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I wrote this book / in the first place / to solve / the problem of information abundance. / We can't be / the first people / to ever have too much information to manage. / So / I went back / through history / when society / was changing, / the economy was changing, / the way that we / lived / was changing, / and it turned out / throughout history again and again, / every time humanity faced / too much change / and too much information / going on around them, / they / turned to the same solution. / They turned to this solution, / this thing / called a Commonplace book, / almost like a journal, / except / it wasn't just a place for them / to pour out their / personal thoughts and reflections. / It was a place for them / to keep / a much wider variety of things, / quotes / and Bible verses / and recipes / and bits of advice and wisdom, / a leaf that they found in the garden / or later on / a photograph. / It became / this central repository / of all the information / and content / that was meaningful to them. / It's the one place you control / and you can make sense / of all this stuff happening around you. / And what I'm trying to do essentially is / reinvent that age-old practice / in digital form / for modern lives / and modern work. //My message to you / is that you need / a second brain, / a personal system / for knowledge management. / It's saving little / bits of material / and content and information from / both your physical environment, / but more importantly, / your digital environment / to cultivate / and retrieve / and review it over time. / The heart and soul / of building a second brain / is called / C.O.D.E. / C/ for capture, / O / for organize, / D / for distill, / and E / for express. / Capturing information, / organizing it, / distilling it, / and then expressing it in in some way. / Our / memory, / especially our working memory, / is kind of like the RAM in a computer. / It's fast, / it can make decisions quickly, / but what happens when you restart your computer, / which is kind of like going to sleep at night? / The RAM / gets wiped. // Notes are simply / a way / to preserve / the value of that thinking / so that you can benefit from it / again and again / and again / in the future / and not just once. //