Review

Disclaimer → I’ve had a Second Brain of my own (powered by Notion) for a few years now. I’ve followed Tiago for a long time - and probably read more than a books’ worth of his articles online.

I strongly recommend this book. Finally I have a book I can share that articulates why I’m building a second brain and why it’s such an advantage. I love how Tiago describes the flow of ideas (Capture, Organise, Distill and Express) → and how a Second Brain compounds the power of ideas and makes them actionable. The concept of work being intermediate packets → that can be reused later is a revelation.

Tiago is the authority on this stuff, even though I don’t follow his exact approach - he articulates the trade-offs of different designs really well.

Read this book - so you can make informed choices about personal knowledge management.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• We are an inflection point - it’s possible to integrate our biological brains with technology and think outside the brain. Being able to build and utilise a second brain is going to be a skill that sets people apart.
• Digital notes can be searched, organised, backed up and synced across devices. You can hold ideas in perfect fidelity, in exchange for a slight lag in response time.
• Cultivate a body of knowledge that’s uniquely our own. Use it to tackle your big challenges. Save your besting thinking to reduce rework. Connect ideas in new ways. Share your work more easily.
• There’s an art to packaging information up and passing it through time to your future self.
• Structure your knowledge in small blocks (like LEGO) so they can be re-used, assembled and rearranged into new forms.
• Create once → use forever → mix and match different combinations
• 4 Key Capabilities of a Second Brain:
1. Make ideas concrete
2. Reveals new associations between ideas
3. Incubates ideas over time (making time your friend not your enemy)
4. Sharpens our unique perspective
• The CODE Method: 4 Steps to Remembering What Matters (and sharing it ELSE why bother?)
• Capture what resonates
• Organise - Save for Actionability
• Distill - Find the Essence (think of yourself as a giver of notes, help your future self)
• Express - Show Your Work
• Shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating
• Capture only: inspirational, useful, personal or surprising information
• Define up to 12 problems you’re interested in solving during your lifetime → capture things that help you solve them
• Value is not evenly distributed in content → Be a picky curator
• Are you capturing the right stuff? The best test - is are you using it later on?
• As a rule → capture only about 10% of information (each round)
• Organise information based on how actionable it is - not what kind of information it is. Tiago recommends therefore a hierarchy of…
• PARA - Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.

Projects	Short-term efforts in work or life. · Time-bound → they have beginning and an end · Specific and clear outcome · E.g. Design and launch a website
Areas (of responsibility)	Long-term responsibilities → committed to over time · no goal to reach - but a standard you want to uphold · E.g. Personal Finance, health, people,
Resources	Topics or interests that may be useful in future · What topics are you interested in? · What subjects are you researching? · What useful information do you want to be able to reference?
Archive	Inactive items from the other categories · Things that are completed, cancelled or put on hold · Things that are no longer relevant

• When you take a note - decide where to store it using this decision tree →
• Is this useful for an active project?
• Is this useful for an active Area?
• Is this useful as a resource?
• OR Archive
• Organising isn’t the goal - using information is the goal.
• Keep capture and organise as two distinct steps → push everything to an inbox first, so it’s frictionless
• If you don’t distill - the more notes you collect the less discoverable they are
• Use Progressive Summarisation
• Essentially highlight the main points of a text - then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on..
• Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart. E.g…
1. Save only the relevant bits
2. Bold the most important parts
3. Highlight the best of the bold
4. Add an exec summary at the top (only if the note is really useful)
• You can do the steps at different times - during breaks, it doesn’t take much energy
• Don’t highlight too much, highlight without a purpose OR overthink it.
• Stigmergy = leaving “marks” on the environment that make your future efforts easier. Ant colonies use it.
• Attention is our most scarce and precious resource → Strategically allocating attention is a competitive advantage
• The more packets you have the easier it is to build something → start your next project with a set of building blocks that represent your long-term effort to make sense of your industry
• Think of everything as intermediate packets of work:
• Distilled notes (progressively summarised)
• Outtakes from previous projects
• Work in process stuff - artefacts used and created on the way to completing past projects
• Deliverables from previous projects
• Knowledge assets created by others around you (keep best practice WGLL)
• Benefits of Intermediate packets
1. Robust to interruption - as you’re only working on a small thing
2. Make progress in small amounts of time (make us of odd moments)
3. Quality of your work increases as you can get feedback more often
4. Eventually you’ll have enough intermediate packets to create entire projects just by assembling them
• Assembling building blocks is the secret to frictionless output
• You can acquire building blocks from elsewhere!
• Instead of thinking of your work as tasks → think of it as an opportunity to create packets that you can later use as building blocks and assemble into something that can propel you forward
• Start thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential
• Each time you start a new project → leverage your second brain and your intermediate packets
• With the power of a Second Brain behind you - you can do and be anything you want.
• Everything is just information - and you can master the flow of it and how to shape it

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Part 1 - The Foundation

Part 2 - CODE

Part 3 - Making things happen