Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

Should you do more research, or start organizing the research you’ve already done? Should you widen your horizons, or narrow your focus? Should you start something new, or finish something you’ve already started?

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember. —Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic

A calendar app is an extension of your brain’s ability to remember events, ensuring you never forget an appointment. Your smartphone is an extension of your ability to communicate, allowing your voice to reach across oceans and continents. Cloud storage is an extension of your brain’s memory, allowing you to store thousands of gigabytes and access

The Digital Commonplace Book Once our notes and observations become digital, they can be searched, organized and synced across all our devices, and backed up to the cloud for safekeeping. Instead of randomly scribbling down notes on pieces of paper, hoping we’ll be able to find them later, we can cultivate our very own “knowledge vault” so we alway

Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. Not only could this lead to more civil discussions about the important topics of the day; it could also preserve our mental health and heal our spli

Commonplace books were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world. They drew on their notebooks in conversation and used them to connect bits of knowledge from different sources and to inspire their own thinking.

Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do. Anything you might want to accomplish—executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business—requires finding and putting to use the right information. Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage informa

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.