A Second Brain

4 min readNov 25, 2021

We all try to capture the most important information around us and make it a useable input. Without the right framework, this can lead to stress, a lack of focus, and amplifies that omnipresent feeling of being flooded with noise. It becomes a real challenge to create valuable action from the plethora of information we get. This situation is very common nowadays.

Feeling like Homer Simpson sometimes with all the medias, books, videos that we have access to…..

In order to solve that issue, Tiago Forte (a “productivity expert”) has developed the concept of a Second Brain. The objective is simple: help people expand their capacity of producing creative and meaningful output through a well-thought system that captures, organize,s and transforms the tons of information in our environment.

We consume all types of media during the day, sometimes without even noticing it. It becomes very difficult to organise our thoughts with the plethora of information.

The second brain that Tiago Forte proposes leverages all the digital solutions on the market: note taking apps, organisation applications, cloud storage solution.

In a nutshell, if you are trying to capture the resonance of your ideas in your head and transform it into key output, a second brain is your best solution.

Building a second brain using CODE

To put in motion the idea of a second brain, we need to apply the CODE methodology:

C for Collect
O for Organise
D for Distill
E for Express

This methodology is meant to help us create a link between ideas themselves and the different steps from getting information to transforming them into useable output.

Collect

The collecting phase is the cornerstone of our second brain: any information that we want to capture, needs to be captured in way that it can be reused. It can take any form, and therefore can be used through any kind of tool: a note, a record of an audio, a video, a book… really any input that we consider valuable.

Organise

The organization phase of CODE uses the PARA Framework: Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive.

Projects

A project is defined as a specific, finite activity that produces an observable and measurable result under certain preset requirements (mymanagementguide).

It may have several tasks, a target date, an approximation of how much time to accomplish the several tasks. Projects are meant to reach a particular goal of life. There are many ways to organise projects: agile, shape up, waterfall, etc. For instance: “Organising the bachelor party of my best friend” is a project, and its goal could be to have the best memorable moments of one’s life.

Area

Areas are part of your life you need to commit to for an undefined time. They are used to keep projects organised. As an example: “Finance” is an area of your life, where projects such as “Invest in stocks” or “Reduce spending for next month” could exist.

Resources

Resources are all the objects that will be useful to achieve a certain project. It could be a list of books, courses, articles, or any “consumable” that is useful to help with tasks within a project.

Archive

You can archive any projects, areas, resources that is not useful anymore and store it.

Here is an example of how to set up the PARA framework using Notion.so:

Distill

The distilling phase consists in reducing the huge amount of inputs, data, or even words to maintain a reasonable level of information that should be easy to use.

Tiago Forte has come up with a technique called “Progressive Summarisation”. The objective is to drill down to the most essential highlight any piece of information that has been captured.

This technique allows any individual to keep record of what they learn for infinite time and use it to establish logical link whenever learning new stuff.

Express

Once all the previous steps have been done, we should be able to express clearly our ideas and transform into key output.

Create your personal knowledge management system

Now that we have all the necessary theory to build our second brain, we can now hop to finding the best digital solution to make it happen.

In order to do that, we need to create our own personal knowledge management system: it could be methodologies, web applications, automation, etc.

I personally use Notion. I think having an all in one solution is the best option to create a second brain. Furthermore, there is a community around Notion that makes the experience smoother and more pleasant. Finally, Tiago Forte is using Notion in one of his youtube tutorial.

The next step is to add automation to our second brain. In some next articles, we’ll try to find several ways to automate our process of capturing information and transforming it into key outputs.