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Overview

• Date Read: 2025-01-12
• Rating: 9/10

• Summary
• My Notes / Highlights from the book
  • The Challenge
  • What Is a Second Brain?
  • How a Second Brain Works
  • CODE Method of Second Brain
  • Capture—Keep What Resonates
    • Capture Criteria: How to Avoid Keeping Too Much (or Too Little)
  • Organize
    • New Note - Where Do I Put This?
    • Creating Projects
  • Distill
    • The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers
  • Express
    • Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output
  • The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers
    • Project Checklist:
    • A Weekly Review Template: Reset to Avoid Overwhelm
• Favorite Quotes
• Links

Summary

We’re overwhelmed with information—books, podcasts, and advice—but most of it is forgotten before it’s useful. It’s like we’re hoarding knowledge without actually applying it, which only adds to our stress.

The idea behind a “Second Brain” is to manage this overflow. It’s a personal knowledge management system to organize and use knowledge effectively, turning ideas into action rather than stress.

Think of it as outsourcing your memory to technology. By taking smarter notes and organizing them well, you can turn fleeting thoughts into actionable insights. It’s about shifting away from the disposable note-taking habits we learned in school and towards a more professional and purposeful approach.

Using the CODE method:

1. Capture: Save only what’s valuable.
2. Organize: Sort it using the PARA system (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives).
3. Distill: Highlight key insights for easy access.
4. Express: Create something meaningful from your knowledge.

The result? Less information overload and more clarity, creativity, and productivity.

My Notes / Highlights from the book

The Challenge

• We’re flooded with more advice than ever promising to make us smarter, healthier, and happier. We consume more books, podcasts, articles, and videos than we could possibly absorb. What do we really have to show for all the knowledge we’ve gained? How many of the great ideas we’ve had or encountered have faded from our minds before we even had a chance to put them into practice?
• We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own. So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

What Is a Second Brain?

• Anything you might want to accomplish—executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business—requires finding and putting to use the right information. Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively.
• It’s time for us to upgrade our Paleolithic memory. It’s time to acknowledge that we can’t “use our head” to store everything we need to know and to outsource the job of remembering to intelligent machines. We have to recognize that the cognitive demands of modern life increase every year, but we’re still using the same brains as two hundred thousand years ago, when modern humans first emerged on the plains of East Africa.
  • “We consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.”
• More than half the workforce today can be considered “knowledge workers”—professionals for whom knowledge is their most valuable asset, and who spend a majority of their time managing large amounts of information. In addition, no matter what our formal role is, all of us have to come up with new ideas, solve novel problems, and communicate with others effectively. We have to do these things regularly, reliably, not just once in a while.
  • My Notes: Thirty-eight percent of jobs are now designated as “managers, officials, and professionals. These are decision-making jobs. Another 41% are service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions.
• As a knowledge worker, where does your knowledge live? At the most practical level, knowledge begins with the simple, time-honored practice of taking notes.

• For many people, their understanding of notetaking was formed in school. You were probably first told to write something down because it would be on the test. This implied that the minute the test was over, you would never reference those notes again. Learning was treated as essentially disposable, with no intention of that knowledge being useful for the long term.

• When you enter the professional world, the demands on your notetaking change completely. The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need. In the professional world: It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on. No one tells you when or how your notes will be used. The “test” can come at any time and in any form. You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place. You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them.

How a Second Brain Works

• Choosing a Notetaking App: The Neural Center of Your Second Brain. The same technology that has fueled an explosion in the volume of information coming our way has also provided the tools to help us manage it.
  1. The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid.
  2. The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connect ideas together.
  3. Eventually, the third and final way that people use their Second Brain is for creating new things. They realize that they have a lot of knowledge on a subject and decide to turn it into something concrete and shareable.

CODE Method of Second Brain

• Capture: Keep What Resonates
• Organize: Save for Actionability
• Distill: Find the Essence
  • Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.
• Express: Show Your Work
  • The word “productivity” has the same origin as the Latin verb producere, which means “to produce.” Which means that at the end of the day, if you can’t point to some kind of output or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive at all.
  • The consumerist attitude toward information—that more is better, that we never have enough, and that what we already have isn’t good enough—is at the heart of many people’s dissatisfaction with how they spend their time online. Instead of trying to find “the best” content, I recommend instead switching your focus to making things, which is far more satisfying.

