How to start building your second brain?

Read to the end to see something so cute but also a little bit creepy

Hello everyone, are you ready for another dose of personal knowledge management (PKM) ... knowledge? Great. I am Anh Tuan and this is Mind the Gap

Last week, I made you think about why you would want to build your own PKM system. But you may be wondering, how do I actually start? No worries, I am going to show you a simple but effective method: the C.O.D.E system by Tiago Forte (yes, there are passionate people who create whole systems to organize personal information, how crazy is that?)

I chose this one because it's built towards action and the notion of projects. It makes sure that you use the information you capture to produce better output. It could be better writing (I use it for this newsletter for example) or better decision making. You could say it's the Getting Things Done equivalent of the PKM world.

In a few words, the method is explained step-by-step by its acronym, C.O.D.E :

This is the process that any information you put in your PKM system should go through. Let's follow the steps. I'll also focus on each one in the coming weeks.

That's something we are all quite familiar with. We all have a more or less structured way to write things down. And if we are honest, it's often scattered across multiple apps. Next week, I'll concentrate on this step and tell you how to improve your capturing routine, make it more efficient and answer the question: What is worth capturing in my PKM system? (spoiler alert: you can't and shouldn't try to capture everything)

This is where we lose a lot of people, right here. Often, people are just capturing over and over, hoarding information like an untouched treasure. But going through the second step is essential. You get to reorganize and move information according to the projects you are working on at the moment. Don't worry, I'll teach you the organization method during Week 2. With that, your knowledge won't be stagnant anymore and will help you reach your endgoals.

Here, things become a bit abstract but bear with me. In this step, you are trying to find the essence of the information you captured and organized by reviewing it a few times. Each pass, you make it a little bit more yours by highlighting its core elements and writing a summary in your own words. Think about it as a note you make for your future self, explaining to them why this information is important to you. The goal of the whole system is not to make a clone of Wikipedia. You could just read the ever-updated original website instead. The goal is to create a knowledge base that feels personal and unique to you. We will talk about it in detail during Week 3

In the last step, we are using all these curated and distilled blocks of information to build new connections or make new projects with them. This is the endgoal of a personal knowledge management system, to generate new insight that you can use in your daily life. More on this during Week 4

OK, that's maybe a lot to take in. But that's why you have a PKM expert in your inbox every week! I am going to explain all of this little by little (I guess I have my next 4 issues of Mind the Gap planned now) and soon enough, you'll have all the tools to start your own second brain. So see you next week to learn more about how to capture ideas. Oh and if you could hit reply on this newsletter and tell me how you actually capture information right now, that would be amazing!

P.S here is something cute but also a little bit creepy (Instagram reel)