How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain

This is one of the very best recaps of the Building a Second Brain method Ali. Fantastic job to you and your team 🙌 It was so much fun collaborating together and I hope we do it again!

To summarize the CODE for building the 2nd brain: C - Capture: use note-taking apps or picture to store information. O - Organise: ask "Where will I use this information?" D - Distill: progressive summarization E - Express: show your work

" So I read all these books and get overloaded with information " and to fix this I'll read another book about reading to many books and getting overloaded with information. Haha 10/10

SUMMARY NOTES: 00:00 Intro -The problem of information overload leads to a need for a system to help manage and organize information. -The "second brain" system helps solve the problem of information overload by providing a framework for organizing and storing information. -The "second brain" system has helped Ali in his own life, and can hopefully help others as well. -The "second brain" system uses CODE as an acronym to explain its core foundations - Capture, Organize, Distill, Express. 00:41 What is a Second Brain and why should you have one? - A second brain is a digital system for capturing and organizing ideas. - Building a second brain can help you express your creativity, be more productive and make better decisions. - Every job today involves knowledge work of some kind, and a second brain can help you with inputting, processing, and outputting information. - The methodology for building a second brain has four parts: Capture, Organize, Distill and Express (CODE). 04:56 C (Capture) - Ali discusses different ways of capturing information, both manually and automatically. -Ali captures his thoughts and ideas in Apple Notes. - He also has a system for automatically capturing highlights from books, articles, and podcasts. - Having a good capture system helps reduce stress levels by freeing up your brain from having to remember everything. - Ali recommends using a note taking system to store thoughts and ideas that come to mind throughout the day, as well as highlights from books, articles, and podcasts. 08:32 O (Organise) - Ali suggests organizing information by actionability rather than topic in order to be more targeted and efficient in one's learning. - This means that when you come across something relevant, you add it to the project folder related to the action you plan to take, rather than creating a new category for it. - You can still search for specific information using control F or command F if needed. - This system is especially helpful when working on long-term projects with many moving parts. 11:07 D (Distill) - Ali talks about a method called progressive summarization, which is basically like highlighting, but on steroids. - This is effective for flagging up the areas which are particularly important. - Different than highlighting we're used to in school - it's not particularly effective for retention in your own personal brain, but it is effective for flagging up the areas which are particularly important. 11:45 E (Express) -The "E" in the second brain system stands for Express, meaning that once you have captured and organized your ideas, you need to share them with the world in some way. -Sharing your ideas allows you to receive feedback, collaborate with others, and ultimately create something tangible that is the output of all of your hard work. -Without expressing our ideas, they are essentially useless - it's important to find a way to share your creativity with others. 13:09 How my Second Brain has helped Ali -The course/book has helped Ali become more productive, but also more creative and less stressed in general. -The system taught Ali the idea of slow burns versus heavy lifts - working on multiple projects simultaneously so that when it comes time to actually finish one, most of the work is already done. -The system has also helped with his teaching work - he can easily prepare talks with just a few minutes notice by referencing his stored information.

I would love to see a "day in the life" style video but from the perspective of how you go about using all these incredible systems like the second brain, reading, learning new information, etc.

omg this entire time I thought second brain was some super fancy productivity technique that no one would explain to me, but this is literally my journal. I used it in the exact way you described when I was writing my college essays, too. Thank you so much for this video your channel is amazing

The quality of his video keep getting better and better. His shirt, his water bottle, his poster etc. are color matching. what an amazing work.

I will just remember everything in this video

This video is very helpful for me. I want to read the book "Building the second brain" for long time. Now, after watching your video I realized that I had built the second brain during my university life but its not digital. I had store all the knowledge in the form of notes that if I get through them it will really help to memorize it again. But now I need to organize them digitally so it could be accessible for me anytime.

Now this is my favourite video! I have been struggling a lot when it comes to handling multiple projects. Thanks Ali!! You really answered a lot of my questions today!!

At first, I thought I was watching this at 2x playback speed. I was not...

I'm an old man now, but I"ve keep notes from everything I"ve read since just after high school. In college I took a look at my high school notes and realized I had trouble reading my own handwriting. So I retyped all my notes. At the end of each college semester I started going through my notes for each class, boiling them down what seemed useful (or forgetable) and typed those as well. It wasn't until later in college that I realized I could not use many of my notes in papers because I did not collect where it came from for a citation, and fixed that for the future. I still have my original little notebook, which became 3 little 3-ring binders. I switched to composition notebooks where I captured notes, and later maybe 3-4 times per notebook I would type of the notes I wanted added to my digital collection. When I learned how to use Google Drive and Docs, I decided to share my notes with my peers and still to this day offer that link freely. Funny though, few have offered to share their collected knowledge. I suspect I will continue doing this until the very end. I look forward to Tiago's book, and enjoy your videos. If I don't seem to find a nugget in each one, it's pretty close to a 1:1 ratio. Great presentations. The topics have substance. The tempo is good, also I too often speed up what I listen to unless I"m focussed on taking notes. Thank you, and keep it up.

You deliver excellent content to your audience. It's very interesting material. All of your effort put into creating this video is much appreciated. I'm truly grateful for your help!

Video ideas: 1. Books for those who don't read 2. How to calm self before sleep 3. Podcasts for beginners 4. How to make notes + apps 5. Things students should use

Without any notions, it is what I was unconsuiously building for myself. Thank you for improving my structure.

It's nice to see how ideas that you get thanks to different inner processes are captured and shared by other people different than you with different backgrounds and context. Today I discovered that spontaneously I have created my own second brain exactly as it is said here without any external inspiration. Awesome how ideas work!

Ali! This video couldn't have come at a better time. I have SO many song ideas, tasks, schedules etc ... I just end up getting overwhelmed - Definitely going to give this a try! Thanks mate :)

Thank you !!!Its exactly what I needed ❤

Seriously man I always get some gems out of your videos. Been a subscriber for a while and your content never fails. Thanks Ali

This channel is jam packed with value. Thanks for sharing these gems.