The Second Brain - A Life-Changing Productivity System

"Our brain is for meant having ideas, not for storing them"

Capture any idea wherever you are because your brain is not going to hold it for much time. You can record the voice message if you are busy doing other things. 

Ideas are not single-use. In fact, we can recycle and reuse them over time. So keeping note of all your ideas is important. 

Don't just categorise the information you've got, but try to link it to the project you are currently working on, so to take the most advantage of it immediately. 

Don't do and even plan to do hard work all at once, since your brain will likely resist doing anything. Instead, do spread your focus and efforts onto several projects, do work in small portions.

It can be really hard to start doing something from a total scratch (e.g. blank piece of paper). But if you've been taking notes and saving all the bits of useful information, it means, you already have a good deal of progress in your work. The only thing left to do is to go through all of your past notes, and maybe just copy & paste. This will make your new project, or task, seem more doable.

Every work, or e.g. essay, can be divided into smaller sections (blocks) and stored for future use. 

If you want to internalise useful information fully and keep it in your memory for a long time, you should make it the product of your efforts, you can write a short summary of a book you just read or tweet the insights you got from listening to the podcast. Whatever you do, you should get involved directly in it. If we engage in the material ourselves, we end up becoming much more familiar with it and then we can do creative things with it.

Take time to flesh out some really complex terms or information (like transactional analysis), that you will not understand in the future. Go the extra mile when describing something in your notes so that your future self will understand what you meant by that term.

Focus on the actual value of the information, and always try to apply, share, or turn that recently acquired material into something new. There is no point in having tons of useful stuff stored on your computer unless you're taking advantage of it.