Building a Second Brain — Tiago Forte
The foundational book on personal knowledge management that introduced the PARA method and the concept of a "second brain."
Tiago Forte's "Building a Second Brain" is the book that started my PKM journey. The core idea: offload your thinking to an external system so your brain can focus on creative work instead of remembering things.
Key concepts:
- PARA — Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive as an organizing framework
- CODE — Capture, Organize, Distill, Express as a workflow
- Progressive Summarization — layer highlights to surface key ideas over time
- Intermediate Packets — reusable building blocks of knowledge