Are You Feeling Overwhelmed? How To Organize Your Life

A Second Brain for Creators, Readers & Knowledge Workers

Are you feeling overwhelmed with everything you need to do?

Do you struggle with organizing info and having enough time for what truly matters?

It makes sense.

According to the NY Times, the average American consumes 34 gigabytes per day, and the Guardian mentioned that this info contains enough to fill 174 newspapers daily.

Twenty years ago, those with information had the power. Nowadays, those who can filter information properly get ahead of the game.

According to Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain, workers spend 30% of their time looking for the correct information. That’s more than one out of five working days.

If you cannot filter and organize your work correctly, you’re quickly lagging behind those who can.

So, how do you become a high achiever and less stressed simultaneously?

Welcome to Building a Second Brain

Several years ago, I came across Tiago Forte’s book Design Your Work (free on Amazon). And it changed my life.

Tiago designed a system to filter and organize information. His system is inspired by the central concept from David Allen’s Getting Things Done: Your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them.

Tiago Forte’s earlier books served as the basis for his latest bestseller, Building a Second Brain, which promises to increase productivity and lead a more fulfilling life with ease and less stress.

And I can guarantee you that the promise holds up. But it does more than that.

Building a second brain helps you to be more creative and connect ideas with relative ease. This method opens up many new doors and enables you to regain control over your life.

In this blog post, I will explain the method, how I have implemented it, and my overall take on it.

The CODE Method

One of the core methods in the book is called CODE, which stands for (1) capture, (2) organize, (3) distill, and (4) express.

Let’s make this practical — here’s how I’ve implemented each step of the CODE method in my own life.

1. Capture

You should only capture things that resonate or, in the words of Marie Kondo, things that spark joy. That means you shouldn’t try to summarize everything from a book obsessively. Instead, just save the things that resonate with you at the time.

2. Organize

Organize for actionability. Think about how you might be using things in the future. An important rule is to store things where you look for them, not where you found them. This is also a good rule for non-digital systems. If you always look for your car keys in a particular place, store them there. You’ll spend much less time searching for them.

3. Distill

Whereas capturing and organizing are divergent activities, i.e., you collect whatever is interesting and don’t discard or organize anything yet, distilling is about convergence: bringing the info down to its core in bite-size chunks. It’s how you package the information so it’s easy to revise and share.

4. Express

This brings us to our last point: express. It’s how you share information, whether on a blog, social media, a YouTube channel, or with friends or colleagues.

Before we proceed to the method, let’s first look at what sources of information are out there.

Implementing the CODE Method

I’ll dive into the CODE method with real-life examples with the applications you can use. We’ll start with the C: Capture.

1. Capture: How to Capture Information in a System.

I’ll discuss two types of storage: one-step and two-step storage. The one-step storage items are things you can store and find in the same place, like songs or book recommendations.The two-step items, require an additional step and is about storing ideas for creativity.

In short:

• The 1-step is easy. You store it and retrieve it.

• The 2-step. You process it for creativity.

One-Step Storage

One-Step info is information that can be stored directly and doesn’t need additional distillation or organization. I.e. you store it there and find it there. An example is music. Whenever you find a good song, you save it in Spotify. Whenever you want to listen to the song, you go to Spotify.

The list below are single-purpose or items that can be saved directly.

• Movies → IMDB

• Music → Spotify/Soundcloud. If you’re a music fan, check out my Shazam tricks here.

• Books → Goodreads

• Photos → Google Photos. Consider doing a yearly download and backup on hard drive.

• Passwords → Keepass

• Events → Google Calendar

• Todos → Todoist

• Locations → Google Maps. I started doing maps per city.

Two-Step Storage

The two steps typically take two steps and a bit more processing time. It’s about capturing ideas that you can connect and use for creativity.