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

The third category of information that we want to keep is resources. This is basically a catchall for anything that doesn’t belong to a project or an area and could include any topic you’re interested in gathering information about.

Tagging for personal knowledge management is a subject unto itself. While not necessary to get started, I’ve written a free bonus chapter on tags you can download at buildingasecond brain.com/bonuschapter.

The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence.

without our thoughts as distractions, we are left to sit with uncomfortable questions about our future and our purpose.

When you express an idea in writing, it’s not just a matter of transferring the exact contents of your mind into paper or digital form. Writing creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.*

When you sit down to finish something—whether it’s an explanatory email, a new product design, a research report, or a fundraising strategy—it can be so tempting to do more research. It’s so easy to open up dozens of browser tabs, order more books, or go off in completely new directions. Those actions are tempting because they feel like productivit

Unless I highlight those points in a way that my future self can instantly grasp, I’ll likely never see them again.

This book isn’t focused on the science, but for an excellent introduction to extended cognition I recommend The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.

the model of divergence and convergence from Design Thinking, an approach to creative problem-solving that emerged out of the Stanford Design School and was further popularized by the innovation consultancy IDEO starting in the 1980s and 1990s.

Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect.