I heard about this book from Sumedha over at The Wordy Habitat and since it’s the new year, I thought this would be a good book to help me make the most of 2023.
Simply put, Building a Second Brain is a book on how to make the most use of the information we encounter every day, making it practical and actionable for our goals and areas of interest. What Forte suggests is to use a note-taking app and to turn it into a second brain, which he defines as “a digital archive of your most valuable memories, ideas, and knowledge to help you to do your job, run your business, and manage your life without having to keep every detail in your head.”
How we build our second brain is startlingly simple and makes a lot of sense. Essentially, we use the acronym CODE:
- Capture – keep pieces of information that resonate with you
- Organise – put the captured information into different buckets
- Distill – bold, highlight, and write summaries (progressive summarization) to distil the information to its essence
- Express – use “intermediate packets” of information to help create content more easily
When it comes to “Organise”, Forte suggests organising by actionability. Basically, everything should go into one of the four categories:
- Project: short-term projects you are working on now
- Area: long-term responsibilities (e.g. finance, children, etc)
- Resource: topics or interests that may be useful in the future
- Archive: inactive items from the above three categories
These categories aren’t static, by the way, and neither are the notes. Projects may arise from areas, finished projects may go into archives and notes can travel between categories as they wish.
I also liked the “archipelago of ideas” that Forte mentions in the “Express” chapter. It’s actually quite similar to how I write some of my UniversiTEA posts – I’ll spend a few days just copying + pasting pieces of information I think is relevant, and then I’ll build a bridge between them to turn them into a post.
Reading this book had me thinking about how I organise my information. I already capture most of what I read thanks to this blog, which incentivises me to summarise and write down my thoughts on books I read. I even have a google folder for notes on longer books, if I feel a book will be useful. But for the rest of the information that I encounter? I don’t think I do any of that. I’m not sure if I want to add another notes app to my life, but I will definitely be trying to be more intentional about capturing the information that I encounter and making sure it’s relevant/actionable to me.
Overall, I found this to be a straightforward and practical book for people who are looking to make full use of the information that we encounter every day. Some of it may sound very straightforward (like organising by projects), but I think that just makes it easier to implement if we aren’t already doing so – after all, it’s better to start and then improve than to wait for perfect and never start at all.