Building a Second Brain

Building a Second Brain is a simple, complete guide to setting up and using a personal knowledge management system that seamlessly plugs into your everyday life with a 4-step framework that works with any note-taking app.

How does Taylor Swift write smash hit after smash hit? What allowed dance choreographer Twyla Tharp to put together more than 160 pieces in her career? A Second Brain, which Tiago defines as “a private knowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth.”

Part digital archive, part journal, and part sketchbook, a Second Brain will make your knowledge searchable, rapidly retrievable, modular, and well-connected. To start, pick your note-taking app of choice. It could be Notion, Evernote, Roam, Obsidian, or the default app on your phone and laptop.

Then, it’s on to the 4 steps of both building and using your Second Brain, which you can remember with the acronym “CODE:”

Capture — keep what resonates. Use your intuition to save, highlight, or write down whatever speaks to you in today’s daily tsunami of information washing over you. Organize — save for actionability. Ask “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?” to sort your notes into 1 of 4 categories (more on this later). Distill — find the essence. Use bolding, highlights, and bullet point summaries to make your notes accessible at a single  future glance. Express — show your work. Tap into your Second Brain as you create on a daily basis, be it for work, passion projects, or to get stuff done in your personal life.

Capture. Organize. Distill. Express. CODE. That’s how you assemble your Second Brain in your note-taking app of choice. It’s also how you use it again and again to remember more, improve your thinking, and access your best ideas at a moment’s notice as you put together creative solutions for your problems.

But how do you organize your notes? Let’s talk about it!

Why do most note-taking systems fail? A lack of sync with our everyday lives. “[The systems] always required me to follow a series of elaborate rules that took time away from my other priorities,” Tiago writes, “which meant they would quickly become outdated and obsolete.” Enter the “PARA” method of sorting your notes. This acronym describes 4 simple buckets for capturing “any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose:” Projects are “short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now.” Areas include ongoing responsibilities you want to work on for the long run. Resources are “topics or interests that may be useful in the future.” Archives are where you move inactive items from the other categories…