Building a Second Brain, page 2
At one point some of my colleagues asked me to teach them my organizing methods. I found that virtually all of them already used various productivity tools, such as paper notepads or the apps on their smartphones, but that very few did so in a systematic, intentional way. They tended to move information around from place to place haphazardly, reacting to the demands of the moment, never quite trusting that they’d be able to find it again. Every new productivity app promised a breakthrough, but usually ended up becoming yet another thing to manage.
Casual lunchtime chats with my colleagues turned into a book club, which became a workshop, which eventually evolved into a paid class open to the public. As I taught what I knew to more and more people and saw the immediate difference it made in their work and lives, it began to dawn on me that I had discovered something very special. My experience managing my chronic condition had taught me a way of getting organized that was ideal for solving problems and producing results now, not in some far-off future. Applying that approach to other areas of my life, I had found a way to organize information holistically—for a variety of purposes, for any project or goal—instead of only for one-off tasks. And more than that, I discovered that once I had that information at hand, I could easily and generously share it in all kinds of ways to serve the people around me.
The Origins of the Second Brain System
I began to call the system I had developed my Second Brain and started a blog to share my ideas about how it worked. These ideas resonated with a much wider audience than I ever expected, and my work was eventually featured in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Fast Company, and Inc., among others. An article I wrote about how to use digital notetaking to enhance creativity went viral in the productivity community, and I was invited to speak and teach workshops at influential companies like Genentech, Toyota, and the Inter-American Development Bank. In early 2017, I decided to create an online course called “Building a Second Brain” to teach my system on a wider scale.II In the years since, that program has produced thousands of graduates from more than one hundred countries and every walk of life, creating an engaged and inquisitive community where the lessons in this book have been honed and refined.
In the next couple of chapters, I’ll show you how the practice of creating a Second Brain is part of a long legacy of thinkers and creators who came before us—writers, scientists, philosophers, leaders, and everyday people who strived to remember and achieve more. Then I’ll introduce you to a few basic principles and tools you’ll need to set yourself up to succeed. Part Two, “The Method,” introduces each of the four steps you’ll follow to build a Second Brain so you can immediately begin to capture and share ideas with more intention. And Part Three, “Making Things Happen,” offers a set of powerful ways to use your Second Brain to enhance your productivity, accomplish your goals, and thrive in your work and life.
I’ve shared my story with you because I want you to know that this book isn’t about perfectly optimizing some kind of idealized life. Everyone experiences pain, makes mistakes, and struggles at some point in their lives. I’ve had my fair share of challenges, but at each stage of my journey, treating my thoughts as treasures worth keeping has been the pivotal element in everything I’ve overcome and achieved.
You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in a deeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is about optimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.
I. I was aided in this effort by my involvement with the Quantified Self community, a network of local meetup groups in which people share their stories about how they track their health, productivity, mood, or behavior to learn more about themselves.
II. Interested readers can find out more at buildingasecondbrain.com/course.
Chapter 2
What Is a Second Brain?
We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.
—Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Extended Mind
Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do.
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.
According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.1 A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2
Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.I
Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.3 And a report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems.4 Incredibly, only 56 percent of the time are they able to find the information required to do their jobs.
In other words, we go to work five days per week, but spend more than one of those days on average just looking for the information we need to do our work. Half the time, we don’t even succeed in doing that.
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.
Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories. Every minute we spend trying to mentally juggle all the stuff we have to do leaves less time for more meaningful pursuits like cooking, self-care, hobbies, resting, and spending time with loved ones.
However, there’s a catch: every change in how we use technology also requires a change in how we think. To properly take advantage of the power of a Second Brain, we need a new relationship to information, to technology, and even to ourselves.
The Legacy of Commonplace Books
For insight into our own time, we can look to history for lessons on what worked in other eras. The practice of writing down one’s thoughts and notes to help make sense of the world has a long legacy. For centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”II
Popularized in a previous period of information overload, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the commonplace book was more than a diary or journal of personal reflections. It was a learning tool that the educated class used to understand a rapidly changing world and their place in it.
In The Case for Books,5 historian and former director of the Harvard University Library Robert Darnton explains the role of commonplace books:
Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.III
Commonplace books were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world. They drew on their notebooks in conversation and used them to connect bits of knowledge from different sources and to inspire their own thinking.
As a society, all of us could benefit from the modern equivalent of a commonplace book. The media landscape of today is oriented toward what is novel and public—the latest political controversy, the new celebrity scandal, or the viral meme of the day. Resurrecting the commonplace book allows us to stem the tide, shifting our relationship with information toward the timeless and the private.
Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. Not only could this lead to more civil discussions about the important topics of the day; it could also preserve our mental health and heal our splintered attention.
But this isn’t simply a return to the past. We now have the opportunity to supercharge the custom of commonplace books for the modern era. We have the chance to turn that historical practice into something far more flexible and convenient.
