully and consciously; then, our autopilot takes over and does it automatically; in fact, it does it far more quickly and efficiently than we could. and from that moment on our consciousness will perform that task on ‘auto-pilot’ to enable us to handle everyday life while focusing our attention on other things. 
Deliver us from labor
The same principle can be applied to systemising our personal knowledge management, but why do we need to do that?
Have you ever stared at the dreaded “blank page” waiting for the information and insights to come flowing out of your head? You know it’s in there somewhere, but … crickets.
How many brilliant ideas have you had and forgotten?
How many insights have you failed to take action on?
Is all the interesting information you’re consuming leading to meaningful results in your life … or is it going to waste?
We feel a constant pressure to be learning, improving ourselves, and making progress. And we spend countless hours every year reading, listening, and watching informational content. And yet, where has all that valuable knowledge gone? Where is it when we need it?
Being effective in the world today requires managing all those different kinds of information – emails, text messages, messaging apps, online articles, books, podcasts, webinars, memos, and many others. All of these kinds of content have value, but trying to remember all of it is overwhelming and impractical.
And the problem is: The volume of information flooding your brain today is just a trickle compared to what’s coming in the near future.
The simple truth is: you can’t afford to keep everything in your head.
But what if we can offload all those information and ideas onto a “second brain,” to free our biological brain to imagine, create, and simply be present, instead of floundering through our days struggling to keep track of every detail.
What if there is a methodology for organising and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. a system to expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks.
What if we can have an ongoing record of personal discoveries, lessons learned, and actionable insights for any situation.
Our brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
A second brain is due...
The Second Brain is a methodology not only for preserving those ideas, but turning them into expressions. It provides a clear, actionable path to creating an external, centralised, digital repository for the things you learn and the resources from which they come.
Your second brain will serve as an extension of your mind, not only protecting you from the ravages of forgetfulness but also amplifying your efforts as you take on creative challenges.
We are already doing most of the work required to consume this content. We spend a significant portion of our careers creating snippets of text, outlines, photos, videos, sketches, diagrams, webpages, notes, or documents. Yet without a little extra care to preserve these valuable resources, our precious knowledge remains siloed and scattered across dozens of different locations. We fail to build a collection of knowledge that both appreciates in value and can be reused again and again.
The perfect productivity app to solve all your problems!
Doesn’t Exist.
Luckily, building a second brain it’s not about that, it’s about developing a system of tools, habits, techniques, and mindsets to take care of the mundane day-to-day details, freeing up your attention for more creative and interesting endeavours.
It will allow you to consistently do your best work – the work that has a real impact on the people, the organisations, and the communities that matter to you…
And truly leave work behind each day, knowing you’ve gotten everything you can out of your time, so you can be present with your families, hobbies, and the rest of your life.
A second brain is important to everyone: especially creators, marketers, and creative knowledge workers like us, doing important work that matters.
"Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging."
While technology is constantly changing, the heart of the creative process remains fundamentally the same:
- Capturing information from the outside world
- Organising it in a way that lets you easily find and use it
- Distilling it down to the best ideas
- And then expressing your ideas in your unique voice through writing, speaking, designing, or teaching.
CODE
Capture | Organise | Distill | Express
Living by the C.O.D.E. system allows you to surf the waves of information instead of drowning in them.
- Cultivate a collection of valuable knowledge and insights for future use
- Create structure around creative projects to reliably move them forward
- Reduce stress & anxiety knowing all your ideas and insights are preserved
- Uncover unexpected patterns and connections to improve your thinking
- Create a digital environment that promotes clarity and peace of mind
- Know exactly where to find all the files and notes you’ve saved in the past
Capture
Your second brain needs a place to collect all the things that resonates with you, from an online article to your grocery list, through reliable tools like to-do list apps, web clipper, note-taking apps, and more.
The first step in building a second brain is “capturing” the ideas and insights you think are worth saving. Ask yourself:
- What are the recurring themes and questions that I always seem to return to in my work and life?
- What insightful, high-value, impactful information do I already have access to that could be valuable?
- Which knowledge do I want to interconnect, mix and match, and periodically resurface to stimulate future thinking on these subjects?
Most of the time we tend to capture information haphazardly – we email ourselves a quick note, brainstorm some ideas in a Word document, or take notes on books we read – but then don’t do anything with it. We are already consuming or producing this information, we just need to keep it in a single, centralised place, such as a digital note-taking app like Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Bear, Notion, or others.
These apps facilitate capturing small “snippets” of text, and can also store hyperlinks, images, webpages, screenshots, PDFs, and other attachments, all of which are saved permanently and synced across all your devices.
By keeping a diverse collection of information in one centralised place, it is free to intermix and intermingle, helping us see unexpected connections and patterns in our thinking.
This also gives us one place to look when we need creative raw material, supporting research, or a shot of inspiration.
