Thoughts on Building a Second Brain

Building a Second Brain Notes - Tiago Forte
Building a Second Brain Highlights

I read Building a Second Brain and it wasssss alright. It was fine. I would never recommend it to someone for money (and I didn't spend any reading it, lmfao).

First I will tell you what I liked.

The Good

First off, PARA and CODE are interesting and helpful organizational structures. CODE stands for "Capture," "Organize," "Distill" and "Express." Basically you capture thoughts and notes that come to you as quickly as possible, put them in the spot they need to be, distill them so you can easily regain context on them when you look back on them, then use your notes to express yourself in interesting ways. This structure makes sense to me, which is good because structure is important to me as a person with a broken brain.

As far as organization there's PARA, which stands for "Projects," "Areas," "Resources," and "Archive." This also makes sense to me, although I initially had trouble determining what an Area is in comparison to a Resource. Once I figured it out for myself, I immediately began to see some improvements in my organizational structures. I have a problem with putting in 8 million subfolders into everything I touch, but PARA helps to cut back on that. This is coupled with Obsidian, since I can just bidirectionally link everything else together after putting them in one of these tentpoles. That's cool.

What else...hmm...uh, Tiago Forte's name is pretty cool. That's it.

The Bad (a.k.a Everything Else)

I like the idea of a "Second Brain" because, having ADHD, my brain feels like it's constantly humming and heating up like a tea kettle 24/7. I have so quickly warmed up to Obsidian because it helps me turn the heat down, so to speak. I can relax knowing I can just throw something into it and easily search for it later. I can take the chaos in my neurons and get some semblance of order. I genuinely feel less stressed out these past few months of using it. That's what I appreciate about it.

Tiago Forte kind of touches on this, but beyond that his book is simply too mired in productivity guru bullshit. Productivity nerds are annoying beyond belief. I like the idea of having a personal wiki and digital garden, but Forte is only really interested in talking about it from the boring, toxic, neoliberal grindset lens. I want a place that lets me be curious and create and keep track of my ADHD-addled ass' thoughts and feelings. That's not what this book was about, and it shows.

4/10, if you're interested it's free.99.