Building a second brain

CODE and PARA

Building a second brain (BASB for short) is a methodology that lends itself especially well for the digital age. It transforms information consumption into insight production, via note-taking. It also likes abbreviations - CODE being the more important one:

1. Collect is about input. Found something that interests you? Put it into Evernote, or into Keep - it's all about making it easy to reutilize later. "Collect what resonates" with you, there'll be more to say later about that later.

2. Organize is where you review your collected items and add them into useful buckets. Here, the second four-letter-abbreviation PARA comes into play:

   1. Projects for holding information that is relevant to your current short-term projects. A project would be any work project, but also private endeavors such as a vacation you have coming up, or a renovation. Projects have a defined outcome and an end date.

   2. Areas for holding information relevant for the hats you wear - your responsibilities, or standards to be maintained. People development, budgeting etc. at work, wellbeing, wealth, your individual relationships in your private life.

   3. Resources for holding information relevant for topics of interest. Your lists, tickler files, your "someday" repository, your templates, dreams you haven't committed to actioning yet (else they'd become a project).

   4. Archives is for inactive items from other categories. Completed projects - but also "mistakes" like canceled projects, resources you're no longer interested in. All of that might come in handy again in the future, which is what the "second brain" is all about.

This "PARA" structure is set up via simple folders in Google Drive. You would add subfolders to, say, "Projects" and then move files and folders around as it becomes more and less relevant. Since your world is unlikely to reside entirely in Google Drive at work, you can set this folder structure up in any major program or note taking app you use. For many people (me included) it's the entry to the BASB world. This is the author's full blog post on it.

3. Distill is work! What keeps your collection from being a "pile of random stuff" is your curation. If you keep textual notes, you would typically add your new snippets and ideas to your existing pieces, link them.

4. Express is payoff. You are transforming your collected inputs into "intermediate packages" that you can reutilize in your projects, share with others, inspire your next steps. As good consultants never start from scratch, neither will you: After a while, there's always something you've collected, something you've thought about and can share. The result of what you see and have collaborated on feeds back into your second brain. Can you see how this becomes a super power?