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

5-star idea, 3-star book.
The short:Tiago Forte gives use a framework to tackle organization of our digital lives and to make technology finally work for us instead of becoming a burden.The good:Forte has three main concepts that help to organize your digital life and improve productivity (i.e. making the data you’ve capture) accessible and usable, instead of getting lost. Those three concepts are CODE, PARA, and Highlighting 2.0 (or Progressive Summarization).CODE: Capture, Organize, Distill, Express is a nice easy to remember acronym for the “second brain” and how we are to think of it.PARA: (Projects, Areas, Resource, Archive) is a subset of Organize and is how the “brain” is structured. Which changes the “normal” way we think of folder hierarchy in a very powerful way. Most of the things we do in our daily lives are Projects, but we save the data for a project in different “areas” and “resources” (i.e. unrelated folders) and aren’t easy to find using browsing and thus create bloat that is never used and continues to grow, PARA is here to solve that.Lastly, Highlighting 2.0: is a powerful way to capture and distill the just of something you’ve read or written. So, that when you come back to it in 20 years you don’t need to read it all over to understand why it was important in the first place (in less of course you wish to do so).The bad:About 50% of this book, probably more (particularly the first 100 pages or so), are portrayal, fluff, salesmanship, cheer-leading, and war stories mean to inspire the reader. Not only is this a huge waste of everyone’s time, the author’s system should inspire based upon it’s own merits and because there was so much “extra”, the book wasn’t as practical and/or applicable as it could/should have been.This lack of applicability is evident in the fact that they author had to write a second book titled PARA to clarify and expound on the matter when he should have done so in this current book; and unfortunately, based upon what the author has said in this book, I doubt that his second book will truly clarify the matter. In fact, a review of “The PARA Method” by Dennis M says essentially that, “While it does expand on the method, you should be able to get everything you need from BASB”.Additionally, Forte lays out a system that is more expansive than the scope of this book alone, leaving the reader to fend for themselves.Epilogue:This is a book that probably should have 5-stars, but tittered dangerously close to being 3-stars. The author has some good insights, he just doesn’t execute the transfer of knowledge well in this book and thus the reader must fend for themselves to really implement what the author is trying to convey and will most likely take many reads/look-backs to fully grasp the fully utility of the message. My biggest gripe with this book, is that there’s so much extra fluff and trying to sell you on the method and not enough instruction and application. Forte outlines the four methods to find data in his system, the first two being searching (which is easy enough), browsing (which Forte himself cite a study showing this is the preferred method by humans to sieve data) however due to the simplicity and flatness of his PARA system (as is) true browsing is seemingly impossible and it’s not clear as how one should rectify this. Forte seems to suggest that we shouldn’t worry about it, because not everything is going to be useful, but then why bother organizing at all if you can’t find an item you need.

Excellent resource
This book was a great help to me- an admitted “information hoarder.” I was the guy with a bunch of discombobulated notes, highlights, and thoughts scattered throughout several apps, programs, and whatnot with no real way to keep track of it all and no plan of how to make sense of any of it or use it.My journey in PKM began over a year ago, but only recently began to achieve some sense of clarity and order. This book has just turbocharged that endeavor in a profound and personally exciting way.I highly recommend the book for two key points: 1) it is eminently readable. For many of us, it may seem odd to talk about a book on knowledge management as being “hard to put down,” but it was. It was an ideal blend of personal experience with informative instruction. 2) the method taught here is easily actionable. Tiago excels at explaining the process in a manner that is easily understood and surprisingly simple to put into practice. This means than you can very quickly begin to “stack wins” on the road to building your second brain.For me, the book was worth every penny. I believe that anyone who finds themselves underprepared or unorganized to make good use of their digital brain will feel the same.

Great information can waste time
I had so many ideas come up that I want to do with it. However if This meeting could have been an email was a book… This is it. Fantastic idea though that I can’t wait to implement.

Livro extremamente útil para otimizar o estudo de qualquer assunto

“Building a Second Brain” hat mein Leben verändert! Die Methode von Tiago Forte hilft mir, die stetig wachsende Datenflut in meinem Alltag effizient zu organisieren. Alles, was ich an Informationen, Ideen oder Projekten sammle, wird nach einem klaren System verarbeitet und abgespeichert, sodass ich jederzeit darauf zugreifen kann, wenn ich es brauche. Dadurch werde ich deutlich produktiver und habe den Kopf frei für wichtigere Dinge.Das Buch erklärt die Methode Schritt für Schritt und gibt dabei praxisnahe Tipps, wie man Notizen sinnvoll organisiert, Prioritäten setzt und digitale Tools effektiv nutzt. Tiago Forte vermittelt das Konzept so, dass es leicht verständlich und anpassbar ist – egal, ob für den Job oder den privaten Alltag. Besonders gefällt mir, dass die Methode auf langfristigen Erfolg und nicht nur auf kurzfristige Effizienz abzielt.Wer endlich Ordnung in seine digitalen Notizen und Gedanken bringen will, sollte dieses Buch unbedingt lesen!