A System for Defeating Information Overload

Part 1/2 of Your Guide to Building a Second Brain

We are exposed to gigabytes of information everyday. So much information that it becomes overwhelming to keep track of what is important and what’s not as well as how we can use that information in our work. My colleague Anish Welde introduced me to an organizational system known as a second brain which is a solution to this problem. The system, codified in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, provides a framework for storing information in a digital “second brain” and freeing up space in your (first) brain for more creative work. It forces you to critically think not just about the information you’re consuming but also how you will process that information with different digital tools to make it actionable.

In this two part series, I’m first going to introduce what the second brain system and briefly touch on a few tools you can use. In the second article, I’m going to dive into the different note taking tools you can use and provide resources to get started with your second brain on each.

Why should I use a second brain?

The goal of a second brain is not meant to store absolutely every piece of information you come across. Instead it acts as a place to help you be more organized, focus on the important information, and get more out of your notes and work. The creator himself even says that you should only be capturing the most important parts of what you consume, be it a few lines out of a book or a quote or two from a podcast. The second brain helps you prioritize the resources you need to easily get things done, rediscover the important information, and prioritize creative rather than rote work.

The second brain system relies on two key acronyms: CODE and PARA. CODE serves as the overarching framework by which information travels through someone’s second brain: Capture, Organize, Distill, and finally Express that information. PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) is a framework more specific to the Organize part of CODE. It provides a template for information storage that encourages people to capture information based more on actionable work (i.e. writing a newsletter, building an app) via projects than only capturing information for information’s sake (more on this later). 

If you seem intrigued already, make sure to subscribe. I post articles like this every week to every other week and you won’t want to miss part 2 of this series!

Now onto CODE!

Capture

Capture is focused around collecting the information you find relevant, interesting, or useful to your daily life and work. A few potential sources of this information include:

• Articles

• Text Messages

• Images

• Presentations

• Podcasts

• Interviews

• Books

• Written Journal Entries

• And many many more

If you’re thinking of building a second brain, the first thing you should do is take a day and “notice” the different sources of information you interact with in a day. Find an article you want to read? Add it to the list. Have a screenshot from your phone you want to refer back to? Add it to the list. Here’s how I set up mine:

This process will help you understand where you’re collecting information from and what tools you should be looking into to help capture this information. Here’s a list of capture tools that Tiago recommends for information capture (you can check out the full list of tools he recommends here as well):

Even after you get your second brain up and running, continuing this practice and creating some process to delay the immediate consumption of media can be incredibly helpful to your productivity. I only recently implemented this practice but it has allowed me to more easily stay on track with what I’m working on and feel less overwhelmed by the information I was encountering throughout the day. My browser is also less clogged and loads pages a lot faster. Tying it to a to-do list also makes it easier to prioritize what needs to be read and what content really is worth saving.

Organize

Alright, so you’ve got your list and rough idea of what capture tools you want to use. Now the question is how do you want to store that information? 

Introducing PARA

First, you should consider what sort of system you want to put in place. As mentioned before, PARA is the second brain approach. It can be broken down into Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Rather than write out a lengthy explanation of each, I feel like this diagram gives a pretty good idea of what to do:

Essentially, projects act as the building blocks for areas and allow you to collect information for resources. 

Here’s another graphic with some examples of what a second brain file management system might look like:

PARA might not work for you though and that’s perfectly ok! Some other methodologies you may enjoy exploring include: Zettelkasten, Getting Things Done, Evergreen Notes, and Alex Komoroske’s Compendium.

Once you’ve decided if you’re going to use PARA or another organizational method, you’re going to want to find an app to store your notes.

Top 3 Note Taking Apps

Although knowing your note taking style can be helpful for selecting the note taking app you use, I’ve found that knowing the features of the apps is a better guide for what to choose. Tiago did a survey of his students in November 2022 to see what the most commonly used note taking apps were. Part 2 of this series will be a deep dive on some of the different tools you can use for note taking in your second brain but here’s an overview of these top 3.

Notion

Built with a more systematic approach in mind, Notion is a note taking app known for its building block approach, prioritizing built in dashboards and databases. Its defining features are the variety of templates and blocks users can use to customize their experience for whatever projects they’re working on. There are built in templates in addition to community developed templates that provide users with hundreds of options to choose from. If you’re willing to pay a little more, Notion has also developed an AI tool that can generate text and summarize notes in-app similar to how ChatGPT might. The tool is cloud native so your notes will be synced no matter what device you decide to work on.

Evernote

The beloved tool of Tiago, Evernote is one of the note taking tools that’s been around since the early days of widespread internet. The tool is similar to a library in its file based approach to collecting information. Similar to a library’s dewey decimal system, it has an incredibly useful search function, making information retrieval incredibly easy. The tool also has a best in class web clipper which easily allows you to specify how much information you want to capture off of a webpage. Evernote is also able to easily interface with Google Drive and Microsoft’s Office making it incredibly versatile for connecting existing databases of information. Evernote boasts both cloud sync and offline access capabilities making it flexible for both local usage and multi device usage.

Obsidian

Obsidian (my personal favorite) allows you to easily collect notes and connect them together. With an interface more similar to Evernote, what sets Obsidian apart is its ability to bidirectionally link notes. Users can connect their notes and return to those connections to build on the information they already have. It pushes this even further with a mind map where users can see how notes and hashtags are connected. In addition to seeing the connections between notes, Obsidian boasts support for community plugins allowing users to customize their experience. The tool also has a canvas app similar to tools like MilaNote that allow users to easily plan out their thoughts in a more visual manner. Obsidian is locally stored in markdown files on an individual device but users can upgrade to a plan that syncs their notes across devices.

Distill

Now you’ve got your information sources and a place to store what you collect. The next step of CODE is distilling that information for insights. 

Many times just reviewing the information you collect while bolding and highlighting key points works perfectly fine. Random ideas from parsing through this information can also come about. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be incredibly helpful in summarizing notes you’ve taken as well as mining ideas for content or areas to explore.

Express

Finally, we come to how you express this content. The project orientation of the second brain framework really clicks here. When you think of how you want to share or use this knowledge, it forces you to be specific about what you want to learn. As an example, when guided by PARA, my research on getting started with a second brain shifted from just consuming random bits of content on the framework to working towards getting a deep understanding of the framework and how to easily convey it for this article.

As for the some of the ways to express the information you’ve collected, here are a few possibilities:

• Publishing a Newsletter on Substack

• Creating a Presentation in PowerPoint

• Writing a Product Research Doc in Notion

• Doing Market Research with Word, Excel, an internet browser, and SQL.

• Creating a Video with Adobe Premiere Pro

• Developing a Book

• Engineering a Knowledge Database with Atlassian

• And many many more..

The more you use this framework, the more effective you’ll be at using your second brain. I’ve only been following the framework for a little while but I’m already finding ways to improve the processes I use. Don’t get bogged down with building the perfect process at first; just get started and see where it takes you. The goal is to make this system work for you and if that means deviating from the CODE or PARA frameworks, deviate away!

If you’re looking for inspiration as to what a second brain can look like, Tiago put together a playlist with a variety of second brain power users’ approaches. Skim through a few and take the best bits of each.

I hope you found this helpful and make sure to subscribe for next week’s article as I do a deep dive into note taking apps.

If you think of any tools I haven’t mentioned or have other thoughts, feel free to mention them in the comments below as well!

See you soon and all the best,

Frank