Building My Second Brain - Part 1
Over the years I’ve read a lot of productivity books, self help guides, and “must-read” business books. From Getting Things Done by David Allan, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People By Stephen Covey, The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll, and many more. I’ve read about techniques like Zettelkasten and the Pomodro Technique. Each of these books and methods influences how I do work and how I influence others in my career. Recently I’ve picked up Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. I’ve read his blog in the past and even put the P.A.R.A method into action in some version or another. I’ve been pretty organized and able to pull various sources of information, but I also recently promoted to a new position that has me taking in vast amounts of information at a rate far higher than previous positions. So it’s time for a change.
Just as I’ve read most of the productivity and self help books, I’ve tried most of the apps. To Do and One Note by Microsoft, AnyDo, Evernote, Dendron, Notion, a combination of all of them, and countless others that I don’t remember. Notion was my most recent attempt and while it is extremely powerful, I felt it over-complicated things too much for me. The capture and organize process was a bit too slow and I hadn’t taken the time to hone my workflow to it. My favorite tool so far has been Dendron. I use VS Code daily and I loved how easy it was to just take a quick note, find other notes, and see how they all interacted. If you know Markdown (and you really should) then Dendron can be so easy to work in. It’s not perfect, though. File management can be less than intuitive and getting used to all the shortcut keys in both VS Code and Dendron plus learning Markdown can be a bit daunting. The biggest flaw and barrier to entry is that there is no quality mobile app or way to interact on mobile. Dendron is an extension or plugin in VS Code, so it shares many of the same limitations that VS Code does.
The Requirements
So for building my Second Brain I need to lay out some basic requirements. I am not going to replicate or follow the official Second Brain methodology that Tiago Forte outlines in his blog, and I’ve just started his book so I’ll be modifying as I learn more. So here are the basic requirements.
- Scalable
- Must be scalable. It should work for 4, 400, and 4000 notes with the same workflows
- Accessible
- It must be accessible in a wide variety of devices and locations. It must also be accessible in that it should be free or relatively inexpensive to implement.
- Easy to Reference
- The whole point of a Second Brain is to reference materials. Taking notes is only 50% of the process. If you can’t reference those notes in a timely manner then the system is not working.
- Easy to Modify
- The system must be rigid enough to work and maintain some constraints, but flexible enough to change those constraints as new data comes in.
The Tools
Tiago recommends using various tools for the various tasks and tie them together with a framework. I can tell you that my experience with Notion and Dendron says that’s a really solid set of advice. Use your calendar for planning events, a to do app for managing to dos, and then find a good note-taking app. I’m going to use the Google Suite (personal) of tools for my latest experiment. All these apps are Cloud-based and also have Android and iPhone apps.
- Google Keep
- Google Keep will be the primary way you take short-form notes, and also your index. You’ll want to use labels/tags extensively in keep.
- Google Drive, Docs, Sheets
- Google Drive will be where you save all relevant information. You’ll use the sharing links to embed in various parts of the other tools. For example, if you had a Google Keep note that grew to be a hefty size and requires a dedicated document, you copy the text from Keep to Docs and then leave a link to the new Google Doc in the Google Keep note.
- Google Calendar
- Put all your events here. You can link to Google Docs, Sheets, etc. in the description field for more information or meeting notes.
- Google Tasks
- This will be where all the actual tasks go. Google Tasks will also automagically place a task on your calendar if you have a due-date.
The Solution
I’ve briefly outlined what each tool will be used for above. In the next few posts I’ll go over setup and my own workflow.