Building a Second Brain

Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, by Tiago Forte

I am personally not a fan of self-improvement books. Their advice sounds nice and sounds motivating, but in reality, it's really difficult to integrate the advice because it's out of context.

This book is different because it teaches you a systematic way (the second brain) to apply that knowledge in your life.

I'm not a note taker; it's harder to concentrate, and I barely ever looked at them. Plus, it takes forever to find the information you need even if you have all the notes in the world.

Despite not liking note-taking, I found some great takeaways from this book that I want to incorporate into my life.

Takeaways

• Externalizing our thoughts makes them more concrete
• Organize our digital archive by "how actionable", not "what kind of info"
• Discoverability of info decreases as the amount of note-taking increases
• Distillation of notes increases discoverability

The author shares an amazing organization system called PARA, which stands for

• P: Projects (short-term goals you are working on)
• A: Areas (generalized long-term goals)
• R: Resources (future references)
• A: Archives (completed or inactive)

I organized my notes into PRA (without the 'Areas'), something like this:

├── Project/
│   ├── Project1/
│   │   ├── somefile
│   ├── Project2/
│   │   ├── somefile
├── Resources/
│   ├── Topic1/
│   │   └── somefile
│   ├── Topic2/
│   │   └── somefile
└── Archives/
    └── archivefile

Conclusion

This book is a great read and contains a lot of information on how you can organize the massive amount of information you consume every single day. With the abundance of information, it has been harder to keep track of what we know and what we need. If you want to hear a solution to that problem, give this book a read!