Think like a curator
It is tempting to turn on our mobile device or computer and immediately become immersed in the flow of juicy information we are presented with. Much of this information is useful and interesting – articles written by experts that could make us more productive, tips on exercise or nutrition, or fascinating stories from around the world. But unless we make conscious, strategic decisions about what we consume, we’ll always be at the mercy of what others want us to see.
Instead, adopt the mindset of a curator – objective, opinionated, and reflective. As you come across social media updates, online articles, and podcasts throughout your day, instead of diving in immediately, save them for future consideration. As you begin to collect content, you’ll be able to choose which sources to consume in a deliberate way.
Organize
Capturing Info is easy but then you need to organise and structure them in 4 different categories using the PARA system.
Instead of organising your files primarily by topic (for example, web design or psychology), which is time-consuming and mentally taxing, organise information by when you would like to see it next, organise them according to the PARA System
- Projects: series of tasks linked to a goal, with a deadline.
- Areas: spheres of activity with a standard to be maintained over time.
- Resources: topics or themes of ongoing interest.
- Archives: inactive items from the other three categories.
Keep only what resonates
The word “organisation” often brings to mind an analytical way of thinking. But analysis is time-consuming and tiring. In deciding which passages, images, theories, or quotes to keep.
Don’t make it a highly intellectual, analytical decision. Instead, your rule of thumb should be to save anything that “resonates” with you on an intuitive level. This is often because it connects to something you care about, wonder about, or find inherently intriguing.
By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us at a deeper level, we improve not only our ability to see opportunities, but also our understanding of ourselves and how we work.
Distill
Capturing and saving notes usually leads to large collections of information, but the more notes you keep, the more crucial it is to keep an effective summary of them in order to be able to immediately grasp the meaning of them. Through progressive summarisation, you’ll be able to get the core of your notes.
- Once you start collecting valuable knowledge in a centralised place, you’ll naturally start to notice patterns and connections. An article you read on gardening will give you an insight into online marketing. An offhand comment by a client will give you the idea of creating a webpage with client testimonials. A business card you saved from a conference will remind you to follow up and propose a collaboration.
- You can greatly facilitate and speed up this process by distilling your notes into actionable, bite-sized summaries. It would be near impossible to review your 10 pages of notes on a book you read last year in the midst of a chaotic workday., for example. But if you had just the main points of that book in a 3-point summary, you could quickly remind yourself of what it contains and potentially apply it to something you’re working on
Design notes for your future self
A powerful mindset for interacting with our notes is to “design notes with your future self in mind.”
Every time we create a note or make an edit, we can make it just a little easier to find and make use of next time.
This can include:
- Defining key terms in parentheses in case we forget what they mean
- Inserting placeholders when we leave off summarising a source so we know where to pick back up
- Adding links to related websites, files, or emails that we’re likely to forget over time
By constantly saving packets of knowledge in a format that our future self can easily consume, we follow a “pay it forward” strategy that we get to benefit from in the future!
Summarise progressively, at different levels of detail
A common problem with notes is that they are too long and dense. You can’t afford the time it would take to review and remind yourself of everything they contain. Executive summaries can help, but often it is a challenge to identify what exactly the main point is in the first place.
Progressive Summarisation is a technique that relies on summarising a note in multiple stages over time.
You save only the best excerpts from whatever you’re reading, and then create a summary of those excerpts, and then a summary of that summary, distilling the essence of the content at each stage.
These “layers” are like a digital map that can be zoomed in or out to any level of detail you need.
Progressive Summarisation allows you to read the note in different ways for different purposes: in depth if you want to glean every detail, or at a high level if you just need the main takeaway. This allows you to review a note’s contents in seconds to decide if it’s useful for the task at hand.
Organise opportunistically, a little bit at a time
It can be tempting to spend a lot of time to create highly structured, perfectionistic notes. The problem is, you often have no idea which sources will end up being valuable until much later. Instead of investing a lot of effort upfront, organise your notes opportunistically, in small bits over time
Your rule of thumb should be:
Add value to a note every time you touch it. This could include adding an informative title the first time you come across a note, highlighting the most important points the next time you see it, and adding a link to a related note sometime later.
By spreading out the heavy work of organising your notes over time, you not only save time and effort, but ensure that the most frequently used (and thus most valuable) notes surface organically.
Express
All of this capturing, summarising, connecting, and organising has one ultimate purpose: creating tangible results in the real world. Whether we want to lose weight, get a promotion at work, start a side business, or contribute to a cause we believe in, the true purpose of learning is to turn our knowledge into effective action.
- With a substantial reserve of supporting material in your second brain, you never need to sit down to an empty page and try to “think of something smart.” All creativity stands on the shoulders of giants, and you have the benefit of already having the best ideas of those giants, Including yourself, documented in your notes!
