I’ve been reading Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, and it’s one of those books that makes you immediately want to reorganise your entire digital life. The central idea is straightforward enough: your brain is for having ideas, not storing them. Everything else – notes, articles, voice memos, half-finished projects – should live somewhere external that you can trust and search.
The framework he proposes is called CODE: Capture, Organise, Distill, Express. It’s simple, and that’s the point. Most people I know (myself included) are terrible at the first two steps. We capture everything – screenshots, highlights, random thoughts – and then we never look at it again because there’s no system for getting it out.
Organising by action, not topic
The part that stuck with me most is the PARA method: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive. The key insight is that you organise by actionability, not by subject. A folder called “Health” is useless if nothing in it has a deadline or a next step. But a project called “Run a 10k by October” is immediately useful because you know what to do with it.
Projects are things with deadlines and deliverables. Areas are ongoing responsibilities without an end date – finances, health, relationships. Resources are topics you’re interested in but not actively working on. Archive is everything else: completed projects, stuff that’s no longer relevant.
I’ve been using Obsidian for a while now, and PARA fits into it naturally. I keep an “Inbox” folder for raw captures – voice memos transcribed, articles saved, quick notes. From there, I move things into their PARA home as soon as I have a sense of what they’re for. The trick is not over-organising at the capture stage. That’s a common mistake: spending more time filing than actually doing the work.
Distilling before you express
The distillation step is where most people give up. Forte’s idea is that every note should be distilled down to its essential meaning – not a summary, but the part that’s actually useful to you. You’re not preparing it for an audience. You’re preparing it for your future self, who will have forgotten why you saved it in the first place.
I’ve started doing this with a simple rule: if I can’t explain in one sentence why I saved something, it probably wasn’t worth saving. That’s cut my “read later” pile significantly.
The vision board idea
One section of the book talks about using vision boards not as some New Age exercise but as a practical delivery management tool. The idea is to make your long-term goals visible and specific enough that you can break them into tasks. Instead of “be healthier” you have a board with actual checkpoints: run three times a week, cook at home five nights, sleep before midnight.
It’s basically OKR thinking applied to your personal life. Set the objectives, write down the key results, and review them weekly. The book suggests keeping next steps in mind at all times – not just the big goals but what you’d do today if everything else fell away.
I’ve been experimenting with this alongside GitLab’s DevOps approach, which is probably overkill for personal planning but the review cadence (weekly and monthly) has been useful. The feedback loop is what matters: look back at where you said you’d be, see where you actually are, and adjust.
On consuming versus creating
The book makes a strong case that most people get stuck in the capture and organise phases because they feel productive – they’re collecting information, building a system, feeling like they’re making progress. But the whole point is expression: creating something new from what you’ve gathered. A blog post, a project, a decision. Without that final step, the second brain is just a very organised graveyard of half-remembered ideas.
I think that’s why I’ve always struggled with note-taking apps. They make capturing feel like progress. The pressure to build the perfect system replaces the actual work of thinking and creating. Forte’s framework at least forces you to confront that by making Express the final, non-negotiable step.
A service idea
One thing the book sparked: a simple newsletter where people fill out a form and get back a personalised vision board as a PDF. You answer questions about your goals, the system generates a clean layout using Pandoc templates, and you get something visual to hang on your wall or keep as a reference. It’s probably not a business, but it’s the kind of thing I’d build just to understand the problem space better.
The book itself is probably going to become a proper project for me at some point – the notes are already piling up. That’s how these things go: you read something useful, your second brain gets fuller, and somewhere in there a new project starts to take shape.