Building a Second Brain

If you like the book and want to read more, consider buying it to support the author.👍

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💡 Key Takeaways

• Make capture notes fast and effortless.
• You can do a “capture” session, where you just fast save bookmarks of information on the internet. I use pocket.
• Organize them every week in an efficient “organizing” session. I use notion.
• Distill your organized notes using progressive summarization.
• Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect.

✏ Top Quotes

Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do.

Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively.

Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, organize them according to where they are going.

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📝 Summary + Notes

THE FOUNDATION

• There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us:
  • Making our ideas concrete.
  • Revealing new associations between ideas.
  • Incubating our ideas over time.
  • Sharpening our unique perspectives.
• Remember → Connect → Create

• Capture: Keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and leave the rest aside.
• Organize: Organize your notes by action, according to the active projects you are working on right now.
• Distill: You’ll inevitably begin to notice patterns and connections between them.
• Express: Information becomes knowledge only when we put it to use.

THE METHOD

Capture

• Have 12 topics of interest where each new idea would be tested against.
• Capture information that: inspires you, is useful, is personal, is surprising.

Organize

• Projects: What I’m Working on Right Now.
• Areas: What I’m Committed to Over Time.
• Resources: Things I Want to Reference in the Future.
• Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold.
• Organizing by actionability counteracts our tendency to constantly procrastinate and postpone our aspirations to some far-off future.

Distill

• Progressive Summarization is the technique to distill notes down to their most important points.
  • Step 1: The 1st summarization of let’s say a book or article is your captured notes. Can be many.
  • Step 2: Work on these notes and make some of them stand out (e.g. bold text).
  • Step 3: Make even less content stand out by highlighting.
• Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting.
• Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind.

Express

• Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others.

THE SHIFT

• Divergence mode: open up your horizons and explore every possible option (Capture, Organize).
• Convergence mode: you have enough ideas and enough sources, and it’s time to turn inward and sprint toward your goal (Distill, Express).

The Hemingway Bridge

At the end of a work session:

• Write down ideas for the next steps.
• Write down the current status (current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect).
• 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.
• The next time you resume this endeavor, whether that’s the next day or months later, you’ll have a rich set of jumping-off points and next steps waiting for you.

Project Kickoff Checklist

You are making a plan for how to tackle the project, not executing the project itself. You should think of this five-step checklist as a first pass, taking no more than twenty to thirty minutes.

• Capture my current thinking on the project.
  • What do I already know about this project?
  • What don’t I know that I need to find out?
  • What is my goal or intention?
  • Who can I talk to who might provide insights?
  • What can I read or listen to for relevant ideas?
• Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes.
• Search for related terms across all folders.
• Move (or tag, or link) relevant notes to the project folder.
• Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.

Monthly Review

• Review and update my goals.
  • What successes or accomplishments did I have?
  • What went unexpectedly and what can I learn from it?
• Review and update my project list.
• Review my areas of responsibility.
• Review someday/maybe tasks.
• Reprioritize tasks.