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

For many people, their understanding of notetaking was formed in school. You were probably first told to write something down because it would be on the test. This implied that the minute the test was over, you would never reference those notes again. Learning was treated as essentially disposable, with no intention of that knowledge being useful f

It’s time to elevate the status of notes from test prep and humble scribblings into something far more interesting and dynamic. For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.

The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too.

Unlike with your house or garage, there is no penalty for keeping digital stuff forever, as long as it doesn’t distract from your day-to-day focus.

you are always trying to place a note or file not only where it will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest.

many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we’re never quite able to focus and al

Why even try? Why keep attempting to do the impossible? Why resist the temptation to watch another Netflix episode or scroll through social media? Without the time and energy to move things decisively forward, what’s the point of starting?

Knowledge capture is about mining the richness of the reading you’re already doing and the life you’re already living.

Once our thoughts are outside our head, we can examine them, play with them, and make them better. It’s like a shortcut to realizing the full potential of the thoughts flowing through our minds.

Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’re already having.