22Sep21 | What I learned in the $1500 program: Building a Second Brain | The Quickstart

The objectives of building a second brain are simple:

• Keep a copy of everything you know outside your biological brain
• Make it accessible & searchable at all times
• Never lose anything you read, know or learn
• Reduce overwhelm & information exhaustion

Another word for a Second Brain is PKMS: Personal Knowledge Management System. The idea of keeping & maintaining a PKMS is fairly recent, but is becoming central in an age where we consume far more knowledge than we know what to do with. These are all really just different terms for “taking proper notes”. If you’re reading a book or attending an online course, your brain only retains 20% of this new knowledge; this is provided you don’t take any notes.

Taking proper notes can sometimes be a hefty process, but pays dividends shortly after knowledge fades away from your biological brain. So imagine few years from now you’re able to access a collective of your first-hand knowledge & learnings throughout these years, in just a few seconds. This is not equivalent to searching google, because your hard earned knowledge has more depth & breadth than any other pieces of knowledge you peek on the internet. Your memory picks up on that depth as soon as you recall the text in front of you, because it knows you have been here before.

It seems intuitive but maintaining such system so that it can help your future self in the best way possible takes some work from your present self. Building a second brain is like working out, but for the mind, everyday you spend building your second brain, you are putting in the reps. Compounded over time, you become a different version of yourself.

C.O.D.E: The Methodology

CODE stands for Capture - Organize - Distill - Express. This is the methodology you’ll be using while you’re taking & saving new notes – In short, you take in some notes, you organize them (by topic, interest, etc), then you summarize them to get their gist, and finally they are here for you to use in whichever task you’re having.

1. Capture

This is the step that needs the most work.

First, on a pen & paper, write down all your current information formats, i.e all the ways by which you consume knowledge on a daily basis. These can be: kindle books, web articles, academic PDFs, podcasts on Spotify, handwritten notes, etc. If it’s something you use to learn, know or read, write it down. By the end of this exercise you’ll have a snapshot of every information format you’re using.

Second, you need to choose your notes app. That is going to be the central place where you save & search for everything. Top options include: Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, Roam & NotePlan.

There are lots of comparisons on the internet, but I’ll try to briefly give my 2 cents on each of them:

• Notion is the defacto standard of this niche. It’s both a note-taking app & a collaborative tool. This is the modern version of Google Docs. Can’t go wrong with it; it’s also ideal for project management. Premium version costs $5/month for personal use.
• Obsidian is the most customizable of them all, and that’s why many people dislike it. Most community plugins are open-source and the possibilities with it are really limitless. It’s available on every platform and can be tailored to anyone’s preferences but it also has the steepest learning curve. Obsidian is free.
• Evernote is the oldest of them & its premium version comes at $8/month. I have never really used it, but here’s a quick review from BASB’s creator Tiago Forte, since he’s using Evernote as his primary note-taking tool: link
• Roam first appeared during covid in 2020, suddenly all people on twitter were talking about it, although many similar alternatives have been there for a while, but Roam was one of the things that started a Second Brain cult in the software community. Its creator https://twitter.com/Conaw is a thought leader in the space & often provides fresh insights. Roam is generally aimed at people who are more technical, and costs $15/month.

• NotePlan is my personal favorite. I’ve been using it for 18 months. It provides an easy interface, integration of your calendar events, a to-do list manager & a personal note-taking app, all in one. But it doesn’t provide a collaboration functionality like Notion, so you can’t use it for project management. It works on macOS/iOS and costs $5/month.

Third, return back to your paper that has the information formats, now what we’ll try to do is connect all information such that they are saved in your central notes app. For this, all notes apps offer integrations with other apps & services.

These are some of the integrations available with Notion, for example.

To give a sense of this, here’s a sample capture toolkit:

• Web Bookmarks → raindrop.io
• Webpage highlighting → readwise
• Twitter bookmarks → readwise
• Apple books highlights → readwise
• Handwritten notes → Google Lens

Side note 1: Some of these tools can’t integrate with my central notes app, and that’s perfectly normal. For this I’ll be using the tool hand-in-hand with the notes app. So the result of the “Capture” step can be that you will be using the 3 apps X, Y & Z as your knowledge management system.

Side note 2: Readwise is not a note-taking app, but a middle software. It enables you to take highlights from articles & books (web articles, apple books, kindle books – works on desktop & mobile) and then sync these highlights to a plethora of apps, one of which should ideally be your chosen notes app. So this way you automatically have your highlights in your notes app!

https://readwise.io/welcome/sync

2. Organize

When you’re starting, all what you need is just a flat structure. Don’t bother with filing & categorization.

