About Your Second Brain
Day 60 of 365 of my Daily Blogging challenge, first published on my blog
I've been interested in the topic of the second brain as it seems a much more reliable way to store information. More than that, it would be the most efficient way to retrieve them instead of having just a big blob of everything which do not make sense to you.
From a first impression, I think that this second brain can only be personal. A global one is called the internet, and it is so massive that we cannot wrap our heads around it. This is why I want to build my own, at human scale, and only for myself.
Sure I can share it, but it won't have nearly as much value to anyone else as it will have for me. Creating it the way that I want, it will reflect the way I actually think. So unless someone has the exact same experiences and ways of thinking, it will end up being a mess of information for them.
There is a course called Building a second brain which helps you do just that. It is very expensive and I cannot judge on the quality of it, but I'm guessing there is a lot of value to be gained here.
Until now, I have captured information using my email. When I stumble upon something that I find interesting, I send it to myself to come back to it later. This is quite a messy process, and I want to have a better one.
I'm thinking of using Notion to do that, but I need something that is just "1-click" to capture an idea. Whether it's on my phone or my computer, I want to save something without having to go through the same process over and over.
The first step would be to save Tweets and threads into notion. I like the way Readwise have done it on twitter, and I want to create something similar.
I don't know where this will lead, and that's still an other idea that I throw out there. This is really an issue for me today, and I want to make it something really useful.
I love the idea and frankly, I would be much more interested in a tool than a course on how to do it - I already do it - badly. Like you, I write emails to myself, I bookmark things if I am lucky, I cut and paste, I screenshot, etc.
My goal is to save information mostly related to projects and its info I don't need now - its info related to steps in the process. I want to be able to grab anything and drop it on a timeline for WHEN I will need it in the future. You can read a million articles but can you really be sure you absorbed it when the time comes to rely on it? I think only a little.
For a project I come across articles about steps and best practices for doing something and I want to save them for just-in-time consumption before I do that step but I can't seem to do it, its in a bookmark folder with 200 other things in no particular order. I need to store emails, screenshots, links, pdfs, tweets, contacts, etc. I need to annotate them with notes to myself - read this before you start building that - use this as a set of steps - test for this effect, etc.
How big is the market for this? Probably pretty big - would I pay? yes but it has to be right-mouse click easy - something called "grab" that can grab anything and then maybe store in a temporary bucket where I can assign a time and stage to consume it with notes. I also have to merge with my docs and the things I create.
Maybe its collection tools merged with a version of "Monday for individuals" merged with dropbox and email and it hooks to things like calendars etc. I can make a Frankenstein version myself but the work to do it is nasty.
Thanks for your reply, that's very informative.
How much do you refer to your collection ?
rate of collection 100% rate at which I refer to it 5-10%. I being to forget I have it - its like asking someone to name everything in their closet without looking - The more I get the harder it is to weed through but when I have a bit of downtime sometimes I go back through it, but again not in the way I want to and when I need to.