Notes on building a second brain

A solitary human is an unremarkable creature with a fickle memory. Our brains aren't even the largest on earth. All human achievement can be attributed to the compounded gains of millennia of our combined knowledge. Our collective ability to retain things as a species has trended downwards since we started delegating remembering to the convenient devices in our pockets. Can you really drive home from work without using maps?

This stands in contrast to the promise of the information age, where all is accessible. The tragedy is, we can only reproduce a tiny fraction of the books, blog posts, social media posts and videos we ingest everyday, which renders this deluge purposeless. You might try to take notes but if they are strewn all over with no structure and unattainable in the future, then you might as well not keep them. Building a second brain promises that it can help you "cultivate a body of knowledge that is uniquely your own" where everything is accessible within seconds. By implementing the ideas in the book, you'll be able to elevate your note taking to a higher level, where you can find anything you've ever captured on demand, until it becomes an extension of yourself; your second brain.

The Creative Process

Ultimately, the goal of cultivating a body of knowledge is to enable you to create more and better. The book argues that the creative process is of a dual nature. There are two different hats which you wear at different times in the process; one for divergence and another for convergence. When you sit down to work, you need to determine which mode you are in.

Divergence is the time for exploration. It is when you capture and organize the necessary ingredients for creative work. This is when you collect your knowledge assets. Knowledge assets could be anything external or internal. External like highlights from books and articles, meeting notes, quotes, inspiring photos or takeaways from courses. It could also be internal, like anecdotes which happen to you or others, memories you don't want to forget, reflections in a diary or random shower ideas.

In divergence mode, you want to open up your horizons and explore every possible option. Click every link, jump from one source to another, let your curiosity be your guide for what to do next. It is the CO in the CODE method (which is the central, new idea which I shall introduce in the next section), the time to Capture what resonates and Organize what you have captured for actionability.

Convergence is time to distill what you have captured and express it. Time to create something new out of the knowledge you have gathered. This mode is about ferociously chasing the sweet reward of completion; put on noise-cancelling headphones, ignore every new input besides the ones you have already gathered, close the door. Trust that you have enough ideas and sources, and it's time to turn inwards and sprint towards your goal.

Convergence is the DE in the CODE method, the time to distill and express, to share your ideas with the world.

The Method: CODE

CODE is the 4 step process for remembering what matters: Capture, Organize, Distill and Express. These are the steps for building and working with your second brain.

1. Capture what resonates

Only ever capture content which resonates with you. Listen to your intuition, it'll tell you something resonates before even your logical brain does. A passage touches you? Note it down. Only save succint notes. The more economical you are with captured material, the less time your future self will have to spend in distilling and expressing it. Think of yourself as a curator - the best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too.

To assist in capturing, ask yourself these questions and only capture those that fit the criteria:

• Does it inspire me? Keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, memories, ideas and stories which you can look through anytime.
• Is it useful? Might it come in handy? e.g. a statistic, reference, research finding, helpful diagram.
• Is it personal? my own thoughts, reflections, memories and mementos. Screenshots from loved ones. Pictures that evoke certain memories.
• Is it surprising? Don't capture what you could've guessed. If what you're capturing doesn't change your mind, what's the point?

2. Organize - save for actionability

Once you start capturing notes, you'll feel the need to organize them. Our priorities change frequently, so we want to avoid organization systems which are overtly rigid. The best way is to organize for action, which asks; how is this going to help me move forward on one of my current projects? To that end, the book proposes the PARA. Create four different folders/notebooks or a similar abstraction (depending on your note taking application) for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives.

