My Second Brain

My brain cannot hold everything I want it to. I constantly have different tasks, projects, ideas, responsibilities, and memories competing for my fractured attention. Often, these thoughts can conflict with each other, which makes organizing them difficult. I also struggle with remembering ideas, even ones I think are good but cannot be addressed immediately. Later, I’ll try to remember that great idea, but I'll be unable to, leading to frustration.

For the vast majority of my life, I just lived with this. I tried to make to-do lists, but I would somehow find the “update to-do list for XYZ project” part of my to-do list. I used different mixes of physical and digital lists for various areas of my life, leading to confusion about where a list was. This confusion would lead to further brain inefficiencies as I tried to find the lists or often just attempted to recreate the lists from memory.

After much research, several YouTube rabbit holes, and some tinkering with different application platforms, I finally have a second brain that I am using a good bit. I settled on Notion for my platform of choice. I like how I can leverage the database functionality and connections between multiple databases. This database functionality has dramatically helped me compartmentalize my thoughts and see relationships between different areas where it makes sense.

I’ll go into detail about my YouTube rabbit hole over the next couple of days including my takeaways from different videos and my adjustments to make my second brain work for me. My second brain is constantly a work in progress, as I’d argue every second brain should be. However, it has served me well recently, and I highly recommend creating a second brain for yourself, whether in Notion or another application. When considering application platforms, I highly recommend choosing a single application that can be easily accessible anywhere, including your phone and computer. In the past, I have used Apple-only applications that partially limited my access when using Windows machines for my corporate job.