An interesting, deeper look at the second brain setup popularized by Tiago Forte. There is an overload of information on this topic available online, so it was nice to read more about it directly from the source in a clear-cut way.

I've been reading this slowly at the encouragement of a colleague, whose enthusiasm for Forte's process is contagious. I particularly appreciate that this book answers the questions I knew I had and those I hadn't even thought to ask.

The book is fun. I follow the other and find his videos on summarizing book reviews helpful. https://neckar.substack.com/p/organizing-your-mental-kitchen-for explains the CODE framework in the book. Based on where you are at .. in the organizing and productivity enhancing phase of your life.. you will find it helpful..

Information junkies rejoice! Tiago Forte's book helps you find a better way to distill all that great information into a meaningful system that allows you to easily recover the data when you need it. Think of it like a digital commonplace notebook. Not all of the book may be relevant to everyone but there is a lot of great nuggets of wisdom that one can mine from its pages to help you easily better organize your digital life.

This book really could have been one medium sized blog post. The premise is that you should use a digital note taking app to organize all of your thoughts, articles you want to read, projects, etc. He doesn't really recommend one app over another, though he mentions a handful. Then you have folders to organize all that stuff. Take notes whenever you have a thought, and once a week organize them. There are various anagrams he uses and he talks a lot, but that's about it.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.

BUILDING A SECOND BRAIN by Tiago Forte offers the intriguing potential to apply "A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential." Forte is a productivity expert who has worked with numerous corporate clients and he splits this new text into three sections: The Foundation, The Method, and The Shift. He writes in a very conversational tone that reassures while capturing the reader's attention. Many points are supported with data (e.g., "according to The New York Times, the average person's daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.") As I was reading, I thought BUILDING A SECOND BRAIN would make a useful "One School, One Book" choice and support much-needed work on helping students become more organized and tech-savvy. For example, Forte is a strong advocate for digital note taking and therefore advocates using apps like Evernote or OneNote which we have been talking about for years. He further suggests organizing saved notes by PARA (Project, Area, Resource, and Archive) and employing CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express). As a list maker and librarian who both juggles numerous requests and curates resources, these habits of personal knowledge management all seem rather intuitive, but Forte does point out some broader aids like a monthly review template. Many of his ideas are explained visually in this 2019 video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjZSy8s2VEE

Who else can relate to this? I have 200-300 tabs open on my computer because I found a great website that I know I will need someday in the future. Every time my computer restarts I pray to the computer gods that my tabs will restore upon restarting. My best friend is CTRL + SHIFT + T to restore my accidently closed out tab.
Is there a better way? Can the information that I learned be stored in a more efficient manner?

According to Building a Second Brain, you can!

Did you know that out of a five-day workweek a worker spends one whole day searching for information? So how can we increase productivity? By making the information easier to find. Tiago Forte, the author, suggests a file system: Short-Term Activities, Long-Term Activities, Information, and Backup.

Of course, he uses other terms so you will have to buy the book for the more sophisticated terminology.

So what did I think of this book?

Building a Second Brain was overly verbose, wordy, with a lot of repetition. Personally, all that I needed to know is that people spend an incredible amount of time searching for information and a better way to store it. However, the factoid that I provided earlier (about the average worker) is just one sentence in an entire chapter. The file organization chapter is the only other chapter that I found helpful.

But did this one chapter change my life?

Yes. On the open tabs that I have on my computer, I started to save them to PDF along with a Word document with the web address. Then, I saved those files to the filing system that the author suggested. I was able to finally close out of my 200-300 tabs! Also, now the information isn’t buried. You know when you finally need one of those tabs and now you have to sort through them all? I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders when I finally closed out of my tabs.

However……

I am not sure that the average worker is the most beneficial person to read this. I propose that people with direct reports are the ideal target audience for this book. Why? Let’s take a look.

1. Back in the day, I worked in public accounting. At every office for every client, we were supposed to use a standardized filing system. For example, every client would have a Tax Returns, Provisions, and PBC (Provided by Client) folder. However, people rarely complied with this filing system. Why? Was everyone out to “get” the company? No. People were overworked, and they couldn’t care less about the filing system. Also, sometimes the Shared Drive was extremely slow or inaccessible, and it was much easier and faster to work from their desktop.

2. There was one gentleman that I worked for that was constantly (and unfairly) passed over for a promotion. He worked nearly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and he had vast in-depth knowledge of the company. Guess where he stored all of his files? On his desktop. This was intentional.

So why do I think corporations might be the best target audience? To ensure compliance with the filing system, they need to make compliance part of their employees’ performance metrics. Otherwise, people will let it slide.

Also, corporations need to rethink how and why they promote individuals. If someone is hording information and stating, “Promote me. I know what the others in the team don’t know.”, that person should not be promoted. Information hording should not be celebrated. The corporate response should be, “Why doesn’t the rest of your team know what you know? What steps have you taken to improve the team?” Information hording is not a leadership trait; it is actually quite the opposite.

