I first read Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain in November 2023.
I will be honest with you: I understood almost none of it. CODE, PARA — the acronyms arrived in such quantity that the book gave off that unmistakable aroma of the American self-help framework. Still, I resolved to simply follow along, comprehension optional.
Three years have passed.
Looking back, that “just do it blindly” approach turned out — rather inconveniently — to be the correct one. Understanding does not lead. The hands move first, and understanding strolls in later, at its own leisurely pace. This post organizes those three years of trial and error along the CODE framework. If you have read the same book and are currently wearing an expression that says “so what exactly am I supposed to do?” — I hope to be of some service.
What is CODE? Tiago Forte’s four-step process for personal knowledge management.
Capture → Organize → Distill → Express.
You collect only what resonates (C), organize it so it can be found again (O), pull out the essentials (D), and put it all to use in something you make (E).
C — Capture: I Write by Hand. I’m Quite Serious.
My capture tools are two Bullet Journal notebooks — one for work, one for personal life.
The Work Notebook — Permanently on Duty
The work notebook lies open on my office desk at all times. It has never once clocked out.
Every morning, I write the date and begin a daily log. Phone calls, notes, incoming emails — everything gets recorded briefly, as tasks. Finished items get a completion mark. This alone frees you from the commute-home question, “what exactly did I do today?” — a question best not asked without evidence on hand.
On top of this, a weekly plan assigns tasks to days, a monthly plan sketches the bigger picture week by week, and a Future Log surveys twelve months of scheduled items. I follow GTD’s “write it all down” doctrine faithfully, moving deferred and waiting items to the monthly plan.
The notation is deliberately minimal — two symbols, no more:
- · — a task
- – — a note
Meetings, seminars, lectures — all of it goes into this notebook. With one rule: only the notes I will want to retrieve later get transferred into Obsidian. The rest are permitted a comfortable retirement between the covers.
The Personal Notebook — A Walking Path for Thoughts
The personal notebook is mostly for reading notes and journaling. I copy down sentences that snag on something as I read, and let the day’s thoughts and feelings drain onto the page at their own pace.
Why I Gave Up on Digital Capture
I confess I tried them all.
iOS Shortcuts that auto-save to Notion. Google Keep. Calendar apps. Even AI transcription via Otter.ai.
The conclusion was surprisingly plain: at work, the moment you pull out your phone, the thread is cut. It proved faster to let Otter.ai handle the meeting recording and write my notes by hand, in the notebook sitting right there. Reading notes, too — a notebook open next to the book, pen in hand, simply had more warmth to it. I used to type journal entries into my phone; these days, pen and paper are the more comfortable arrangement.
Digital tools are not the villain here. But the tool with the least friction at the moment of capture is the one that survives. In my case, that tool happened to be the hand.
O — Organize: From Notebook to Obsidian
The Bullet Journal has exactly one fatal weakness: it cannot be searched.
Flipping back through the past few days is easy. But finding what someone said in a meeting three months ago? That requires turning pages one at a time, from the beginning. That is archaeology, not work.
So the rule is: only what needs long-term storage moves to Obsidian.
What did I do a few days ago — the notebook answers that quickly enough; no need to digitize it. But material I will want again next year is a different matter. Meeting minutes, seminar summaries, lecture notes — those must go into Obsidian.
Along with them go the documents I referenced while doing the work — PDFs, slide decks, spreadsheets. “How did I handle that last time?” “Something similar just came up — what did I do before?” When those questions surface, I want the trail of execution waiting there, ready for inspection.
The Skeleton — the PARA System
The folder structure inside Obsidian follows Tiago Forte’s PARA.
| Folder | Criterion | What goes in |
|---|---|---|
| P — Projects | Ongoing work with a deadline | The projects I’m currently running |
| A — Areas | No deadline, but needs ongoing attention | Recurring duties, requests, admin |
| R — Resources | Not a task, but worth referencing | Guidelines, precedents, training materials |
| A — Archive | Graduated from the three above | Finished projects, retired duties, spent resources |
The key point: you do not file by topic. You file by “what use is this to me right now.”
A finished project simply moves to the Archive — sort those by year and they stay easy to find. And when you change roles or hand your work off to someone else, the pressure of “cleaning everything up” drops considerably.
D — Distill: Throw the Files In, but Leave One Line Behind
With PARA in place, I create a page in Obsidian for each unit of work, and attach the related documents — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF — by date.
If I’m being honest, “throw them in” is the more accurate verb.
But I have attached one small habit to the throwing: whenever I attach a document, I write a one- or two-line summary of what it is.
The effect of this small habit is considerably larger than it looks.
- The document becomes findable by keyword search. (Filenames alone will not save you.)
- Surprisingly often, the summary is all you need — no reason to open the heavy file at all.
- The net result: time, returned to you.
The difference between organizing and distilling is this: organizing decides where a thing goes; distilling leaves a note for your future self. And your future self has a worse memory than your present self. On this point, I’m afraid, there is no debate.
E — Express: The Moment the Pile Pays Rent
Express is not some grand act of creation. The moment your past self does you a favor — that is Express.
When a new document needs making — “how did I do this last year?”, “what template did I use for that similar task?” — I go digging through PARA. Open the old project in the Archive, and the documents and their summaries are sitting there, exactly as they were left.
A former me hands the paperwork over to the present me. It is a formal handoff — performed, conveniently, with oneself on both ends.
Reading notes work the same way. Handwritten notes, retyped into Obsidian, become the seeds of new blog posts. This very post, as it happens, sprouted from exactly that.
An Honest Assessment, Three Years In
Before CODE and PARA, every new document began with a considerable amount of time lost to hunting for related files. Open a folder, open a subfolder, open another. Often enough the hunt failed and the document got rebuilt from scratch — with the stress settling into my shoulders each time.
That time has now shrunk decisively. So has the stress.
When I first read Building a Second Brain, most of it escaped me, and I had no idea how any of it was to be used. So I made four PARA folders, comprehension pending. The hands went first.
Three years later, the frame has finally set.
In the end, the core of this system is simple:
- Write down only what resonates. (Release the compulsion to record everything.)
- Organize by “what use is this now?” — not “might I need this someday?”
- Throw the files in, but leave a one-line summary.
- Accept the handoff from your past self.
If I may offer exactly one piece of advice to anyone about to attempt this system: do not try to understand it. Make the four folders. Understanding will let itself in quietly, roughly three years later.
The brain has not received a single upgrade since the Stone Age. Do the decent thing and plug in an external drive.