Few weeks in, you’ll start having themes across your notes. You will find that they can be categorized in more than one way & it can get overwhelming, but in his course, Tiago Forte discusses a scientifically-backed method to organize your notes: The PARA method.

P.A.R.A stands for Projects - Areas – Resources – Archives. It is a method for organizing any kind of information by its actionability. That is how and when it is most likely to be used in real projects. When we organize by actionability, every single piece of information from whatever source can be placed into one of just four categories:

a. Projects

A project is any outcome you’re actively committed to that requires multiple work sessions. Most actionable. It needs to be:

• Something that will happen at a specific moment in time so that you can mark it off as completed
• Something you’re actively committed to, not just a casual interest
• Not something that you can complete in one sitting. you’ll need a few work sessions over a few days or weeks to complete

b. Areas

An area is a role responsibility with a standard to be maintained over time. Less actionable than projects.

Areas don’t stop and start, they continue indefinitely. And you always have to be managing these areas to some extent. e.g: Health, Investing, etc. It’s something that you will have to think about and manage in one way or another for as long as we live.

Areas are the ongoing roles or responsibilities that you are accountable for, the hats that you wear at work and in your personal life. They don’t have an end goal that you’re trying to achieve. That’s why there is information relevant to these standards that you are going to want to track over time.

c. Resources

A resource is a topic of ongoing interest or a useful reference. Barely/may become actionable.

Things you’re interested in, but you haven’t committed to as either a project or an area. Resource is our third category that is basically a catch-all for everything else, e.g: trends you are keeping track of, ideas related to your job or your industry, hobbies and side interests, or just things you are randomly curious about.

They could include subjects that you’re researching with a slow burn over time. They could also be something that’s not so much interesting but a potentially useful resource that you might need later.

They can be notes from books you read, notes from online courses, notes from podcasts you listen to, etc.

You might draw on some of these resources when you are executing your projects or when you are working on one of your areas. But otherwise, most of the time you want them safely tucked away out of sight.

d. Archives

Archives include inactive items from the previous three categories. Non-actionable. Out of sight but still searchable, accessible & linkable.

Archives are so valuable because they create no penalty for keeping any volume of information. You can keep as much as you want, as long as it doesn’t distract you from or interfere with your day to day productivity.

A note can be recycled/transferred between any of the above 4 buckets of information.

3. Distill

This step is only applicable for long-form notes that can be: brain dumps during meetings, highlights from an entire book, etc. These tend to be so long, so the “Distill” step helps get the gist of what you wrote, to deliver maximum value for your future self or anyone whom you might share it with. As for the viability of the system overall, this step is optional.

You can think of the original source as the ground level. It’s like when you zoom in on a map to a specific street. That’s layer zero. From that original source, you capture only the best passages, only the parts that resonate with you in your notes app. This is kind of like the neighborhood view, and that’s layer one. Then you bold the best parts of those passages, which is like the city view at layer two. Then you highlight the best parts of those passages, which is like looking at a state at layer three. And then finally, you write a takeaway summary in your own words, which is like seeing the entire country in one glance at layer four. This version of the content is the highest elevation, most actionable form of what you’ve captured.

Now, using the current project that you’re working on as a filter, or lens, you can decide what’s relevant. All you have to do is trace into the different layers of the note (takeaway → highlights → bold parts → all page → main source) with different attention spans based on how far the note is relevant to your work. This gives you the best of both worlds: You have brief summaries when you don’t have much time, but also you have more of the context when you need more detail and you need to find out where this information came from.

4. Express

An important aspect to all of this is Expressibility. You want to always capture information with an end goal in mind, because gathering knowledge for the sake of it is pointless. Generally, information capture becomes easier if you have an output format in mind. This goal can be anything, as long as you’re building & using your second brain to serve it.

A possible outcome can be Intermediate Packets. These are chunks of work from the past or present, that can be re-used for future projects. They can include distilled notes, unused resources, presentation slides, or checklists, just to name a few. These can help kickstart future projects much faster & with less cold-starts.

Any future idea or project can piggyback on what you already have, so intermediate packets can help you mix things up, spot contradictions, build better arguments, and always have a bunch of building blocks ready.

At the end, remember that all this time we’re building up for a “global wide sweep search”, which is the main goal here: Your entire knowledge at your fingertips.

In the next part of this series, I’m going to talk about how to check updates from your favorite newsletters, blogs, twitter accounts, youtube channels, rss updates & podcasts from one place.