Building a Second Brain - Book Review

In the modern world we're constantly bombarded by important information, but trying to deal with all these things coming at us can leave us feeling frustrated and overwhelmed.

If you feel like there's just too much to do and you're not meeting your full potential, then a new book called ‘Building A Second Brain’ might have the answers that you need.

If you'd like to instantly recall important information or successfully complete any goal or project, then the ideas in this book are probably going to be incredibly useful to you. But don't worry I read the book, so you don't have to.

Our problem is that our palaeolithic brains just aren't designed to effectively manage and store all the information we need to use in our professional and personal lives.

The book’s central theme is that modern humans need an external storage system, effectively a digital platform, to store all the information and ideas they come into contact with.

Indeed the New York Times estimates the average person currently consumes 34 gigabytes of data every day.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that manipulating knowledge and knowledge work are some of the most valuable tasks in today's society.

Here's a little bit of background on the book before we get into it.

‘Building a Second Brain’ is written by an American guy called Tiago Forte.

Forte focuses on productivity, and the emerging field of personal knowledge management or PKM for short. He runs a consulting firm called Forte Labs that helps individuals and companies improve their productivity.

Forte’s ideas are built on the well-documented field of personal productivity.

Peter Drucker first explained that knowledge workers produce results by recalling and sharing important information in his 1967 book ‘The Effective Executive’.

Then in the 2001 book, ‘Getting Things Done’, David Allen introduced the premise that our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear, and our thoughts are organised, can we achieve effective results and unleash our creative attention.

In 2016 Cal Newport proposed the idea of ‘Deep Work’ which he defines as professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list so if there’s other books on productivity that I've missed and are worth checking out please do mention them in the comments below.

Having a digital storage system allows us to retain every important idea we come across in highly organised environments that makes it easy to recall ideas and therefore increase our ability to carry out knowledge work.

Personal Knowledge Management is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and shares knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities.

In the 1990s Steve Jobs called new Mac computer “A bicycle for the mind” and Forte sees his second brain method in a similar way.

In the book Forte first mentions the idea of commonplace books.

Historically information was scarce, so in the past writers, engineers and artists recorded the ideas they found most interesting in their commonplace books.

In the same way Forte believes you should use your digital second brain as a combination of notebook, sketchbook and journal.

Think about the brain extensions you already have – a calendar, a to-do-list and so on. By creating a digital second brain you’re just adding to these.

So, what are the superpowers of a second brain?

Firstly, it makes ideas concrete, by writing them down,

Secondly, it reveals new associations between ideas,

Thirdly, it helps you incubate your ideas over time,

And lastly, it sharpens your unique perspectives on your life and work.

Forte says that when you think about task automation and AI you start to realise that as humans our highest value is in sharpening our unique perspective.

I read this book on holiday in August and, hand on heart, I can honestly say I’ve already experienced all of these advantages.

So, the first task in setting up a second brain is picking a notetaking app, such as:

Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, Apple Notes, Notion, Evernote and so on

To be effective notetaking apps need to have four main characteristics.

1.     They can handle multimedia formats like photographs, text or weblinks

2.     They’re informal – you must be able to jot things down as soon as they occur to you

3.     They’re open-ended – they can go on forever; you’re not trying to produce an output like a slide deck or a spreadsheet.

4.     They’re action-oriented – your notes don’t have to be precise or comprehensive.  It’s all about capturing ideas when they occur to you.

Once you start to collect your notes you then need to think about the 3 stages of Personal Knowledge Management:

Firstly, Remembering - where you save facts and ideas that you’d otherwise forget.

Secondly, connecting those ideas - this where your second brain becomes a thinking tool.

And thirdly, creating - where you realise you have a lot of knowledge on a subject that you can turn into something shareable and concrete.

In the book Forte then moves on to one of his central themes - CORE

Capture your ideas

Organise them

Distil them

Express them

You need to ask yourself, how can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?

The danger is in consuming information, but then not applying it.

To avoid this Forte suggests creating a list of your 12 favourite questions.  He got this idea from the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Peynman.

These questions allow you to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects. You can use them to make decisions on what to capture.

Remember though that value is not evenly distributed in the content you consume, so you must take a curator’s perspective.

Your capture criteria should be:

1. Does it inspire me?

2. Is it useful?

3. Is it personal?

4. Is it surprising?

Just as a side note, you do need to choose your capture tools carefully and if people are interested, I’ll make another film on that subject.

Forte then goes onto to outline this other central theme, PARA, which stands for:

Projects

Areas

Resources

Archive

He’s written a whole other book on this called ‘The Para Method’ which is also worth checking out if any of Forte’s ideas resonate with you.

PARA is the way in which you classify your notes.

This is where it gets slightly complicated, but once you get your head around it, it does make perfect sense.

