Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

My main takeaways from Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte are featured below:

Your second brain is like a digital commonplace book. Intellectuals would carry around commonplace books to write down ideas, quotes and other things they found interesting. My digital notetaking app of choice is Notion.

The PARA method is a way to organize your digital notes. It stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives. Examples of Projects I have are: Research interesting things I can sew, take film class and draw benefits of x series. For my Areas, I have mental health, quality of life ideas, learning and youtube work. For Resources, I have movies and shows to watch, mobile app ideas and templates I’ve found for youtube video making. Archives is where you put your completed projects.

You want to organize the information based on how actionable it is instead of what kind of information it is. So you focus on a practical use case. So when deciding where to put a note, you first see where it would be most useful. Would it help with this project? Would it fit in this area? Or would it fit as this resource? If none of those, then you archive the information. Using modern search features, you can easily find archived information. Archiving the information helps keep your work area clean of things that aren’t necessary for the immediate projects you’re dealing with.

I am hoping with this PARA method I can get more done. It helps being able to sort through the data and par it down to what I actually need for a project. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in personal knowledge management.