Building a Second Brain

Notes from Tiago Forte’s popular approach to knowledge management

Remember

Don’t really get why this section is titled remember. It should be “capture” or “filter”.

  • Make a lot of content, but that information gets siloed or scatter around, and we fail to build collection of knowledge who’s value compounds over time.
  • Important to keep all information in a single, centralized place synced across devices. Can capture snippets of text and other media at any point in time
  • WHen curating and filtering out content, keep only what resonates on an intuitive level. Don’t need to overthink it, and don’t need to keep everything.

Connect

Connect with previous notes and begin picking up on patterns across the system. Focus on quick summaries whe possible, distill information into useful chunks.

  • Design notes with future self in mind. Leave remarks for context, relevant definitions, links to resources, etc.
  • Summarize progressively at different levels of detail; allows one to make tradeoff between large, detailed writing and quick summaries. Follows pretty closely to something like the Feynman technique, which encourages explanations at different levels of detail to ensure you understand a concept well.

Create

  • Work on projects in intermediate, discrete parts. This is pretty obvious, and I already do this by assigning small tasks to larger objectives when making local progress toward a goal.