Tiago Forte | Highlights: Building a Second Brain | Talks at Google

We're trying to live these complex modern lives with a brain that is 200,000 years old. We're trying to run a complex modern life with cognitive hardware that is 2,000. That is 200,000 years old. I think it's time, it's well past time for us to have a prosthetic device for the mind. I'm talking about notes, notes, note taking. This thing that's existed for hundreds, even thousands of years, this habit that you probably already do all the time, that requires no special skill besides reading and writing and no special technology except paper or software, the software that we already have today. What would it look like to reinvent the ancient, timeless practice of note taking for our modern connect age? This is the question that a second brain answers. Supercharging note taking, enhancing it, making it something far more powerful than just some scribbles on a piece of paper that you do one time. But a lifelong practice of learning and creating and producing a second brain is a trusted place outside of your brain, a trusted tool where you save for the long term. The information that matters most to you, the information that you want to revisit, you want to reflect on, that is personal to you, unique to you, whether it's on paper or on a piece of software. It is a lifelong record and archive of your learnings, your discoveries, your research. Not just for one test or to write one paper or even to do one project, but for years, for a lifetime of learning and growth. If you invest your most precious resource, which in my opinion, is your attention, right, which is so limited and becoming even more limited every day, if you invest at one time, there's no reason to just throw away the results of that thinking at the end of the day or the end of the week. Keep the results of that thinking, Keep the notes, the brainstorms, the bullet points, the action steps, keep them in your second brain. So the next time you're in a meeting, like that one, or you're trying to solve a problem like that one, or you're in a similar situation, you can just revisit your best thinking so you don't have to do it again. And if you look at my kind of note taking app, it's very straightforward. Over here on the left, I have folders which in Evernote are called notebooks, which correspond to my different projects. You can see this talk right here. I have the notes right there in that folder. I also have events that I'm speaking at, roles that I'm hiring for, products I'm creating, people, pieces of writing that I'm doing, my taxes, all my active projects, all the information related to them is right there. I have areas of responsibility which are other aspects of my life, such as cooking, finances, health, different aspects of my business. Finance, legal, content, marketing, and then finally down here, I have everything else I'm interested in. Culture, design, the economy, languages, marketing, music, overlanding, philosophy. Okay. And so inside each of these folders are just simple notes. A note. When I say note, I really just mean a simple document with text, some combination of text, images, links, attachments that I want to reference in the future. So you can see here I have 7,000 notes, which I know is kind of insane. That is what you get when you've been doing this for 10 years. But a note can be short. In fact, most, most of them are probably 30 to 50 words. A few bullet points, a sentence, a quote, some ideas that I have in a meeting. They're short even just 20, 30 years ago. I'll find a piece of paper, turn to the right place, find a pen, write it down, hope that somehow you'll find it in the future. No way to search, no real way to edit what you've written down. It was full of friction. That's completely changed now. Capturing is so easy. It's as simple as can be. As simple as hitting bookmark on a webpage. You know, like I said, you can use integration services like Readwise that automate it for you. So now I'm not even doing anything and notes are just appearing in my second brain without any further effort on my part. So basically the bottleneck on note taking moves. It moves from the initial capture, which has now become trivial, and it moves to the subsequent steps. And that's what my book is about. I have four steps which follow the acronym code C O D E. The C is capture. That's the first one. But then the subsequent steps are O for organize, D for distill, and E for express. So code is a workflow. It is actually like a. It's like a factory. It's like a production line. You know, it's directional. There's a beginning, middle and end. Things come in as they get captured, then they get organized, then they get distilled. And then the last step, the E is express. So this is an example. I just read a book, not exactly revolutionary, and I read a book on something that I was facing in my life, which was our infant son was not sleeping. Okay, I had a real use case. This isn't just abstract research. We can't sleep. So I read the book. I think I read it in like three or four days. I was very desperate. And you can see here, every time I kept a highlight, you can see the location in the ebook right there. It got saved to this note. So you can see this is a very long note. This is one of the longest notes that I will ever take. That's capture for organize. I simply got this note and I moved it. I actually had a project called Caillou, who's our son's name? Caillou Sleep Plan. Right. I had a. I had a concrete project. I'm not just going to read stuff, I'm going to make a plan to help him sleep. So organizing was as simple as getting this note. Oh, actually you can see the project right here. Caillou Sleep Training. Okay. So all I did was get this note and move it from the inbox, which is where notes appear when I first take them, and in one action moved it to the Caillou Sleep training project folder. That's it. That was organize. One ten second action. Okay. Then is distill the D. And all distilling means is to highlight or in this case bold the key points. Right. This note is probably thousands of words, I'm guessing. Yeah, it's 11,000 words. This is a book unto itself. Okay. I can't work with 11,000 words. I can't make sense of 11,000 words. So I went through and I highlighted the key points specifically that I thought we could use. And then finally, expression, right? You might think, okay, you know, this is just a personal problem you have. But I. So I knew that this needed to take a form that in the middle of the night, at three in the morning, in the dark, I could look at one piece of paper. Actually it needed to be on paper because I wasn't going to, you know, take out my phone, my tablet and blind us all with this artificial light. And so I distilled just the points you see in bold here into a one page sleep plan that we tacked right to the wall outside Caillou's bedroom door. That was expression. So this is what you got to get. Expression can be writing a blog post. And actually I think I did eventually write a blog post on this because so many people that I know had trouble with their infant sleeping. So I actually did make it public. But you don't have to. It doesn't have to be like, you know, you're an online independent creator. Expression is just making something. It's making some concrete artifact that then becomes the solution to the problem that you're facing, part of the reason we're keeping everything in a centralized place in your second brain is so it can mix and match and melt together. You see very different ideas from very different fields juxtaposed and stacked on top of other ideas. Sometimes the most random combination of things that appears together ends up being an incredible breakthrough for, you know, something that you're trying to do. Everything in your life, from the past, from the future, across your work, across your personal life, across your hobbies, across everything can be organized in just one of four categories. The projects you're working on that have like a short term, you know, outcome that you're working toward, the areas of responsibility that are ongoing over time. Resources, which is just everything else potentially useful. Research, reference documents that you might want to use, and then archives, which is everything from the previous three categories that is no longer actionable. The key principle here is you're not doing what most people do, which is organizing these broad categories like economics, marketing, history, psychology, which is how libraries do. Organization. That doesn't make sense on the individual level. You're organizing according to what's actionable, right? Projects, areas, resources that's most actionable, less actionable and least actionable. It's basically, since this is a probably a more nerdy audience, it's an information hierarchy. I use Para to organize Evernote, to organize Google Drive, to organize ClickUp, to organize even things like my calendar. It is truly a universal framework for your entire digital life. And I challenge you. I would ask you what issue, problem, goal, you know, situation that you're facing in your life. Are the answers already around you? The answers are there. The answers are maybe in your own head. They're in your journals, they're in the your family, your colleagues, your boss, your organization's wiki, or on the Internet, right? How for how many situations are the answers out there? It's just waiting for you. It's waiting for you to have the agency and the will and the willingness to take it in, capture it, organize it, distill it, and express, express it back out into the world.