Book SummaryBuilding a Second Brain, by Tiago Forte

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Building a Second Brain

In today’s age of technology, we’re constantly surrounded by important information. However, our brains aren’t equipped to effectively process and recall every important thing we encounter, leaving us frustrated and overwhelmed. Consequently, many people feel like they’re failing to reach their full potential—as if they’re dying of thirst during a rainstorm simply because they lack the means to capture what’s surrounding them.

Luckily, In Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte presents a solution to this problem—a straightforward method of recording, organizing, and utilizing valuable information. This method allows you to recall important knowledge at the snap of your fingers, easily connect ideas and make discoveries, and complete any goal or project to the best of your ability.

Forte specializes in productivity and the emerging field of personal knowledge management (PKM). He’s also the founder of Forte Labs, a consulting firm that helps organizations improve productivity and maximize creative potential through the principles and techniques of design thinking. Alongside Building a Second Brain, Forte has also published four...

Building a Second Brain Summary Your Brain’s Not Equipped to Effectively Manage Today’s Information

Forte claims that modern humans need an external storage system (ESS)—a digital platform to store all the important ideas, information, and work they encounter—because knowledge, and the ability to do knowledge work, is the most valued asset in today’s society.

In Forte’s view, knowledge work involves recalling important pieces of information, making connections between them, and using the insights gained from this process to develop novel ideas or solve problems. Your ability to do knowledge work hinges on how creative and productive you are. Creativity is the ability to make connections between ideas and information. Productivity is the ability to make effective use of your time and creativity to accomplish a goal. The more creative connections you can make, and the faster you can execute on them, the better you’ll be at knowledge work.

The History of Knowledge Work

The concept of knowledge work was first popularized in 1959 when management expert Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge workers” in his book The Landmarks of Tomorrow. As Drucker explains in _The Effective Executive,...

Building a Second Brain Summary How To Organize Your Storage System

Forte explains that the organization of your external storage system is the most important component of increasing your creativity and productivity. Creating folders and sub-folders in your digital storage system will allow you to easily locate and utilize saved information. We can break Forte’s organization system into six main areas—four of these areas are part of the organization system he calls PARA.

(Shortform note: While Forte says that the highly organized digital working environment of an ESS will increase productivity and creativity, recent studies on physical working environments suggest that this may not be the case. Psychologists found no difference in productivity between people working in organized environments and those working in cluttered ones. However, the people in cluttered environments produced more unique and interesting ideas—they were more creative. If the observations from this study on physical work environments hold true for digital work environments, then your creativity might benefit more from a more integrated or “cluttered” ESS,...

Building a Second Brain Summary How to Effectively Use Your External Storage System

Once you’ve organized your external storage system, Forte explains that you must learn how to use it in a way that increases your productivity and creative potential. His process for utilizing your ESS mirrors the creative process, which he explains has two modes: expansion and contraction. (Forte calls these modes divergence and convergence, respectively.) First, you must expand the possibilities of a project or goal to include all relevant information and resources. Then, you must contract by narrowing your scope, cutting extra information, and refining your product or idea until you have a final result.

Forte explains that the first two steps of using your ESS are to record information and sort it into relevant folders where you can utilize it (these are the condense and organize steps of Forte’s CODE system for saving information). These steps are part of the expansion mode of the creative process—they’re designed to gather relevant information that gets your creative juices flowing and sparks new ideas.

The second two steps of using your ESS are to refine your notes to their most important parts and use them to create something (these are...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Goals, Engagements, and Interests

Forte explains that the foundation of an effective ESS is identifying what kind of information you want to save. To do this, determine which goals and projects you want to focus on currently, which engagements you want to commit to long-term, and which areas you’re interested in possibly pursuing through a future goal or project.

First, list three to five goals or projects you want to work on (or that you’re already working on). These will be your first subfolders in your current goals folder. (Feel free to add more than five or less than three based on how many projects you feel comfortable taking on at once.)