There's a lot of interesting but simple concepts around personal notes in here. The organization into projects, areas, resources, and an archive is broken down in a useful way, and the actions of capturing, organizing, distilling, and extracting are straightforward enough to make the "second brain" concept seem doable.

But the author, as is normal in these sorts of books, seems to sell it as much more impressive than it is. Which gets annoying at times. The whole thing could be broken down into a few blog posts without losing much of anything. There is a lot of fluff around the core concept, and I had to use the highlight function of Libby for maybe the first time ever just to keep track of the acronyms. There's some good stuff hidden in among an insufferable ego.

I'm also just straight up dropping another star off because I need to put in my email for the bonus chapter on tagging. That is just not cool. If it's worth including, include it, don't make me sign up to your mailing list. Like, oh my god.