13. November 2022

Building a second brain

Everything not saved will be lost.

—Nintendo “Quit Screen” message

Recently I have discovered the value of offloading information from my mind to my second brain. Inspired by Tiago Forte book Building a Second Brain

Why a second brain?

A second brain is a personal knowledge management system that supports offloading information, improves information retrieval and memory recall.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

—David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

Information Overload

In the early days of the internet, we had a single inbound flow of information: email with far less marketing messages. Over time as the internet evolved, we now see our inbox receives a barrage of messages from various sources (Most messages today are bulk mail).

In addition, we all face continuous interruptions from the following sources:

Email
SMS/iMessage/WhatsApp
Slack/Teams
Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc..)
Calendar Notifications
YouTube
Website notifications

So with all this information flow how can we identify the signal from the noise?

💡 Filter or opt-out of emails that contain unsubscribe in the message. A strong indication an email is bulk mail message if it contains unsubscribe.

💡 For each input source (email, SMS, Slack message, etc..) identify actions such as TODO, Calendar, note, read-later

Common Tools

In Building a Second Brain book we need to identify a way to capture the following. A way to manage our Todo items (Things that we can’t complete immediately), Calendar (upcoming events or appointments), Note taking tool to capture thoughts, ideas and information that resonates with us

Todo apps (such as Todoist, Microsoft Todo, Google Tasks, etc..)
Calendar (Google Calendar, Outlook, etc..)
Note-Taking Apps
- Simple Notes (eg Apple Notes, Google Keep, VS Code, The Archive, Drafts, etc..)
- Online (Evernote, Notion, Roam, etc..)
- Local storage (Obsidian, LogSeq, etc..)

Personal Knowledge Management

My personal requirements for a PKM tool are as follows:

Own your data
Support for Forward and Backlinking
Support for rich media
Search – Needs to be easy to find information
Scalable – PKM system needs to be scalable to large amounts of information
Provide a mechanism to visualize connections between concepts
Tagging
Text based (prefer Markdown) – Needs to be timeless
Version Control
Must work with both Windows, Mac and Linux ecosystems
Must sync across my devices

Personal/Work Information Flows

Organize both my Personal and Work world based on Tiago Forte’s P.A.R.A. method to structure the information for my work and personal Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives.

Projects are short-term that require the most immediate attention
Areas of responsibility such as Family, Friends, Co-workers, Interests, Ambitions
Resources links, videos that support the project, areas and ambitions
Archive for information that is not currently related to Projects and Areas or completed Projects

Work

My work notes require capturing information related to projects and areas of responsibility. The information must be stored in trusted locations.

Tools that are supported include:
- Teams
- One Note
- Microsoft Todo
Logseq also allows for local storage of notes and information.
- Flash cards
- Note taking

Personal

My personal notes and journal need to be friction-free and help me recall things that resonate or are important to me.

Todo - Todoist and/or Google Task capture important emails that need follow-up. Process the email once and if necessary create a TODO to the time when the email can be processed.
Logseq also allows for local storage of notes and information.
- Daily Journal
- Task management
- Annotate Youtube Videos

Information flow

flowchart TB A(Email) --> C{Process} --> D{Future} C-->|Immediate| E[Read/Archive/Respond] D -->|Later| F{Capture} F -->|TODO| G(LogSeq Most Important/Maybe do-list) F -->|Read/Later| H(Instapaper) F -->|Reschedule| I(Future) F -->|Watch/Later| J(LogSeq Videos)

So why so many tools?

Each tool has a specific purpose and strength. In my case, I am using Todo apps to ingest email and actions from slack/teams that I have yet to process.

Calendar to manage events, meetings and appointments.

Logseq is my main dashboard to help me have an overview of my day including what tasks are most important to complete, things I might do, my dreams, my ambitions, etc…

What next

In future blog posts, I intend to provide more detail on how each of these tools contributes to my second brain.

Resources & Tools

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