- With a second brain at your disposal, you always have something to inspire you, remind you, support you, or guide you as you engage in the projects and interests that are important to you. You are able to draw on the sum total of your life experience and learning, not just whatever you can think of in the moment.
Create smaller and reusable units
Once you start to curate a collection of valuable knowledge in external form, a very different way of working becomes not only possible, but necessary.
You will begin to think of your projects as made up of discrete parts. I call them “intermediate packets,” which can include any kind of content we’ve already mentioned: a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analysing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call, for example.
Instead of trying to sit down and move the entire project forward all at once, which is like trying to roll a giant boulder uphill, a more effective approach is to end each work session – whether it is 15 minutes or 3 hours – by completing just one intermediate packet. This allows you to work in smaller increments, making use of any available span of time, while getting lots of feedback and taking frequent breaks. Not only does this result in higher quality output, it fuels the motivation and the inspiration that we need to do our best work.
These packets can then be saved to your second brain, and re-used the next time you have a similar need.
Conclusion
Each note in your second brain is a record of something you’ve experienced in your life – whether that is from reading a book, having an interesting conversation, or completing a project at work. With all your most valuable ideas at your fingertips at all times, you never need to struggle and strain to remember everything you’ve learned.
As your second brain gains momentum over weeks and months, you will start to become different. You will no longer think about things in isolation, but as part of a network of ideas in which everything affects everything else. You’ll realize that something you learned at work about effective communication also applies to your family vacation debate.. A random fact you read in an airplane magazine will somehow end up being useful in a blog post you’re writing. A lesson from Ancient Greek history you picked up from a podcast on your morning commute will help you deal with a crisis at the office. You will start to think in terms of the systems and principles that you’ve gleaned through your summarizing and reviewing, and see them everywhere.
Your mind will start to work differently, learning to depend on this external tool to draw on resources, references, and research far beyond what it can remember on its own. You will start to conceive of “your work” as an integrated whole that you can actually point to, shape, and navigate in a direction of your choosing. You’ll be more objective and unattached, because if any single idea doesn’t work out, you know you have a huge trove of others ready to go.
Over time, you will start to recognize that everything you are learning and experiencing makes sense. You can see, mapped in the notes you are cultivating, the underlying structure of your life. Why you do things, what you really want, what’s really important and what isn’t. Your second brain becomes like a mirror, reflecting back to you who you think you are, who you want to be, and who you could become. Because you know how to capture and make use of anything, every experience you have becomes an opportunity to learn and to grow.
As this self-understanding dawns, you will look around at the notes you’ve collected, and you will realize that you already have everything you need to get started. You will start combining the ideas together, forming new perspectives, new theories, and new strategies. Ideas about society, about art, about psychology, about spirituality, about technology will start intermixing and spawning ideas you’ve never consciously considered. You’ll be shocked, in fact, at the elegance and power of what pops out of your notes.
This epiphany won’t just exist in your head. People can tell. They’ll start to notice that you can draw on an unusually large body of knowledge at a moment’s notice. They will admire your amazing memory, but what they don’t know is that you never try to remember anything. They’ll admire your incredible self-discipline and dedication at developing ideas over time, not knowing that you’ve created a system in which insights and connections emerge organically. They’ll be impressed by your ability to produce so much creative output, but in reality, you never lock yourself in a room to “crank out” some work. You just let your projects simmer until they’re ready.
Building a Second Brain is an integrated set of behaviors for turning incoming information into completed creative projects. Instead of endlessly optimizing yourself, trying to become a productivity machine that never deviates from the plan, it has you optimize an external system that is more reliable than you will ever be. This frees you to imagine, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you come alive here and now in the moment.
Most of the time we tend to capture information haphazardly – we email ourselves a quick note, brainstorm some ideas in a Word document, or take notes on books we read – but then don’t do anything with it. We are already consuming or producing this information, we just need to keep it in a single, centralised place, such as a digital note-taking app like Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Bear, Notion, or others.
These apps facilitate capturing small “snippets” of text, and can also store hyperlinks, images, webpages, screenshots, PDFs, and other attachments, all of which are saved permanently and synced across all your devices.
By keeping a diverse collection of information in one centralised place, it is free to intermix and intermingle, helping us see unexpected connections and patterns in our thinking.
This also gives us one place to look when we need creative raw material, supporting research, or a shot of inspiration.
- Once you start collecting valuable knowledge in a centralised place, you’ll naturally start to notice patterns and connections. An article you read on gardening will give you an insight into online marketing. An offhand comment by a client will give you the idea of creating a webpage with client testimonials. A business card you saved from a conference will remind you to follow up and propose a collaboration.
- You can greatly facilitate and speed up this process by distilling your notes into actionable, bite-sized summaries. It would be near impossible to review your 10 pages of notes on a book you read last year in the midst of a chaotic workday., for example. But if you had just the main points of that book in a 3-point summary, you could quickly remind yourself of what it contains and potentially apply it to something you’re working on