The Digital Commonplace Book
Once our notes and observations become digital, they can be searched, organized and synced across all our devices, and backed up to the cloud for safekeeping. Instead of randomly scribbling down notes on pieces of paper, hoping we’ll be able to find them later, we can cultivate our very own “knowledge vault” so we always know exactly where to look.
Writer and photographer Craig Mod wrote, “There is a gaping opportunity to consolidate our myriad marginaliaIV into an even more robust commonplace book. One searchable, always accessible, easily shared and embedded amongst the digital text we consume.”6
This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas. It is a multipurpose tool that can adapt to your changing needs over time. In school or courses you take, it can be used to take notes for studying. At work, it can help you organize your projects. At home, it can help you manage your household.
However you decide to use it, your Second Brain is a private knowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth, not just a single use case. It is a laboratory where you can develop and refine your thinking in solitude before sharing it with others. A studio where you can experiment with ideas until they are ready to be put to use in the outside world. A whiteboard where you can sketch out your ideas and collaborate on them with others.
As soon as you understand that we naturally use digital tools to extend our thinking beyond the bounds of our skulls, you’ll start to see Second Brains everywhere.
A calendar app is an extension of your brain’s ability to remember events, ensuring you never forget an appointment. Your smartphone is an extension of your ability to communicate, allowing your voice to reach across oceans and continents. Cloud storage is an extension of your brain’s memory, allowing you to store thousands of gigabytes and access them from anywhere.V
It’s time to add digital notes to our repertoire and further enhance our natural capabilities using technology.
Rethinking Notetaking: Notes as Knowledge Building Blocks
In past centuries, only the intellectual elite needed commonplace books—writers, politicians, philosophers, and scientists who had a reason to synthesize their writing or research.
Nowadays, almost everyone needs a way to manage information.
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.
As a knowledge worker, where does your knowledge live? Where does your knowledge go when it’s created or discovered? “Knowledge” can seem like a lofty concept reserved exclusively for scholars and academics, but 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.
This isn’t the same notetaking you learned in school. It’s time to elevate the status of notes from test prep and humble scribblings into something far more interesting and dynamic. For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.
By this definition, a note could include a passage from a book or article that you were inspired by; a photo or image from the web with your annotations; or a bullet-point list of your meandering thoughts on a topic, among many other examples. A note could include a single quote from a film that really struck you, all the way to thousands of words you saved from an in-depth book. The length and format don’t matter—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note.
A knowledge building block is discrete. It stands on its own and has intrinsic value, but knowledge building blocks can also be combined into something much greater—a report, an argument, a proposal, a story.
Like the LEGO blocks you may have played with as a kid, they can be rapidly searched, retrieved, moved around, assembled, and reassembled into new forms without requiring you to invent anything from scratch. You need to put in the effort to create a note only once, and then you can just mix and match and try out different combinations until something clicks.
Technology doesn’t just make notetaking more efficient. It transforms the very nature of notes. No longer do we have to write our thoughts on Post-its or notepads that are fragile, easy to lose, and impossible to search. Now we write notes in the cloud, and the cloud follows us everywhere. No longer do we have to spend countless hours meticulously cataloging and transcribing our thoughts on paper. Now we collect knowledge building blocks and spend our time imagining the possibilities for what they could become.
A Tale of Two Brains
Let me paint a picture of a day in the life of someone who doesn’t have a Second Brain, and someone who does. See if either of these descriptions sounds familiar.
Nina wakes up on Monday morning, and before her eyes even open, thoughts are flooding her brain. Things to do, things to think about, things to decide. It all comes rushing in from the depths of her subconscious, where it’s been simmering all weekend.
Nina’s thoughts continue to swirl around her brain as she gets ready for work. Like jittery birds, they flit and flutter around her head because they have nowhere else to rest. There is a constant hum of background anxiety that she has come to expect, as she wonders what needs her attention and what she may be missing.
After a hectic morning, Nina finally sits down at her desk to start her workday, opens up her email inbox, and is instantly engulfed by a torrent of new messages. Flashing with urgent subject lines and the names of important senders, these demands fill her with a cold adrenaline rush. She knows that her morning is shot, her own plans ruined. Pushing aside the important work she wanted to focus on this morning, Nina settles in for a long slog of replying to emails.
By the time she gets back from lunch, Nina is finally done handling the most urgent issues. It’s finally time to focus on the priorities she’s set for herself. This is when the reality sets in: after a morning spent fighting fires, she’s far too scatterbrained and tired to focus. Like so many times before, Nina lowers her expectations, settling for chipping away slowly at her ever-expanding to-do list full of other people’s priorities.
After work, Nina has one last chance to work on the project that she knows will make use of her talents and take her career to the next level. She exercises, eats dinner, and spends some quality time with the kids. As they go to bed, she’s filled with enthusiasm that she finally gets some time to herself.
