Building A Second Brain

I've been excited about the prospect of creating the human brain digitally since reading 'How to Create a Mind' and discovering the Blue Brain Project was already on track toward the Singularity event to make it a (theoretical as of 2022) reality.

What I wasn't aware was that I'd kind of already been building my own (unintentionally and seriously low intelligence) until I came across the 'Building A Second Brain' concept and now book by Taigo Forte.

Short version: All the inputs of your life, whether that's email (work & personal), instant messages, thoughts, RPMs , phone calls, coffee catchups, meetings, websites, podcasts, videos, books etc. etc., you want to start to capture those into a digital note taking app like Evernote or Notion to start to build a library of your own mind that you can access and search.

The end results from Building A Second Brain were enough to hook me in to give a go:

Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds
Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward consistently
Save your best thinking, so you don’t have to do it again
Spend less time looking for things and more time doing the best, most creative work you are capable of
Create a digital environment that promotes clarity and peace of mind
Turn work “off” and relax, knowing you have a trusted system keeping track of all the details

Now for the Long Version 🤯

Find a system to app to suit your archetype

Turns out there are 4 archetypes of note takers:

The Architect
The Gardener
The Librarian
The Student

Each has their own preferred digital note taking app to suit them. Arch's lean towards Notion, Gardner's go for Obsidian/Roam, Librarian's (like me) enjoy Evernote and Students go for Apple notes or Google Keep.

You can see from the image I borrowed, Evernote & Notion seem to popular picks for laying your brain's foundation.

Lets get PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources & Archive)

From these info graphics below from Maggie Appleton's site, you'll see the PARA system is the folder structure you want to setup your 2nd brain with.

In the instructional video, Tiago adds in the Read/Watch Later & Tasks which makes PARARWLT which isn't a catchy but is good to split them out should you wish too. You can use the below to see how each section shows examples underneath and the range of action to reference.

Time to Start Brain Dumping

With your framework in place, it's time to start adding to your 2nd brain. This is that song that tickled your fancy, those meeting notes from last week or that chili oil that you can't seem to get enough of (you know the one). The more you add and the longer you keep adding to it, the more it will begin to pay you back.

Training your Brain

Now with all your notes in place, everything needs to be refined so that it's easy to find and understandable.

I'm tagging notes with things like 'Productivity', 'Career' and '4DX' to make it easy to locate and then search for when I need them.

I will need to refine everything I have though to ensure it's essence is understandable and just 'Do thing'.

Go with the Flow

With our notes refined and easily accessible what can we do we get? We get our attention back. We know what to do and where to go to find out the information and we drop into flow state more often.

Putting your 2nd brain to work

With another brain at your disposal that's growing every day, what better use that tackle your biggest goals?

That's it! It's remarkable simple but devilishly clever in the detail. I'm pumped to grow my 2nd brain and hopefully not end up with 2 heads.

Cheers,

Alex.