Finally, I wanted to touch on something that the author missed (in my opinion). He referred to how you know so many things and you want to remember them all. However, Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist and author of Remember, gave a great example of clarifying what you really know in the first place. Imagine that you are running late for a very important meeting. You pull your car into the first available slot and run into the building. When you come out of the meeting, you can’t remember where you parked. However, you never took the time to look up and see the sign that says that you are parked in Level 3. You can’t remember something that you didn’t know in the first place!

This is a good reminder that sometimes we need to slow down. If you speed read something at 6X speed, how much of that book are you really going to remember? If you quickly skim an article online for 30 seconds, are you going to have any truly valuable takeaways?

Overall, Building a Second Brain has life-altering advice; however, it is difficult to wade through all of the other non-useful information to get to the useful stuff.

*Thanks, NetGalley, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and honest opinion.

This is one of the most impactful personal productivity books I have read in the past 10 years. Anyone who wants to tame the information firehose needs to read it.

The main theme of the book is to collect information with purpose. I admit that for many years, I’ve been an information hoarder. I’ve got almost 30,000 links saved on Pinboard. I have countless books on paper and in electronic form that I have yet to read. After reading this book, I realized that I’ve collected those things because I have a fear of not being able to find something I heard about “that one time”. Not only did this book teach me that’s a fool’s game, but it turned the tables on me and made me realize that I need to value information that resonates over all else. It is this type of information that will enable me to come up with new ideas or have an impact on my life in some other way. It’s simply life changing.

I recommend this book to all who browse the Internet because they think the next awesome thing is just around the corner. Spoiler alert, it usually isn’t.

What used to take an hour of research in a library can now be found in a few minutes with Google. But can our poor brain retain all that information? Can it combine it effectively to create something new? Maybe…but it is more efficient to offload some of that information digitally in an organized way. That’s why everyone should be Building a Second Brain.

In past centuries, intelligent people kept paper journals. I personally use a notes app on my phone. Both made it challenging to find a particular item of data. This book promises to fix that issue with free or inexpensive digital solutions.

Of course, it is not just the software cost. It takes time to build a second brain after all. I wish I had started earlier in my career. Now, I’m not sure if this is a solution for me. However, it would be invaluable for a creative person especially a writer trying to find the plot of their next book.

The book’s step-by-step instructions about how to start are easy to follow. 4 stars for Building a Second Brain!

Thanks to Atria Books and NetGalley for a digital review copy of the book.

My ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I heard Tiago Forte explain the general gist of this book on a podcast and thought it was interesting. The book had some good ideas about how to keep a “second brain” (i.e., a system of note taking on things you come across that might be useful in the future). For someone who writes for a living or is in a similar creative field, this system could work. It’s a great starting point from which someone could build his or her own system. As someone not in that type of work, this didn’t appeal to me the same way. There may be elements that I can pick out, but it won’t be anywhere near as formal or elaborate as Forte’s system.

I first heard of Forte when Ali Abdaal discussed having gone through Forte's course, which costs four figures at the lowest level. It was obviously valuable enough for Ali to recommend it to his YouTube audience.I was eager to get my hands on Forte's book. I had accessed a webinar from Forte, and I signed up for a free conference that he did as a sales funnel leading into a cohort of his class. It was accessible enough for me to pay for, but I was unsure if the value would pay off. I have a friend who did enter it.Forte is an expert on personal knowledge management (PKM). I was dazzled when I looked at the system that Forte described using now. I can't imagine setting up that many integrations. I was on a live presentation on how to set up the most basic version, and he really seemed to batch his active efforts to make the system reasonable. There are tons of integrations that he has set up, and it works for him. I'm a Millennial, and a fair number of us consider ourselves content creators. I read a relatively huge number of books per year. It's hard to retain all of the information or to take action on what I learn. Forte pushes you to remember the things that matter and take action.I've shared his free information with my friends. They've found it really useful. So I opened up the book with a lot of hope. My hopes were dashed. He is writing for an audience that does not include me. The way that he described everyone being barraged by information they can't possibly hold on to is not the way that my information intake works. However, I already had Notion because of Ali Abdaal's heavy use of it. More than a decade before I ever got Forte's book, I wrote blog posts about books I enjoyed or classes that were interesting to me. I'm much better at holding onto information than he seems to think the average reader's base state is, and it was jarring enough for me to close the book.He has a lot of good things to say. He has developed his system after handling thousands of students who are well-heeled enough to pay four figures for his classes. He has given talks and workshops to high-flying executives for years. He has valuable knowledge, but while I was reading his book, I wondered if it was valuable knowledge for me.

I've heard of Tiago Forte from Nat Ellison, and the general Twitter-Internet corners I've frequented. So when I saw his book, I took a chance.
Overall, this book is promising. It reads a little like a Twitter thread that has been expanded, but that makes sense; Forte give a lot of this book away for free online, but spread out over several years. This book focuses on the main points, but goes deeper, giving real-world examples of highlighting text in a website, the logistics of clipping images online, how to organize your thoughts from short- and long-term projects, etc.
Overall, I like it for just the examples. How to use different note-keeping apps in a real-world function way is a gold mine by itself. So if you've bounced from one productivity app to another, this book will show you how to use any productivity app to your potential.
**I received an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.