I Read Building A Second Brain: Here’s What I Learned

Introduction

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte is a productivity book about how to organize your digital life in such a way that you can organize your life, quickly reference material that is important to you, keep track of areas of interest, and finally declutter anything that is currently unnecessary.

We’ve all had to write notes in our lives, whether or not those notes were helpful is another story. If we break down why we would want to write notes two very key ideas come to mind.

Separation of Concerns

We want to write notes because we want to reference them later — this is not limited to any media type either. Sometimes we may want to take a picture of a recipe in a cookbook, maybe it’s a golden hour in the middle of summer and we want to take a photo of the sunset. Perhaps it’s a quote from a book or an idea we read on the internet. We don’t necessarily need to have an exact idea of what it means or what it could be used for, what is sufficient enough is that if it moved us, we can decide its meaning and where it belongs later on. With this strategy, we are separating the act of taking notes. One step is that whenever we find something intriguing, we capture it in any form as quickly and easily into a general holding area (iPhone notes app, Notion app, Computer files) and only later will we then organize it to where it belongs. We are bombarded enough as it is in our daily lives so it is best to capture whatever it is and move on with what you were doing.

Progressive Summarization

The next idea that really spoke to me was the concept of Progressive Summarization. It’s a helpful strategy to help you synthesize your notes progressively over time. This is extremely helpful when referencing material over and over again and you inevitably notice patterns of what parts are most essential

Here are the general steps of this technique. When aiming to write down some notes about a topic

1. Write down what you think you should know and what you would like to reference later on. We can usually leave the refinement for a later time.
2. Next, whenever you come back to this material again bold the specific parts that speak to you from what you wrote down — what specific parts are you referring to the most? You can bold complete sentences if that’s what works for you.
3. Add another layer of refinement. Here we will highlight or underline the most imported parts of what was previously bolded. Our aim is to trim a lot here and only highlight what’s essential.
4. This is the last layer of refinement, and it is not always needed. But if you really wanted to understand the material here you can create a short bullet-point summary of what you have written down. The aim of this last layer is to get the gist of what the topic is quicker than if you were to read everything you have written down previously.

Conclusion

There is a lot more in this book, however, these are the parts that spoke the most to me. I strongly believe that you should do the same. If you found any of these techniques interesting today I highly recommend you give them a try and alter them to make them work for you. Do I always write notes and separate the capture and the meaning? No, sometimes I am writing notes while I am working and already know exactly where it needs to go but other times I am just reading a random article or book and need to write down a quote quickly.

When performing Progressive Summarization I rarely get to the 3rd and 4th steps. Maybe if I was studying for a certificate or back in University I would find all the steps helpful but for my current use cases, the first 1-3 steps are usually enough.