How These 3 Books Helped Me Build My Second Brain (and Finish My PhD in 3 Years 8 Months)
Let me start with a proud moment.
On March 30, 2025, I successfully defended my PhD—completing it in just 3 years and 8 months, with over 10 manuscripts (some still in the pipeline). It wasn’t easy. I had my share of messy note files, forgotten ideas, and mental burnout.
But one thing saved me:
Building a Second Brain — a system for organizing ideas, managing knowledge, and showing up every day with clarity.
During my PhD, I even created YouTube playlists sharing this process. You can check them out here:
🎥 Second Brain YouTube Playlist
And today, I want to share the 3 books that quietly transformed how I took notes, learned deeply, and ultimately got published.
If you’re a student, researcher, or lifelong learner—these books can change how you think, write, and grow.
📘 1. Build Your Second Brain by Tiago Forte
Create a digital system for remembering everything and forgetting nothing.
This book gave me the blueprint for turning messy notes into a trusted system. Tiago Forte introduces the CODE method — Capture, Organize, Distill, Express — and shows how to build a workflow that scales with your mind.
🧠 On the Purpose of Note-Taking
“Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful.”
“We take notes to remember information. An important part of remembering is understanding.”
“Note-taking is effective to the extent that you paraphrase, organize and make sense of the information while taking notes.”
“Taking notes is only effective if the student has sufficient note-taking skill to deal with the learning material.”
✍️ On Active Learning and Memory
“To use a strategy effectively you need to understand how it works… and your own learning style.”
“Research reveals the main value of note-taking is through its effect on how you encode the information in your brain.”
“The more anchor points you can connect to, the more meaningful the new information becomes, and the more easily you will remember it.”
📚 On Reading and Preparation
“Preparing your mind before reading a text is an important part of successful learning.”
“The first step in taking notes is not to read the text, but to prepare yourself for it.”
🧩 On Understanding Through Connection
“Making information meaningful is about connecting new information to existing knowledge.”
“Connection, not selection, is the heart of what makes information meaningful.”
🗂️ On Summarizing and Condensing
“A good summary: is short, contains only, and all, the most important information, and is in your own words.”
“Clearly the most difficult part of summarizing is to construct sentences that sum up a paragraph.”
🔍 On Strategy and Skill Development
“There is no one ‘best’ strategy for taking notes.”
“Research suggests that the most effective strategies are often those you are initially not most comfortable with.”
📗 2. How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
Master the Zettelkasten method and turn note-taking into a thinking process.
This book taught me the power of atomic notes and linking ideas. It’s not just about writing things down—it’s about thinking through writing.
Key Quotes:
“We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter.”
“If you focus on understanding, you cannot help but learn. But if you focus on learning without understanding, you’ll fail both.”
“If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words.”
“That is why good, productive writing is based on good note-taking.”
“Things we understand are connected… and deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about.”
“Even the best tool will not improve your productivity if you don’t change the routine it’s embedded in.”
📙 3. Effective Notetaking by Fiona McPherson
The science and strategy behind better notes, deeper learning, and stronger memory.
This book is a goldmine for cognitive insights — written by someone who really understands how the brain learns best.
🔍 Understanding Learning & Strategy
“To use a strategy effectively you need to understand how it works.”
“The most effective strategies are often those you are initially not most comfortable with.”
“There is no one ‘best’ strategy for taking notes.”
🧠 Cognitive Science Insights
“Working memory governs your ability to comprehend, plan, and organize.”
“Our long-term memory is massive, but working memory is tiny.”
“Working memory is about attention.”
📝 Note-Taking Principles
“Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful.”
“Taking notes is only effective if the student has sufficient skill.”
“Reading actively often involves taking notes; taking notes often requires you to read.”
“The first step in taking notes is not to read the text, but to prepare your mind.”
✂️ Summarizing & Processing
“Distinguishing the important from the unimportant is arguably the most critical studying skill.”
“If you can’t put it into words, it doesn’t count.”
🔗 Making Connections
“Connection, not selection, is the heart of what makes information meaningful.”
“The more anchor points you can connect to, the more easily you’ll remember the information.”
“You can’t understand your material if you don’t make connections.”
🧩 Analogy, Comparison & Elaboration
“Comparisons help learning by focusing on deeper structure.”
“Analogies are worth seeking out — they’re powerful tools for understanding.”
“Elaboration is how you connect new information to your existing mental database.”
🚀 Final Thoughts
These three books didn’t just help me write papers or pass exams.
They taught me how to think, how to retain, and how to create knowledge from scratch.
If you’re overwhelmed by notes, struggling to recall what you read, or staring at a blank page while writing — start here.
📚 Build your second brain.
✍️ Take notes that think with you.
🧠 Make knowledge meaningful.
👋 About Me
Hi, I’m Shuvangkar Das, a power systems researcher with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University. I work at the intersection of power electronics, DER, IBR, and AI — building greener, smarter, and more stable grids. Currently, I’m a Research Scientist at EPRI (though everything I share here reflects my personal experience, not my employer’s views).
Over the years, I’ve worked on real-world projects involving large scale EMT simulation and firmware development for grid-forming and grid following inverter and reinforcement learning (RL). I also publish technical content and share hands-on insights with the goal of making complex ideas accessible to engineers and researchers.
📺 Subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I share tutorials, code walk-throughs, and research productivity tips.
Connect with me:
📚References
[[Three Book To Build Second Brain]]
Leave a comment