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

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. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.

The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or mov

Write out your intention for the next work session:

How do you create a Hemingway Bridge? Instead of burning through every last ounce of energy at the end of a work session, reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes: Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the nex

To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense.

The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence.

The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence.

The activity of divergence is familiar to all of us: it is the classic whiteboard covered in sketches,