Name: Building a Second Brain
Rating: 4.5 (794 reviews)
Author: Tiago Forte

What’s in it for me? Double your brain power.

How often does something like this happen to you: you have a brilliant idea on your morning commute, but by the time you get to the office it’s vanished. Or you’ve just read about a new study that’s totally relevant to the meeting you’re in, but you can’t remember what it was.

If you’re like most people, stuff like that happens to you all the time. We’re living in an age of information overload. According to the New York Times, the average person processes the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information every day. That’s simply too much for one brain to deal with.

Luckily, technology offers us the tools to file, recall, and recombine information as efficiently and intuitively as a second brain might. In this Blink, you’ll learn how to build a second digital brain. In the process, you’ll free up your actual brain for deep thinking and creativity. And you’ll never forget an important piece of information again. Sounds good? Let’s get started.

Building a second brain begins with effectively capturing information.

Meet John and Amelia. They’re both knowledge workers. John has a second brain; Amelia doesn’t.

A typical day for Amelia looks something like this:

Amelia wakes up, and her mind is flooded with scattered thoughts and ideas, but before she can follow them through, she is distracted by the ping of email notifications. She spends the morning putting out fires in her inbox. There’s no time to gather her thoughts before an afternoon meeting. Worse, she spends half the meeting sifting through files trying to find the numbers she needs – and loses the thread of discussion completely. After work, exhausted, she carves out a little time to work on her passion project but gets quickly discouraged – she can’t remember where she left off last time, and has no idea what to prioritize now. She goes to bed, and the cycle repeats the next day.

John’s typical day looks a little different.

John also wakes up to scattered thoughts – but he quickly types down promising ideas in his notes app. On his way to work, he mulls the ideas in more detail, making an audio voice note of potential challenges and solutions. When his afternoon meeting rolls round he has the agenda ready to go, as well as extra information he thinks could be pertinent to the discussion. And that idea he jotted down this morning? It’s refined enough by now to present to the board. That evening, with time to spend on his passion project, he knows just where to begin work.

John isn’t smarter or more capable than Amelia. He simply has a second brain.

So, how do you build a second brain that works as well as John? It’s easy … once you crack the code. That’s code as in C-O-D-E. Each letter stands for one of the four steps for building a second brain: Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express. This section, and the three that follow, will break down each of those steps. And each section will end with an extra-credit assignment, designed to help you build your second brain as you listen.

Let’s start with that first step. Capture.

We’re surrounded by information inputs, both external – like quotes, images, articles, meeting notes – and internal, like memories, musings, and insights. Capitalize on those inputs. When you encounter a piece of information you want to remember, you should capture it – that might look like taking a screenshot, bookmarking an article, or even recording a quick voice note. Simple!

Now, you might be thinking: “Hang on – I do this already. And I definitely don’t feel like I have a second brain!” Well, you’re probably making two mistakes.

First, you’re capturing the wrong things. Often, we capture things because we think we should even when we don’t feel any connection to them. We end up with way too much information that doesn’t mean very much to us. Try and capture only information that sparks something inside you. It might help to think of the pieces of information you want to capture as knowledge assets. They’re more than a fact or an observation. They’re solutions, time savers, sparks of inspiration, perspective shifters.

Second, you’re not centralizing the knowledge you capture. There are all kinds of digital tools that let you capture knowledge assets. You can highlight e-books, like and bookmark on social media, excerpt audio clips from podcasts … the list goes on. But these tools aren’t the whole story. Think of everything you capture with these tools as nerve endings. They should all lead back to one central nervous system: your second brain. Any standard digital notes app should do the trick. Set all your modes of capture to export, and automatically update, everything you save to that one central digital space.

Still feeling overwhelmed by all the information you’re capturing? Follow the lead of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who had a reputation for innovative, out-of-the-box thinking. Feynman wrote a list of about a dozen core questions that he wanted to answer in his research. Whenever he came across a new piece of information, he would test it against these core questions. Using this method, he often found solutions in the most unexpected places! Maintaining a list of core questions will help you focus your captures, even while you build an eclectic library of knowledge assets.

Ready to start capturing yourself? Here’s your extra-credit assignment:

Everything you capture should feel potent and urgent. Tiago Forte, creator of the CODE system, captures on average just two assets a day. So, think back on your last 24 hours. What are your two key knowledge takeaways? Capture them!

Create a digital space designed to optimize productivity.

Ever heard of the cathedral effect? Basically, the space you’re in affects your thinking. You’re more likely to think lofty thoughts about your life’s purpose when you’re in a cathedral with gothic arches, vaulted ceilings, and marble floors than you are in a dentist’s waiting room. And more likely to find focus in a spare, sparsely furnished studio than in a room overflowing with clutter and mess.

This same effect applies when it comes to digital space. Think of the knowledge assets you’ve captured as the building blocks of your second brain. With the next step, Organize, it’s time to start building them into a cathedral, that will inspire awesome thinking.

Take what you need, forget the rest.

You wake up in the middle of the night. You’ve had an amazing, life-changing idea. You jot it down, then fall back asleep. When you wake up in the morning and read the note next to your bed, you think – huh? Alien cucumbers?

Let enough time pass between filing a note and encountering it again and – no matter how much it resonated with you in the moment – six months later it makes about as much sense as alien cucumbers.

Don’t just store knowledge – use it!

We’ve reached the last step in the CODE system: Express. This step is pretty self-explanatory. You’ve built a working second brain. You’ve gathered information, organized it, and distilled it into key takeaways. Now, it’s time to put that knowledge to use: create new deliverables at work, action fulfilling personal projects, get side hustles off the ground, and innovate new solutions to nagging problems.

Well, what are you waiting for? Off you go! Have fun!

Key ideas in Building a Second Brain

What is Building a Second Brain about?

Building a Second Brain by productivity expert Tiago Forte offers simple, effective, and workable solutions to one of the biggest challenges we face today: information overload. Using four key organizational principles, Forte shows how you can leverage digital tools to create a knowledge storage system as intuitive and efficient as a second brain.