Building a Second Brain - Book Notes

Early readers

Early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book.

They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks.

Commonplace books

Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things. By keeping an account of your readings you made a book of your own.

We have an opportunity to supercharge commonplace books for the modern era.

Creating a commonplace book

CODE - Capture, Organise, Distill, Express.

Capture - To decide, ask 'Is it inspiring, useful, personal or surprising?'

Separate capture and organize into:

1. “Keeping what resonates” in the moment
2. Deciding to save something for the long term.

Organise - Use a digital notes tool like Evernote, Notion etc

Use the PARA system:

Distill - Continue to go back and reread and refine notes. Leave them better than you found them. Prune the good to surface the great.

Use Progressive Summarisation

1. Source Material (reference)
2. Extract Key Excerpts
3. Bold words or passages
4. Highlight the most interetsing bolded words or passages

Express - We only know what we make

Split work into Individual building blocks, or intermediate packets.

1. Distilled notes
2. Outtakes
3. Work-in-process
4. Final Deliverables

Physical spaces affect how we think.

Cathedrals encourage abstract thinking. Digital spaces affect our thinking, clarity and order enable clear thinking.

Recency Bias

We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. (so its useful to keep track of all your ideas, not just the ones you thought of recently)

Allowing your mind to roam

Optimizing a system outside yourself, leaves your mind happily unoptimized and free to roam.

Decluttering our brains of complex ideas can allow us to think clearly.