Projects are a goal with a deadline whereas an area is a standard to be maintained with no definite deadline. For example, your health or your personal finances.

A helpful way to think about it is to see projects as sprints and areas as marathons.

Going deeper, areas are things you are directly responsible for, whereas resources are things you’re merely interested in.

Everything else that’s not a project, area or resource then gets put in your archive.

So, the next question is, how do you decide where to save your notes? You should batch them in an ‘inbox’ first and then PARA them, generally on a weekly basis.

Forte has some useful practical tips when you’re doing PARA:

Never create an empty folder before you have something to put in it.

Use a naming convention.  He recommends using emojis for projects, capital letters for areas, and lower case letters for resources.

Remember PARA is not a filing system, it’s a production system so think carefully how you classify and prioritise your notes.

Forte believes discoverability is the secret sauce that makes your notes useful and to help with this he suggests using a progressive summarisation technique.

This takes advantage of something we're all familiar with which is highlighting

You highlight the main points of the notes and then highlight the main points of those highlights and so on until you go down through a number of layers:

1.     captured notes

2.     bolded passages

3.     highlighted passages

4.     executive summary

Progressive Summarization allows you to zoom in and out of your map of knowledge.

In the book he mentions Picasso’s 1945 painting – Le Taureau, where he sketches 11 versions of a bull, getting progressively more and then less detailed.  I found this a striking and very useful analogy.

Most PARA novices make one of three mistakes when they start using progressive summarisation:

1.     Over highlighting

2.     Highlighting without a purpose in mind

3. Making highlighting difficult - don't worry about over analysing stuff when you decide whether it's the highlight it or not. This is just too taxing for you and will break your concentration. Instead, just rely on your intuition to tell you when you think something is interesting or counterintuitive or relevant to your favourite problem.

Once you’ve been through CODE and PARA you then need to start creating outputs and once again Forte’s got a really cool idea to make things easy for you. He suggests creating intermediate packets – which is a way of dividing of work into smaller units, like modules in software developments or sketches in architecture or demos in music recording.

He identifies 5 types of intermediate packets:

1. Distilled notes – that come from books or articles you read,

2. Outtakes – which are stuff that you've collected in the past that didn't make it into other projects,

3. Works-in-progress – which are creations that you created during past projects,

4. Final deliverables – which are specific pieces of work that you created in the past that can be used in future projects,

5. Documents created by other people like your team workers or contractors working for you.

Forte sees 4 core benefits of creating intermediate packages:

1. You’re less vulnerable to interruptions because you're not trying to manage a huge project,

2. you can break projects down to the available time that you have,

3. you increase the quality of your work because you can get feedback from others more often,

4. eventually you have so many intermediate packets that you can create entirely new projects just by assembling previously created intermediate packages.

He sees the creation of projects in terms of divergence and convergence.

The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas so this stage is necessarily quite spontaneous and chaotic.

On the other hand, convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs and decide what is truly essential.

He has some interesting thoughts about how people get lost when they’re undertaking projects and he suggests three ways of dealing with this

Archipelago of ideas

To create an archipelago of ideas you divergently gather a group of ideas sources that will form the backbone of your project, like a linked chain of islands. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work on you then switch decisively into convergence mode and link them altogether.

Hemmingway’s Bridge

This is based on Ernest Hemingway's approach to writing where he would always end his writing session only when he knew what came next in the story so that when he started again the next day he was starting from a concrete point or a bridge.

Dial down the scope

There are always constraints we must work under. When the complexity of a project reveals itself, most people choose to delay, but postponing our goals and desires to later often ends up depriving us of the very experiences we need to grow. Dialling down the scope recognises that not all parts of a project are equally important.

Lastly he has suggestions for project kick-off and project completion checklists. And I have to say I think checklists are a really no-brainer when you’re trying to get more stuff done.

So, there’s five items on the kick-off checklist:

1. Capture my current thinking on the project

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

3. Search for related items across folders

4. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder

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

Just remember at kick-off you’re not actually executing the project!

And there’s 5 items on project completion checklist:

1. Mark projects as complete in task manager or project management app

2. Cross out the associated project goal and move to ‘completed’ section

3. Review intermediate packets and move them to other folders

4. Move project to archive across all platforms

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

At the end of the book Forte describes Building A Second Brain as an imperfect system, but a highly practical system. I agree with him completely. He’s obviously thought of everything and has also thoroughly road-tested his ideas both by himself and also with his consulting clients.

It’s an absolute treasure trove of immediately actionable hacks that will help you lead a more enjoyable and productive life

He makes the point that your brain is handing over the remembering job to your digital second brain. This means there’s a shift from a scarcity of ideas to an abundance of ideas, a shift from consuming content to creating content and finally a way for you to express yourself to the world through your unique perspective.