From Chaos to Clarity
Why distilling your notes—and your thoughts—can unlock real productivity and creativity
This is Part 3 in a series on Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
Part 1:
Part 2:
“Speed is everything when it comes to recall: you have only a limited amount of time and energy, and the faster you can move through your notes, the more diverse and interesting ideas you can connect together.”
The real magic of your notes lies in their ability to help you quickly find what you need—when you need it. Chances are, you won’t have time to reread an entire article before a meeting, so it’s important to get in the habit of reducing information down to its most essential parts. Thankfully, we live in a digital world where nothing is ever truly lost. If you end up highlighting the wrong section, no problem. You can always revisit and refine it.
This brings us to the concept of progressive summarization—a technique of layering and distilling your notes. It’s not about remembering everything. In fact, it’s about forgetting most of it. The goal is to reduce the original content into the smallest amount of actionable information.
You begin with the full article or book section. From there, you highlight complete sentences that capture key ideas. Then, you distill those highlights into a few concise bullet points at the top of the note. This gives you a trail back to the source if you ever need more context. This step-by-step reduction allows you to move through your notes efficiently and still retain the core insights.
For progressive summarization to be effective, you must resist the urge to highlight everything. If everything is important, then nothing is.
It’s easy to over-highlight because you’re afraid of missing something useful. But that’s precisely the problem—you don’t yet know what will be useful. That’s why it’s best to wait until the information becomes actionable before deciding what to keep. Let your goals guide the distillation process.
When deciding what to highlight, trust your instincts. Highlight anything that surprises you, excites you, or piques your interest—even if it seems small. A useful test is to revisit the note after a few days and see if you can grasp the main idea within 30 seconds. If not, you’ve likely overdone it.
As knowledge workers and creatives, time and attention are our most limited resources. We want to avoid wasting them re-reading notes that don’t serve us.
“The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blank page, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth. Professional creatives constantly draw on outside sources of inspiration—experiences, observations, lessons from failure, and ideas from others. If there is a secret to creativity, it’s that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.”
Staring at a blank page is a productivity killer. One way to prevent that is by building Intermediate Packets—small building blocks of work that bridge the gap between the start and the final product.
Most jobs focus on delivering the final outcome because that’s where the value lies. But for creative knowledge work, progress happens in the intermediate steps. These are your drafts, insights, outlines, brainstorms—packets of progress that can be recombined into new outcomes later.
The real productivity hack is learning to complete projects by assembling these intermediate packets. As you work this way, you’ll begin to see individual tasks not as isolated chores but as pieces of a larger puzzle that your future self will thank you for.
You never know where your notes will lead you. But through working with your ideas and expressing them, you’ll come to understand them more deeply. As the philosopher Richard Sennett put it:
“We only know what we make.”