Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte – Book Summary & Highlights

Capture—Keep What Resonates

• Use open questions to decide what to capture, such as
  • What can I do to exercise three times a week?
  • How do I save money for oversea trips?
  • How can my company become more eco-friendly?
• Capture criteria
  • Is it inspiring?
    • such as quotes, photos, ideas, and stories that can shift your perspective or give you motivation
  • Is it useful?
    • such as a statistic, a reference, a research finding, or a diagram that can help you develop your idea
  • Is it personal?
    • such as your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and musings
  • Is it surprising?
    • "If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it?"

Organize—Save for Actionability

• The PARA system
  • Projects: what you're working on right now
    • are most actionable because they have a clear deadline and a certain outcome
    • examples: organize a conference, finish an online course, plan a trip
  • Areas: what you're committed to over time
    • are less urgent to act on because they take more time to achieve
    • examples: home, health, finances, research and development
  • Resources: what you want to reference in the future
    • could require action depending on the situation
    • examples: minimalist home design, communication skills, sci-fi movies
  • Archives: what you’ve completed or put on hold
    • remain inactive unless needed
    • example: projects that are completed or canceled, areas that you stop caring about, resources that you are no longer interested in
• Where to put a note: a checklist
  • In which project will this be most useful?
  • If none: In which area will this be most useful?
  • If none: Which resource does this belong to?
  • If none: Place in archives.

Distill—Find the Essence

• Progressive Summarization
  • Capture key excerpts into a note
  • Bold the main points within the note
  • Highligh the most important of the bolded passages
  • Use a few bullet points to summarize the exerpts in your own words
• Four tips for distilling notes
  • Highlight no more than 10-20 percent of the previos layer
  • Do highlighting until you know how you’ll use the note
  • Trust your instinct to inform you when a passage is captivating
  • Keep your future self in mind by making notes easy to scan

Express—Show Your Work

• Think small with Intermediate Packets
  • Notes as knowledge building blocks
    • like the LEGO pieces, the more you have, the easier it is to build something interesting
  • Four benefits:
    • you can focus on just one IP at a time, instead of trying to cram the whole project into your mind at once
    • you are able to move forward at any time
    • you can collect feedback early and increase the quality of your work
    • you will have many IPs as your creative assets
• Three Strategies for Creating
  • The archipelago of ideas
    • you collect ideas, sources, or points that will be the basis of your project, and then arrange them into a logical flow
  • The Hemingway bridge
    • write down ideas for next steps
    • write down the current status
    • write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away
    • write out your intention for the next work session
  • Dial down the scope
    • drop, reduce, or postpone the least important parts of your project, and then save them in your Second Brain