Building a Second Brain

3.5 stars.

I was pretty excited to find out that Tiago wrote a book about his Second Brain PKM system. But alas i have to dock a star because he does ramble a bit.

Every chapter starts out with a story or anecdote on why having a second brain is so useful. Then he talks about why its important to have it. When this is repeated almost every chapter it becomes rather tedious and you are crying inside, “I get it! Can you just teach me how to do this already ??”

I never read self-help books but I stumbled across this one via a YouTube video. The book contains exceptional techniques for organizing, digesting, and actually USING the huge amount of information – primarily digital – that we are all bombarded with on a daily basis. Some of the methods described are ones that I have been using and improving upon for years. Others are new to me and ones I plan on implementing in my life.

I read this one rather quickly while taking copious notes. While not particularly life-changing for me as I was already an extremely organized person, many others should benefit from the clearly laid out tips and tricks and indeed build a fully functioning and tremendously useful Second Brain.

Highly Recommended

Although I strongly enjoy the premise of the book, the book delivered little in actual practicality. This book is more to introduce the concept of the Second Brain or whatever you would like to call it. There are some nuggets within the text, but this book could have been a blog post.

Quotes:

According to the New York Times, the average person's daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes. 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 (p. 17)

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. (P. 18)

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. (P. 24)

Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...” (p. 31)

There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives. (P. 34)

Insights from this book:
- Take notes on the work you're doing, and store these notes in a way that you can reference them for future projects.
- Organize notes by the projects/actions they support, rather than by some vague category. In other words, rather than organizing by type, organize by what the notes can do for you.
- Don't overthink your system.

4 stars because it was more verbose than it needed to be. Good ideas in this book, just could have been communicated in less words.

Listen, I LOVE this methodology but this book contains a lot of text that could've been skipped. If you want to know about Forte's personal system and a bit of his background, this is a good book. Otherwise, I would recommend checking out the authors website or YouTube channel because this book is just too hard to get through if you were expecting to learn how to setup a second brain and nothing more.

Remember that non-fiction doesn't require you to read cover to cover like fiction.

With that in mind, about 60% of this book is cool, and most of it is ignored by the people online making content about this topic. The primary advice discarded by these internet individuals is that the Second Brain is a habit, not one specific app. If you're going to build a Second Brain, design it as a system. It should branch multiple apps. It's a structure, not one app.

Unfortunately, the book didn't help me too much, as I knew most of the techniques beforehand from his YouTube videos. I also noticed that his writing style is rather boring. In my opinion, it can't keep up with the big “self-help books” such as Deep Work or Atomic Habits. It also seemed to me that he had written all the paragraphs before and just put them together into one book, which would also account for the boring writing style. It's a shame that the book is so popular...apparently, a lot of people don't have high standards.

This book, in my opinion, is necessary for most people that will be working in knowledge work.

Files and information on a computer are such a critical part of today's work, that having a system to deal with the massive amount we accumulate is necessary. I learned multiple helpful mindsets and tools that I can use to produce a better product in what I deliver to others.

As self help books go, this one is really solid. The advice is extremely actionable, concrete, and well defended. My main problem with most books in the self help/productivity space is that they are written by people whose whole productive output is writing about productivity. But Forte keeps the book grounded with examples of people doing a breadth of creative and knowledge work, which tethers this one to the ground. Really excited to operationalize the ideas here and apply what I wasn't doing before to my PKM system.

Building a Second Brain is simple yet unexpected.

With only small changes made to your life can be a life changing experience. The underlying principle of Tiago Forte's Second Brain, GTD and Zettelkasten method are mostly the same. If you want to master the information overload, this is definitely the book you must read!

Quite a useful book. Gave me my new structure for organisation. I no longer have reading notes like before, but I do have notes of a more household nature. And this PARA system is very useful for that. I have read this book before and I will most likely come back to it again to refresh the principles. A little rambling in places, but very useful nonetheless.