PARA system

1. Projects - short term efforts you're working on right now that have a deadline, both for work and personal projects.
   • They have a final outcome and a clear definition of done e.g. finalize, publish, launch.
   • Examples could be plan vacation, do a recruitment drive, complete online course.
2. Areas - long term responsibilities that you are committed to over time.
   • Examples could be your health, personal finances, product development, partners, kids, friendships, marketing, direct reports, bosses.
3. Resources - These are things you may want to reference in the future, organized by type of subject matter.
   • Examples could be hobbies, useful information for reference e.g. testimonials, statistics
   • Anything which isn't actionable for a current project or area, akin to school notebooks.
4. Archives - inactive items from the categories, completed or put on hold. This is important in order not to clutter your workspace but also for safekeeping for when you need it, forever.

Given a note, when deciding where to put it, go down this list of questions like:

• In which project will this be most useful?
• If none, in which area will this be most useful?
• If none, in what resource does this belong?
• If none, archive it.

Here is how my evernote currently looks, but you can adapt it to your note taking application of choice:

It's important to keep capturing and organizing as two different activities, in order to avoid the friction of deciding where to put things, which makes capturing what resonates less likely to occur. I keep a triage area for all the notes that I capture. Then when I get some time, perhaps right before I go to bed, I do the organizing bit and put the notes in the appropriate folder.

3. Distill the essence

This stage is about enhancing discoverability. How easy is it to discover at a glance what a note contains and immediately put it to use. For this, we can use the progressive summarization method. Highlight your notes in 4 layers, in order to really capture their essence. How many layers you need varies depending on the note.

The layers are:

• Capture the note, including a link to the source.
• Bold passages which have the main points of the note.
• For long and interesting notes, highlight the key words/sentences in the bolded passages.
• For corner stones of your thinking, make executive summaries.

Do not over-highlight. If you're going to capture a whole book, you might as well not capture at all. Content in one layer should always be less than 20 percent of the previous layer. Making notes discoverable should be a practise. Every time you touch a note, leave it better than you found it. Make it a little more discoverable.

4. Express your work

Creativity emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences. Think of everything you've gathered and organized as an "intermediate packet", an atomic unit of either distilled notes, works in process (documents and graphics from past projects which didn't get to be used) which can be worked on continuously and independently. These can be moved around and re-combined to form a whole project. When working on a project, assemble them rather than starting from scratch.

Serendipity is magical and it arises when seemingly unrelated items combine to make art. It feels like the stars aligned and doesn't usually happen on demand. In order to create a conducive environment for serendipity, search/browse multiple PARA notebooks just incase there's something useful, use visual patterns (look at stored images) to try and activate your visual brain, and ask for feedback from others.

Feedback lies at the heart of creativity. Intermediate packets enable you to have smaller bits which are easier to share, easier to get negative feedback on - it's less confronting to hear criticism on one small aspect of your work than on an entire opus. Collaborate more and ask for feedback often to get more clarity early on how it'll be received. You begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.

Share your ideas

Being organized digitally is about adopting a set of systems and habits which are incorporated into your daily life. Time isn't going to magically appear out of nowhere. It's also not ideal to have to distill the essence of a note 10 minutes before a meeting, where you're going to need the contents of that note. Therefore, everytime you touch a note, leave it better than how you found it, either by organizing to put it in the correct folder, or through progressive summarization.

In order to get started, create the folders of the PARA system, take all the notes that you have and put everything into the archives folder. This might seem daunting but don't worry, your notes will always be there. Then create subfolders for each project you are working on within the projects folder, and move individual notes into them. These now act as dedicated, focus areas. You don't need anything else for when you shift into convergence mode.

Ultimately, knowledge management is about creation. You have to value your ideas enough to want to share them. Following these lessons gets exciting because you no longer hope that you will remember the best ideas, you can guarantee that you always will. You'll start being a lot more attentive to what you perceive, the conversations you have, interviews you listen to, things you watch. Serendipity will start arising more often since you'll start seeing connections in areas of your life that previously seemed unrelated. You'll start living as a truly creative being.

This is just a primer. I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. It goes deep into the concepts mentioned here, their motivation and justification, with examples. There's also alot more practical concepts which I couldn't fit here, but I still find useful everyday.