Capture—Keep What Resonates

• What Not to Keep : In my experience, there are four kinds of content that aren’t well suited to notes apps:
  • Is this sensitive information you’d like to keep secure?
  • Is this a special format or file type better handled by a dedicated app?
  • Is this a very large file?
  • Will it need to be collaboratively edited?
• The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.

Capture Criteria: How to Avoid Keeping Too Much (or Too Little)

• It starts with realizing that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you. When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.
• Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting.
• Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?
• Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?
• Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?

• Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

• Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you. If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it?
• If you’re looking for a more precise answer of how much content to capture in your notes, I recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most.

Organize

• No one questions the importance of having physical spaces that make us feel calm and centered, but when it comes to your digital workspace, it’s likely you’ve spent little time, if any, arranging that space to enhance your productivity or creativity. As knowledge workers we spend many hours every day within digital environments—our computers, smartphones, and the web. Unless you take control of those virtual spaces and shape them to support the kinds of thinking you want to do, every minute spent there will feel taxing and distracting.
• With the PARA system, every piece of information you want to save can be placed into one of just four categories

1. Projects: Short-term efforts in your life or What I’m Working on Right Now
   • Projects have a couple of features that make them an ideal way to organize modern work. First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or “publish.” (Page 91)
2. Areas Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time
3. Resources: Things I Want to Reference in the Future (Page 94)
4. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories

New Note - Where Do I Put This?

• How to Decide Where to Save Individual Notes Setting up folders is relatively easy. The harder question that strikes fear into the heart of every organizer is “Where do I put this?”
• The temptation when initially capturing notes is to also try to decide where they should go and what they mean. Here’s the problem: the moment you first capture an idea is the worst time to try to decide what it relates to.
  • First, because you’ve just encountered it and haven’t had any time to ponder its ultimate purpose,
  • but more importantly, because forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process. This makes the experience mentally taxing and thus less likely to happen in the first place.

• This order gives us a convenient checklist for deciding where to put a note, starting at the top of the list and moving down: In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives.

• In other words, you are always trying to place a note or file not only where it will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest.
• My mentor advised me to “move quickly and touch lightly” instead. To look for the path of least resistance and make progress in short steps. I want to give the same advice to you: don’t make organizing your Second Brain into yet another heavy obligation. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?”

Creating Projects

• When it comes to PARA, that step is generally to create folders for each of your active projects in your notes app and begin to fill them with the content related to those projects. Once you have a home for something, you tend to find more of it.
• Start by asking yourself, “What projects am I currently committed to moving forward?” and then create a new project folder for each one. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you think of the projects that might be on your plate: Notice what’s on your mind:
  • What’s worrying you that you haven’t taken the time to identify as a project?
  • What needs to happen that you’re not making consistent progress on?
  • Look at your calendar: What do you need to follow up on from the past?
  • What needs planning and preparation for the future?
  • Look at your to-do list: What actions are you already taking that are actually part of a bigger project you’ve not yet identified?
  • What communication or follow-up actions you’ve scheduled with people are actually part of a bigger project?
  • Look at your computer desktop, downloads folder, documents folder, bookmarks, emails, or open browser tabs:
  • What are you keeping around because it is part of a larger project?

Distill

• There is a key idea that catches our attention in the moment. We feel enraptured and obsessed with it. It’s difficult to imagine ever forgetting the new idea. It’s changed our lives forever! But after a few hours or days or weeks, it starts to fade from our memory. Soon our recollection of that exciting new idea is nothing but a pale shadow of something we once knew, that once intrigued us. Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fading away
• Discoverability—The Missing Link in Making Notes Useful The most important factor in whether your notes can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful.
• Distillation is at the very heart of all effective communication. The more important it is that your audience hear and take action on your message, the more distilled that message needs to be. The details and subtleties can come later once you have your audience’s attention. What if your future self was just as important as these VIPs? How could you communicate with them through time in the most efficient, concise way? (Page 119)
• There is one more layer we can add, though it is quite rarely needed. For only the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words. The best sign that a fourth layer is needed is when I find myself visiting a note again and again, clearly indicating that it is one of the cornerstones of my thinking. Looking only at the points I’ve previously bolded and highlighted in layers two and three makes it far easier to write this summary than if I was trying to summarize the entire article all at once. (Page 124)
• Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly. To be clear, it takes skill and courage to let the details fall away.

