Information is everywhere—it’s at home, in the office, at the home office, and in all those places we visit between our homes and offices. Sometimes, it feels like all we’re doing is fighting to stay afloat in a sea of competing data. Our “first brains” get waterlogged as they struggle to keep track of our ideas, tasks, and notes.
This mental clutter leads to missed opportunities, forgotten insights, and a general sense of disorganization. In fact, the average knowledge worker spends up to 30% of their work day searcing for information.
What if there was a system that could capture, organize, and recall every valuable thought or piece of information you encountered? There is. And as you might’ve guessed from the mention of a “first brain” in the intro, this valuable system is called the “second brain.”
What is a second brain?
As Tiago Forte lays out in his bestseller Building a Second Brain, this system is a digital environment made up of read-later apps, notes apps, web clippers, e-book apps, audio/visual transcription tools, social media apps, and other tools and software.
These resouces allow you to capture notes (journal entries, favorite quotes, compelling facts, etc.) and build knowledge assets (business frameworks, writing templates, finished blog posts, etc.) that can grow into larger and more complex projects. Managing all those notes and knowledge assets is relatively simple because they all follow the same organizing principles and protocols (explained below).
When beautifully organized, a second brain can boost your productivity while helping you remember what truly matters. So, how do you build one? To answer this question, I spent the last few weeks building my own second brain. Below, you’ll find everything I’ve learned.
How to build a second brain: the CODE method
One of the core elements of Tiago Forte’s second brain system is the CODE method, a simple yet powerful framework to help you remember what matters most. Standing for Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express, these four steps ensure your notes and ideas are useful and actionable.
#1: Capture
The first step in the CODE method is to capture information that resonates with you. To determine what information to capture, consider the following:
- Is it inspiring? Capture notes—quotes, stories, photos, ideas—that might grow into a curated collection of inspiring material.
- Is it useful? Capture useful facts and statistics that fit into a larger report or provide a building block for a future project.
- Is it personally meaningful? Capture funny texts and personal insights that you want to remember.
- Is it surprising? Capture notes that surprise you rather than confirm what you already believe.
The key here is to be selective—only capture what truly stands out. By focusing on what resonates with you, rather than trying to record everything, you build a collection of notes that are meaningful and relevant to your goals.
Tips for capturing notes in your second brain:
- Pick a notes app that works for you—iNotes, OneNote, Evernote, etc. Don’t get too bogged down in trying to find the “perfect” one.
- Consider what you’d like to capture more of and less of.
- Be picky—don’t capture more than 10% of the original document.
- Capture the source—author, title, date, and URL for books and articles, or time-stamped sections and URLs for podcasts and videos.
- Aim to capture two notes a day.
#2: Organize
Once you’ve captured notes that resonate with you, the next step is to organize them for actionability. This insight is fundamental to Forte’s book.
Instead of organizing your notes based on what broad subject they belong to, organize your notes by how useful they will be to a project you’re actively working on. For example, instead of placing a note on public benefit corporations in a folder titled “business,” place it in a folder titled “Write Growthocracy Blog post.”
The PARA System of Organizing
Forte explains exactly where to place notes in his PARA organizational system, which stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.
Since PARA is so useful, Forte expanded it into its own best-selling book. I’ll deep dive into that book in another post. For now, here are the basics:
- Projects: short-term goals with end dates. These include blog posts, web page designs, finishing a language course, etc.
- Areas: long-term commitments you’re working toward that require a certain standard of performance and regular maintenance. These include reaching financial independence, managing a content team, keeping up with a gym routine, etc.
- Resources: interests, research topics, trends, hobbies, and other things you’ll reference in the future. These could include trends in AI, a list of business books to read, places to travel, etc.
- Archives: finished projects that you might return to at some point in the future to update, or projects that you’ve put on hold for the time being.
By organizing for actionability with the above PARA system, you ensure that your second brain remains a dynamic, living system that adapts to your changing needs.
#3: Distill
After organizing your notes for actionability, the next step is to distill your notes down to their essence. The goal here is to highlight the most important, actionable insights so that you can quickly grasp the key points without wading through unnecessary details.
Progressive Summarization
Forte uses progressive summarization to distill the essence of article, books, and other sources. The four steps are as follows:
- Capture notes from a book, podcast, or article and save with a source link.
- Highlight passages that are important to a project you’re actively working on.
- Bold passages within those highlights to further condense your notes. Use keywords to explain the overall idea, phrases that succinctly capture what the author was saying, and sentences that resonate even if you can’t explain why.
- Add an executive summary and a bullet point list of the main ideas to the top of the entry.
As you highlight notes, be wary of over-highlighting. Your bolded passages should be 20% or less of your highlighted passages, and your highlighted passages should be 20% or less of your initially captured notes. Additionally, highlight with an eye toward capturing notes for a project you’re currently working on. Finally, don’t get paralyzed by analysis. Instead, rely on intuition to determine what’s relevant and interesting.
#4: Express
After distilling the essence of your notes, the final step is to express your knowledge by turning it into something tangible—a blog post, a presentation, a report, or a piece of artwork. Expression is how all the information you’ve captured, organized, and distilled turns into useful knowledge.
Forte suggests seeing every finished expression as a kind of “knowledge asset,” and one of the most important assets is what he terms “intermediate packets.”
Intermediate Packets (IPs)
These are the smallest concrete building blocks you can use to start a project. IPs include:
- Distilled notes created through progressive summarization
- Outtakes that didn’t make it into other final projects
- Documents, agendas, and templates you made for prior projects
- Finished projects that might be useful for something larger
- Knowledge assets created by others, such as style guides, outlines, and checklists
Intermediate packets like the ones above allow you to improve your concentration by focusing on only one IP at a time, making forward progress on a larger project regardless of time constraints. Furthermore, by getting feedback on each IP, you improve quality over time.
Eventually, you’ll have enough IPs to where you can finish new projects by simply reassembling what you already have. In fact, Forte suggests only starting projects when they’re already 80% done. This boosts your productivity.
Each new project should create new IPs that get recycled back into other projects. Consider how what you’re doing today can be useful tomorrow, creating building blocks that move future projects forward.
Should you build a second brain?
Whether you’re a student, an office worker, or a self-employed entrepreneur, building a second brain offers a host of benefits, including:
- Making ideas more concrete: Externalizing your thoughts into a tangible form you can revisit later allows you to make fleeting ideas more concrete and real, avoiding letting valuable insights slip away.
- Creating new associations between ideas: Creativity is based on making new connections between ideas, and a second brain supports this by housing a variety of notes related to specific projects in one curated place.
- Developing ideas over time: Your first brain is limited by a bunch of logical fallacies and cognitive biases, including the “recency bias”, which favors the most recent ideas regardless of whether they’re the most relevant or useful. A second brain provides a workaround, allowing you to gradually accumulate and review quality ideas over time.
- Sharpening your unique perspective: As the collection of notes in your second brain grows, you’ll find that you can draw from a deep well of knowledge, making it easier to come up with unique perspectives that can spark innovation and problem-solving.
Ultimately, Tiago Forte’s second brain system offers a way to offload the mental burden of remembering everything, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.
A System for Everyone
My biggest takeaway from the second brain system so far is this: By externalizing your thoughts and structuring them in a way that supports your personal and professional growth, you gain greater control over your mental and emotional resources. This can help you achieve your goals more effectively while reducing stress and freeing up mental space for the things that matter most.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information you need to manage, then give the second brain a try. Follow the CODE method above to start capturing your most valuable insights and sharing them with the world. Start small, be consistent, and watch as your second brain becomes an indispensable part of your daily routine.