07 Aug 2025 10 min read Book Club

Book Club | Building a Second Brain

Thank you, Tiago, for writing this book.

It is a masterpiece and should be made an obligatory reading at schools. I wish I had read it sooner.

What did I like about that book?

It helps you organise and manage your knowledge in an otherwise chaotic world.

This book is life altering - I noticed an immediate and insane change in the way I manage my projects and work. Introduction of the PARA system and an emphasis on the Distil and Express elements of CODE were the game changers.

What did I dislike about that book?

There is a lot of writing for the sake of writing. The book could have been half the size and still extremely impactful if Tiago got to the point faster.

Summarize the book in a few bullet points

Second Brain is a personal information management system, digital or analogue - depending on your liking, meant to support you in achieving your aspirations.
Use two systems - PARA and CODE to capture information:
- Project Areas Resources and Archive
- Capture Organise Distil and Express.
Use a system of Progressive Summarisation to capture and distil information to make them useful for your future self.
Mise-en-place (French for put things in order), reviews weekly and monthly, introduce checklists and work on noticing habits (little pockets of time you have throughout your day to make progress on your projects)

Favorite Quotes

“Chase what excites you”
“How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?“
“It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life begins to change”

Outline the chapters and their sub-chapters

Where it all started
What is a second brain
How a second brain works
Capture - keep what resonates - “engineers build “code libraries”, lawyers keep “case files”,
Organise - save for actionability
Distill - find the essence of - “progressive summarisation”
Express - show your work - share your knowledge in notes, slides, presentations or courses.
The art of creative execution.
The essential habits of digital organisers
The path of self expression
How to create a tagging system that works. Bonus Chapter for download from the website.

Chapter 11 - Building a Second Brain.pdf

Chapter 1 | Where it All Started

introduction - Tiago developed foundations for his second brain approach through researching into a medical issue he had as a child.

Chapter 2 | What Is a Second Brain

A Tale of Two Brains - thoughts pop to your mind as you live through your day. Thoughts come to you in a shower, on your way to work, at a cafeteria when chatting with colleagues. Capture these notes by adding them to the notes of your project. Share early with your team / colleagues to gather feedback - as you work though your day they are adding value. Withold judgement, seeking to gather the widest possible range of feedback before deciding on a course of action. By the time you come to work on the project you would have accumulated a rich pool of ideas.

Chapter 3 | How a Second Brain Works

your second brain - world’s best personal assistant.
CODE
- Capture - keep what resonates, what is useful and what surprises you, keep for inspiration and “save for later” material in case you’d like to revisit it in the future.

Organise - save for actionability - increasingly I am convinced that the best way for organising things are Projects and Tags.
Distil - find the essence - when taking notes, ask yourself “how can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?”
Express - show your work - all the previous steps are geared toward one ultimate purpose: sharing your own ideas, your own story, and your own knowledge with others.

Chapter 4 | Capture - Keep What Resonates

keep a library of what is relevant and useful - engineers build “code libraries”, lawyers keep “case files”.
Feynman twelve projects idea - You have to keep dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind (…). Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.
Content in books or articles is typically not evenly distributed - don’t save entire chapter of a book - save only selected 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. Be picky.
capture what is useful and surprising. If it is neither, then you probably already know it.

Chapter 5 | Organize - Save for Actionability

Twyla Tharp - “the box” approach. Every time she begins a new project, she takes out a foldable file box and labels it with the name of the project.
PARA
- Projects - would include anything you are currently working on. Active projects. In each of these you would have notes, photos or references on each project.
- Areas - general areas in your life - finances, flat, car, etc. Longer time horizon.
- Resources - topics I am interested in currently and information that may be useful in the future. May be actionable depending on the situation.
- Archive
Capture (CODE) first and the organise later. Help with deciding where to save what you capture. Use “useful soonest” approach?
- in which project will it be useful?
- if none - in which area?
- if none - which resource? → if none then Archive it.
Instead of organizing ideas according to where the come from, Tiago recommends organizing them according to where they are going - the outcome they can help you realize. Do not keep all the book notes together just because they happen to come from books, quotes together because they are quotes.
one note can move between places - coaching quote from a class on coaching moves to folder on direct reports when you are a manager, then to archive when you quit and then to side gig when you start that.
“Move quickly, touch lightly” - search for the path of least resistance to make progress in short steps.

Chapter 6 | Distil - Find the Essence

Use a technique for recordings notes called Progressive Summarization Technique. You highlight the main points then highlight again and again until you get to the exec summary.

Source: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Website: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/

When you save an article don’t just copy and paste. That’s the bare minimum. Read and extract main points. Then summarise them in “captures notes”. Then bold main passages, highlight key sections of these and then write an Executive Summary. Do that for your future self.

How to highlight / distil - 10-20% of the text applied on each layer.
Tiago on writing a blog - when I’m preparing to write a blog post, I’ll usually start by highlighting the most interesting points from a group of articles or notes that I think will be most relevant to the topic at hand.
assume any given note will never be useful - do not go and spend hours polishing all your notes; some of them may never be useful. Keep to the minimum.

