Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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Second, critics argue that Forte’s refinement process (bolding, highlighting, then summarizing) causes you to focus more on understanding the original source’s perspective than on developing your own original insights from it, ultimately decreasing productivity.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen recommends an alternative process for sorting important information so you can either apply it to current projects or save it for a future, more relevant project. Rather than sorting information into folders and subfolders based on where it’s most relevant, as Forte recommends, Allen suggests sorting information based on its actionability.First, sort through all the information in the project sub-folder to determine what you’ll use and what can be moved to your hold folder. This step should be applied to entire notes and pieces of information within a note. For example, if an entire note is no longer helpful, move it to hold. If a note is relevant but you’ll only use two of the main points, save those points and move the rest of the note to hold. Over the years, I’ve taught thousands of people around the world how to clear the mental clutter, organize their knowledge, and capitalize on the full potential of their thinking through my popular online course Building a Second Brain.

So much of what we call “organizing” is essentially procrastination in disguise. We tell ourselves we’re “getting ready” or “doing research,” pretending like it’s progress. When in reality, we are seeking any little thing we can polish or tidy to avoid having to face the task we are dreading.

Making our ideas concrete. An idea, in its infancy, is abstract. But when we turn an idea into a visual entity, such as a digital note, we can begin to move it from abstract to concrete. To borrow a meta example, you might have noticed that I’ve used the second layer, bolding, throughout this book summary. For a more in-depth example, here’s how I use Progressive Summarization to improve the discoverability of a book summary in Notion: What you do have, both at work and in life, are outcomes you are trying to achieve . You are trying to launch a new product, plan a family vacation, come to a crucial decision, find daycare in your neighborhood, publish a new piece of writing, or reach a quarterly sales number. If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.” The system you use to organize information has to be so simple that it frees up your attention, instead of taking more of it. Your system has to give you time, not take time. The Key Principle – Organizing Information By Your Projects And Goals