I Built A Second Brain

So this month, I invested some time into organizing my digital life. I have tried doing this a few times in the past and I did succeed all of those times. When I sit down to organize, I do manage to create perfect folder structures to store all my notes.

But the problem is that one, it takes me hours to do this ‘meta’ task, and two, the structure remains viable for a short duration. Then, as I’m working on new projects, or my life changes (college to job), or some completely random idea strikes my head, I don’t know what to do. I can’t put it into the existing structure so I just let it go out of procrastination.

And if I do manage to store it somewhere, I never care to use that information. “What’s the point?” I find myself asking and stop taking notes altogether.

This changed when I started learning the principles of note taking from Tiago Forte. He’s the author of ‘Building A Second Brain’ and an expert in note taking and digital organization.

Tiago is a fan of abbreviations and has named his system CODE, short for Capture, Organize, Distill and Express.

Capture

Capturing is simple. Whenever you come across a piece of information, you capture it in your note taking app of choice (Notion for me). You can write down your ideas, paste pictures, or put anything in there that you’d like to preserve.

Organize

Organizing is where most of us actually struggle. That’s where, another of Tiago’s framework, PARA helps. PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives, the four folders where all our notes go.

Projects

Anything that is actionable and has a completion date is considered to be a project. Think of creating a website, planning a trip, winter shopping, family dinner, etc. The idea here is simple — information needs to be captured with a clear purpose of using it.

So if I’m planning a wedding per say, I’d create a folder and put all the related information in there — the clothing options, vendor details, venue booking receipts, everything goes in a single place.

Once the wedding is over, that project is finished. I move it to the Archives folder. We don’t delete anything because it may come in handy in future. But archiving takes it out of sight, freeing up our mind.

Currently, I have seven active projects ranging in the domains of programming, video production, long form writing and research. Most of these I haven’t even started, let alone having a deadline. But these are still projects because they have a completion date.

Areas

Areas are parts of our lives that we put our time into but they don’t really finish. They are on going. Think of piano lessons, fitness routine or these weekly meditations. You’re involved in all of these, but won’t ever finish them.

As you may notice, the companies that I’m working with are kept into areas. That’s because it’s an active partnership, not limited to just one project. Once our contract is over, they go to archives.

Resources

This is the category where most of our notes go. It is a dedicated space for all our random ideas. A movie we liked, a book paragraph we resonated with, a life-altering thought from shower, you put all these into the resources folder.

These notes aren’t immediately actionable because they don’t belong to a project or area. But these can become sources of inspiration for future projects.

That article you see at the top, I couldn’t think of a folder name so it just sits there for now. I’ve stored some quotes, the sentences I wrote but didn’t fit into any of my essays, stock photos for future use, etc. Art folder doesn’t actually contain art but a tweet that explains how to interpret art.

Archives

Finally, archives contain every note you ever created in the past. There’s no need for further organization here, just dump everything into this folder.

You can see how all my notes from different domains and phases of life rest here. Notes from classroom, my hackathon applications, previous projects, my monthly goals, and other stuff I’ve been up to in the past.

Lately, I’ve been using the PARA method in every digital space, not just notes. The files on my computer and Google Drive, are all organized in the same way as Notion.

Distill

The beauty of PARA system is that every note is categorized into just four folders. This makes it super easy to capture ideas, almost too easy. As a result, we may get an overload of information in our personal database.

So the natural next step is to make sense of this information. Tiago suggests the idea of progressive summarization. Basically, when we make bigger notes, like meeting notes, book chapter summaries, etc. We highlight the key points right while capturing them. We can also summarize the core idea in a couple of lines above the note.

While capturing? Why? Because the subject already has our attention and once you lose it, you won’t be able to summarize it unless you put in effort.

This is what I was talking about when I said that I spend hours organizing my notes. I’ll have to read a huge chunk of it just to make sense. If I have a couple of bullet points summarizing what the note is about, I can save significant amount of effort.

Express

Last and the most important step is to express. You didn’t take those notes for nothing, right? Why would you put in so much effort if you’re not using that information? So, just use those notes in your projects!

‘Express’ does not mean that you need to take the creative path of blogs or YouTube videos (though that’s obvious and this essay is one of the ways). You can turn those notes into any kind of project.

I gave the example of planning a wedding earlier, here are some more:

1. Turn your recipe bookmarks and experiments from past into the perfect family dinner.

2. Your time spent in saving decor ideas on Pinterest can become worthwhile once you get a chance to revamp your room.

3. Having a little space in the cloud where you save all your documents, booking details, itinerary and inspiring Instagram reels can make your travels hassle-free.

As a matter of fact, starting with a small project is the best way to learn anything. Rather than trying to learn piano arbitrarily, if you think of composing a song, you’ll be able to figure out a better pathway.

Another interesting principle I learnt from Tiago is that unless you’re working on a project, you don’t need to look at your notes at all. No need to open your laptop every Saturday and scroll through your ideas from that week.

The whole point of building a second brain is that you keep your biological brain free from information. So, just search for a note when you need to.

Check out this playlist if you want to apply these principles to your digital space:

Or if you’re too curious, read this book to dive all the way in:

Kinda long issue, but I really wanted to document this system. It’s genuinely helping me create a clutter-free digital life. And I hope it does that for you as well :)

Happy Sunday!
Aachman