Chapter 7 | Express - Show Your Work

secret to creativity is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences. Professional creatives constantly draw on outside sources of inspiration.
Treat the things you invest in - reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides - as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch.
Intermediate Packets - concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work. These are essentially small pieces of work that later can be strung together to put the final product.
it is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life begins to change - so what does it mean - it means putting your learnings into action - e.g. pulling all the slides together and designing a template, setting up a course or a presentation on tips and tricks how to create slides, savings basic tools you build for yourself and taking colleagues and other through it. For all that however you need to save all your presentations or links to them in your PARA System. Same for tools - durations, BF, CLM etc. notes your gathered on cooking to put your own recipe, skills you learned to create a YouTube video - possibilities are endless.

Chapter 8 | The Art of Creative Execution

building a second brain is about standardizing the way we work, because we only really improve when we standardize the way we do something
when going through a creative process the “divergence” part is easy. The hard part is the “convergence” one because you are axing ideas that may be full op potential. However creative process is hard and you need to select what is best. Divergence part may feel like productivity - opening more tabs, buying more books - but it just postpones the moment of completion.

Three strategies for achieving convergence
- The Archipelago of Ideas: “Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the sirens of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between islands.” . Quote from Steve Johnson from a book “DIY: How to write a book”
- Hemingway’s Bridge - stop with an unfinished passage so that it’s easier to start the next day. Tiago proposes to take this a bit further - write down next steps, write down an outline of your next thoughts, next steps. Apply that to any work you are doing and next time it will be easier to pick up where you left off.
- Dial down the scope - better to deliver something smaller but concrete.
in his book Tiago wrote - between managing the business and our household, my time was incredibly scarce as we began the remodel. Whenever I could, I would highlight and distil the last few notes I’d capture and leave for my future self a brief note about where I left off .

Chapter 9 | Essential Habits of Digital Organizers

“mise-en-place” - a French term for putting things in order; comes from the kitchen background where cooks and chefs would set keep things in the same location so that it can easily be access when needed; or a knife would be washed immediately after use so that it’d be ready for the next cut.
Three Habits to ensure your Second Brain remains up to date
- (1) Project Checklist
  - checklist # project kick-off
    - capture my current thinking - project brief
      - what do I already know about the project,
      - what don’t I know that I need to find out,
      - what is my goal or intention,
      - who can I talk to who might provide insights,
      - what can I read or listen to for relevant ideas?
    - review folders / tags that may 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
    - answer pre-mortem questions - like a post-mortem that is trying to answer what went wrong, we ask what is likely going to go wrong
    - communicate with stakeholders - explain to managers, colleagues etc.
    - define success criteria
    - have an official kick-off - call, meet etc.
  - checklist # project completion
    - mark project as completed or inactive or abandoned - whatever ended the project
    - cross out the associated goal - for motivation to see all you completed
    - review Intermediate Packs, tag them for ease of future finding, anything that can be repurposed?
    - move project to archive
    - reflect on the project and write down your thoughts - if success what made it success? how can I repeat or double down on the positives, if not, what can I learn to change or to improve
- (2) Weekly and Monthly Reviews
  - Weekly Review
    - clear my email inbox - start at the oldest item, move things to archive if old and won’t get done, focus on the current open projects and archive what is no longer active. if you have a learning - add a note or a file to your second brain and then distil when you are at a distilling mode - if you have too much old stuff you don’t know what to work on and the mailbox get cluttered.
    - check my calendar - next week and next weeks / months to see if anything urgent is coming up
    - clear my computer desktop
    - clear my notes inbox - this is your second brain PARA method. At this point just go quickly through what is caught in your inbox and assign in a project, area, note or resource status.
    - choose my tasks for the week
  - Monthly Review
    - review and update my goals
    - review and update my project list
    - review my areas of responsibilities - health, finance, relationship etc.
    - review someday / maybe tasks - this could be ideas that you once had but were archived over time
    - reprioritize tasks
- (3) Noticing Habits - instead of doing one heavy lift every now and then, try to incorporate your Second Brain to your daily life and use little moments of time you have to update it.

Chapter 10 | The Path of Self-Expression

The Tacit Dimension - by Michael Polanyi - Polanyi‘s dilemma is - we know more than we can say.

„chase what excites you“.

Chapter 11 | How to create a tagging system

“Your time and energy are much better spent thinking about how the contents of your notes can be used to advance your projects and goals”
Instead of using taxonomy to tag your notes use type of work - [presentations], [meeting notes], [analysis], etc.
One interesting thing to take away from this chapter, and from the entire book I suppose, is that whatever you do, privately or professionally, there may be an element of repetition to it. For instance, say you are hiring your first staff member. You go through an entire process or writing job description, uploading ads online, receiving and processing applications, conducting interviews and so on. What you should do is to actively write notes about your experiences, jot down improvements and build system as you go along. You can improve and fine tune later. Right in the moment you are building a foundation. If you realize this early, and implement to your daily life, over long term you will build system that will be able to carry itself and you can then focus on what really adds value.

Until next time

M | K