Progressive Summarization - My Takeaway:

1. Level 1 : Take highlights from the article. Reduce Article to 10%
2. Level 2 : Further mark the key highlight as bold in markdown
3. Level 3 : Underline the key bold highlights.
4. Level 4 : Write summary.

The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers

• Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting
  • Remember that notes are not authoritative texts. You don’t need to and shouldn’t include every tiny detail. They are more like bookmarks peeking out from the pages of a book on the shelf, signaling to you, “Hey! There’s something interesting here!”
  • A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. If you save a series of excerpts from a book amounting to five hundred words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty. This isn’t an exact science, but if you find yourself highlighting everything, this rule should give you pause.
• Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind
  • The most common question I hear about Progressive Summarization is “When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something.
  • Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes. If you try to do it with every note up front, you’ll quickly be mired in hours of meticulous highlighting with no clear purpose in mind. You can’t afford such a giant investment of time without knowing whether it will pay off.
  • Instead, wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use. For example, when I’m preparing to write a blog post or article, I’ll usually start by highlighting the most interesting points from a group of notes that I think will be relevant to the topic at hand.
• Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult (Page 140)
  • Just as you listened for a feeling of internal resonance in deciding what content to save in the first place, the same rule applies for the insights within the note. Certain passages will move you, pique your attention, make your heart beat faster, or provoke you. Those are clear signals that you’ve found something important, and it’s time to add a highlight.
  • Now read through only the bolded passages, and highlight (or, if your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, underline) the best of the best passages.

  • The true test of whether a note you’ve created is discoverable is whether you can get the gist of it at a glance. (Page 142)

  • I like to think of layer one as the “soil”—an excerpt from a source or my own thinking (whether as words, drawings, images, or audio) I initially capture into my notes. They are like the ground on which my understanding will be built. Layer two is “oil,” as in “I’ve struck oil!,” conveniently represented by black, bolded text. Layer three is “gold,” which is even more valuable, and shines in highlighter yellow in many apps. Layer four is the “gems,” the most rare and illuminating finds that I’ve distilled in my own words as an executive summary.

Express

• Turn the knowledge into output like writing, presentations or projects

Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output

• Those four retrieval methods are: Search, Browsing, Tags and Serendipity
• The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence. They help us shut the door to new ideas and begin constructing something new out of the knowledge building blocks we’ve assembled.
• Of the two stages of this process, convergence is where most people struggle. The more imaginative and curious you are, the more diverse your interests, and the higher your standards and commitment to perfection, the more difficult you will likely find it to switch from divergence mode into convergence mode. It’s painful to cut off options and choose one path over another. There is a kind of creative grief in watching an idea that you know is full of potential get axed from a script or a story. This is what makes creative work challenging.

The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers

• In this chapter, I will introduce you to three kinds of habits that can be integrated into your routine to ensure your Second Brain remains functional and relevant. Each of these habits creates boundaries—of time, space, and intention—around the states of mind that you want to protect and promote in your life.

• Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work.
• Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything.
• Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

Project Checklist:

• Checklist #1: Project Kickoff
  • Here’s my own checklist: Capture my current thinking on the project. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project. (Page 203)
• Checklist #2: Project Completion
  • Mark project as complete in task manager or project management app.
  • Cross out the associated project goal and move to “Completed” section.
  • Review Intermediate Packets and move them to other folders.
  • Move project to archives across all platforms.
  • If project is becoming inactive: add a current status note to the project folder before archiving.

A Weekly Review Template: Reset to Avoid Overwhelm

• Clear my email inbox. Check my calendar. Clear my computer desktop. Clear my notes inbox. Choose my tasks for the week.
• A Monthly Review Template: Reflect for Clarity and Control
  • Here’s mine: Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/ maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks.

Favorite Quotes

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

Information is food for the brain. It’s no accident that we call new ideas “food for thought.”

“Use what you have; even if it seems meager, it may be magic in your hands.”

If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.

“Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.”

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention . . .”

“Like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab, our goal should be to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy.”

Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking.

Links

• Purchase the Book
• Author’s Website

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