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

Nowadays, almost everyone needs a way to manage information. More than half the workforce today can be considered “knowledge workers”—professionals for whom knowledge is their most valuable asset, and who spend a majority of their time managing large amounts of information.

The field of PKM emerged in the 1990s to help university students handle the huge volume of information they suddenly had access to through Internet-connected libraries. It is the individual counterpart to Knowledge Management, which studies how companies and other organizations make use of their knowledge.

Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively.

Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do. Anything you might want to accomplish—executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business—requires finding and putting to use the right information.

This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas. It is a multipurpose tool that can adapt to your changing needs over time. In school or courses you take, it can be used to take notes for studying. At work, it can help you organize yo

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.

I will teach you how to create a system of knowledge management, or a “Second Brain.”* Whether you call it a “personal cloud,” “field notes,” or an “external brain” as some of my students have done, it is a digital archive of your most valuable memories, ideas, and knowledge to help you do your job, run your business, and manage your life without h

Those who learn how to leverage technology and master the flow of information through their lives will be empowered to accomplish anything they set their minds to. At the same time, those who continue to rely on their fragile biological brains will become ever more overwhelmed by the explosive growth in the complexity of our lives.

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.