How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain
Video by Ali Abdaal on YouTube · 15 min · uploaded June 2022
Notes and analysis by BrainTube, written from the video. Not affiliated with Ali Abdaal. Watch on YouTube
In short
Ali Abdaal walks through Tiago Forte's CODE method (Capture, Organise, Distil, Express) using his own Apple Notes setup. The strongest advice is to file notes by the project you will use them for, not by topic or source, and to keep several projects simmering at once. The video is thin on the hard step, distilling, and its opening statistics are shaky, but the core habits still hold, and better search has made his low-effort filing style more defensible since the 2022 upload.
The argument
Abdaal's argument is that information overload is solved by writing things down in one digital place, which Forte calls a "Second Brain" and Abdaal describes as a digital commonplace book. He claims this matters for everyone, not only creators, because almost every job now takes information in, processes it and produces something. The method has four steps. Capture anything that resonates. Organise it by where you will act on it. Distil it so the key points are easy to find later. Express it by making something. His payoff examples are a book built from old notes, eight video ideas developing in parallel, and a talk prepared in two minutes in the back of an Uber.
Key ideas, with timestamps
- 0:41
The overload problem, and two shaky numbers
He opens with claims that we take in 34 gigabytes of information a day, or the equivalent of 174 newspapers. Both figures come from older research that counted bytes of all media, much of it video and TV, so they say little about how much anyone reads. The real point, that most people never write anything down, does not need them.
- 1:34
Commonplace books
He frames the system as an old habit made digital, citing Taylor Swift, Jerry Seinfeld and Leonardo da Vinci keeping notes of ideas as they came. He still carries a paper journal but says analogue notes cannot be searched or organised, which is why the digital version wins.
- 3:43
Every job is knowledge work
Using Bertrand Russell's quip that work is moving matter, he adds a third kind: moving information. A doctor reads journals and turns them into a prescription; a consultant turns research into slides. Inputs, processing and outputs describe both.
- 4:56
Capture: anything that resonates
He quotes David Allen's line that the mind is for having ideas, not holding them. His capture tool is Apple Notes, with Notion kept for team work. He saves book highlights, quotes, websites, meeting notes and his own thoughts, and at 6:52 says notes he wrote years ago are now becoming paragraphs in his book.
- 8:31
Organise: by actionability, not topic
Folders for book notes or podcast notes are rarely opened again. Instead, material goes into the folder for the project that will use it, such as his longevity video script. He skips tags entirely and relies on search, and compares it to studying a specific essay question rather than a whole subject.
- 11:07
Distil: progressive summarisation, barely explained
He names Forte's progressive summarisation and calls it highlighting with extra steps, useful for flagging what matters rather than for memory. Then he points to the book and to Forte's course, which he took and mentored on, without showing the method.
- 11:38
Express: show your work
Notes that are never used are close to useless, he says, and this video is itself his expression of the book. Slide decks, trading strategies, songs and photographs are all expressions of the same input-to-output loop.
- 13:11
Slow burns and the two-minute talk
He used to treat each project as a heavy lift. Now he keeps about eight video ideas and several book chapters open, feeding each as material arrives, so the final step is assembly. At 14:40 he says he prepared a talk for 100 students in about two minutes by searching his notes.
What it gets right
Organise by use, not by source. This is the most valuable idea in the video and in Forte's book, where it is formalised as PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives). A note filed under the project that needs it gets read; a note filed under "Podcasts" usually does not. If you change one habit after watching, make it this.
Slow burns are a real productivity gain. Keeping several outputs open and feeding them as you go turns a blank-page problem into an assembly problem. The two-minute talk example is a single anecdote, but most people who write regularly will recognise the effect.
Low-effort filing plus search. He admits he does not tag and just uses search. In 2022 that was a minor confession. Today it is closer to best practice, because full-text and semantic search find material regardless of where it was filed. Time spent on elaborate tag systems is usually better spent capturing less and using more.
What it leaves out
The distil step has no method. Progressive summarisation in Forte's version works in layers. You save the passage, bold the key sentences on a later visit, highlight the best of the bold on the next visit, and write a short summary only when a note keeps proving useful. The point is that effort follows use, so you never summarise notes you do not return to. None of that is in the video, and it is the step most people get wrong.
Capture what resonates is too loose. Without a filter, "anything that resonates" fills an inbox faster than anyone can organise it. A tighter rule is to capture when you can name at least one project or question the note might serve. That links capture to the organise step from the start.
It is partly a sales funnel. The video recommends the book and Forte's course (which Abdaal took and mentored on), plus his own interview with Forte. That does not make the advice wrong, but the distil gap reads like content held back for the paid version.
The opening statistics are weak. The 34 GB and 174-newspaper figures measure media volume, not reading load. They make overload sound like a data problem when the real issue is attention and follow-through.
How this applies to memory across AI tools
CODE was designed for a person searching their own notes. In 2026 a lot of the retrieval is done by an AI assistant instead, which changes the economics of each step. Capture still matters most. Organising by project still helps you, but an assistant with search can find a note whatever folder it sits in. Distilling can now be done on demand, by asking for a summary of what you saved on a topic when a project needs it, which is close to the spirit of progressive summarisation: effort only where there is use.
The gap is that most capture tools are not readable by the assistants people use. BrainTube is one way to close it: it saves YouTube videos with their transcripts, articles, PDFs and podcasts into one compiled knowledge base, exposed as an MCP server so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients can search it while you write.
For how these approaches compare, see what notes apps get wrong and remembering what you watch and read.
Who should watch it
Watch it if you have heard of Forte's book and want a 15-minute overview before deciding whether to read it, or if your notes pile up in source-based folders you never open. The organise section from 8:31 to 11:07 and the slow-burn examples from 13:11 to 14:48 carry the most practical value. Skip it if you already use PARA or want detail on progressive summarisation, which the video only names. The $100 video-idea plug at 6:22 to 6:52 can also be skipped.
Frequently asked
- What is Tiago Forte's CODE method?
- CODE is Tiago Forte's four-step method: Capture ideas that resonate, Organise them by the project where you will use them, Distil them down to their key points, and Express them by making something. The aim is to turn saved information into output rather than an archive.
- What is progressive summarization?
- It is Forte's technique for distilling notes in layers. You first save a passage, then bold the key sentences when you revisit it, then highlight the best of those, and only write a summary for notes you keep returning to. Effort grows only with use.
- What app does Ali Abdaal use for notes?
- In this June 2022 video, Ali Abdaal says he uses Apple Notes for his personal notes and Notion for team work on videos and podcasts. He also mentions an automated tool for collecting book and article highlights. His setup may have changed since the upload.
Keep videos like this one searchable
BrainTube saves YouTube videos with their transcripts into one compiled knowledge base that Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients can search.
Go deeper
More video notes
- Build an Obsidian BACKEND Not a Second Brain! · Eric Michaud
- Complete Guide to building an AI Second Brain with Claude · Ray Fu
- The NEW Way to Build a Second Brain w/ Claude (2027) · Nick Saraev
- Build a Self Improving Claude Knowledge Base · Paul J Lipsky
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