People with a "second brain": Why? How?
I've been looking around at different note-taking apps (Notion, Obsidian, Anytype, Joplin, Logseq, etc.) after seeing a few videos about the idea of having a "second brain", and only how has the the thought popped into my mind, "What's the point?". A “second brain” seems like it would require spending too much processing power on something that only exists to exist. What are the chances there you're going to remember any given thing after writing it down? You haven’t filled up your first brain yet. This all sounds very pessimistic - my intention is not to insult anyone's choice to use these tools, but I'm curious of what benefits people have gotten from their "second brains". Maybe I'm just the wrong kind of person for it, or maybe it's just that I'm not used to writing things down.
Edit: I'm coming to an interesting conclusion that many people use their version of a second brain for things they need to do. This isn't really what I was referring to, I was more looking at it as a form of journaling or personal research, which might be less common?
ADHD here.
External tools are crucial to my life.
I have essentially zero ability to say, "Oh, I better go take care of that task in an hour." and then actually do it. It never once enters my brain again.
What I have done instead is create a running to do list in an app. And I've created a compulsive habit of checking that list several times per day.
As for simple note taking, the act of processing and taking the time to write down something I've thought of or learned increases my chances of recalling it in the future. Doubly true if written by hand or drawn into a picture/diagram that shows relationships between concepts.
My understanding of this whole second brain concept is basically that it's a rebrand on something that's been known to work for centuries: taking notes and organizing your thoughts.
Undiagnosed some kind of attention disorder here. I have the same thing.
I can remember that I looked up something a while ago, but what the result of that lookup was is a complete blank.
Using a search engine to try and find whatever it was again is too hit and miss, the page might be gone or just too hard to find.
Thus: "Second brain" in Obsidian, where I copy/paste whatever I found out. If I'm really fastidious, I might even add a few tags to the markdown frontmatter to make it more searchable.
Now when I get that "I know I looked this up a while ago" I use Obsidian with Omnisearch first to see if it's something I already stored there or whether I need to fire up a search engine.
You can even do both at the same time! https://publish.obsidian.md/omnisearch/Inject+Omnisearch+results+into+your+search+engine
The other way seems more useful to me.
Yeah as someone with ADHD my brain cannot be relied upon to remember things, so something external is often very important on that front.
UNfortunately, I haven't found a "second brain" system that works for me yet either. I always end up neglecting them after a few weeks tops.
You might be interested in this previous thread. What I have found over the years that I have often the same issue as you. The way I try to account for it is to keep whatever system I use as simple and low effort as possible. But also just accept that my ADHD brain just sucks in motivating itself. So, whenever a system stops working, and I can't trick myself in using it again I switch to a different system. There are a few that I have used in the past I know I can sometimes pick again for a little while. I hope that makes sense?
Having said that, in that thread mentioned I did comment about a system that works for me and so far I have been able to maintain. It's far from perfect, but it is low friction and does keep me somewhat sane ;)
Isn't it funny how often ADHD'ers talk about "My brain" like it's a separate entity than ourselves. When I say it to neurotypical people, they sometimes probe about it (Although I find many neurotypicals to be pretty uninterested in understanding other's internal experience), but largely they are just confused by it. I've even had discussions with friends who almost see my disassociation from my brain as an excuse to explain away things I'm responsible for.
They just don't understand how other my brain feels to me, like it's a coworker I have to rely on daily, but I they report to another boss. I have to use tricks and treats, conditioning, post-its, signs, dry erase markers, prizes, books, journals, background stims, physical stims, fidgets, and any other god damn thing to just get it to do something I want, or even worse, NEED.
I never really thought about it like that. But now that you mention it, yeah, it's funny.
It also often feels like I have two brains, one I have control over which is "me" and then some sort of silent bully type who needs to give permission to actually be allowed to do what I want to do.
Or something like that
It gets messy fast when trying to make sense out of it. It also makes me hyper aware of the (lack of) conscience that goes into my actions. Neurotypical people often don't give that sort of thing a second thought (pun intended).
I always describe everything happening in my brain like it's a bureaucracy. I have hired and trained a guy that interjects when I am about to leave something out, instead of putting it away, also have a woman that manages my interruptions in conversation, etc, etc. I think it's helpful for us to describe our internal experiences as dynamics between two individuals, because we are so often mentally negotiating to do tasks that it kind of just manifests another entity. Similar to you, my wife has a negative voice that is critical to get her to "Act right," while mine is much more compassionate.
This comment (and the stuff you linked) is a great help, thanks so much! I'm game to try anything but you're right that simple and low effort is almost definitely the way to go.
I feel you. If I ever tell my wife I'm going to do something and she doesn't see me writing it down, she already knows it's not happening. I don't have the capacity to remember the thing I've just said.
I don't know how I'd operate like a normal human without to do lists and notes.
The whole point is that you don't have to remember it anymore after writing it down. You can let it go and just look it up in your notes later as needed.
It's possible that you have an unusually excellent memory, and really have no need for notes!
I'm pretty forgetful, so I'm heavily dependent on my "second brain" to help me stay on track with things I have to get done.
This question might seem disingenuous, but why do you need to write something down if you don't need to remember it?
My memory is definitely not superhuman, but maybe I don't have enough thoughts I consider worth keeping? You mention you use your 2nd brain to stay on track, is that just in the form of a todo list?
For the same reason that any form of written documentation exists. I don't need to have the information in my head, I just need to know where it is stored and how to find it.
I read that as not needing to make the effort to remember it, not that it wasn't important to remember it. I'm similar to feanne in that I'll forget many things that are important to remember if I don't write them down. I don't know if it's called a second brain, but I use a notes app on my phone to remember shopping lists, to-do items (with associated dates, phone numbers, etc), documentation of important phone call details, etc. I absolutely could get by without these notes, but a lot less things "slip through the cracks" when I use it.
And although I said "not needing to make the effort to remember it", that's not exactly true (for me). Making these notes is part of that effort, and it actually helps me to remember many of the notes so that I don't always need them in the end. The act of writing the notes helps make their items more permanent in my first brain.
It's like a phone number. You don't need to memorise (remember) any phone numbers, you write them down in your phone. Then all you need to remember is the person's name you want to contact.
Same works with all information. I don't need to remember how to set up chezmoi on a new computer, I don't need to search for it either. I can just open Obsidian and I have step-by-step instructions written that I can mostly just copy-paste and have it work.
I feel like the comment meant that they don't need to remember the details. Meaning that they only need to remember they wrote something down about a certain subject and can just look up the details if they need them.
I think for many the idea is that they can't guarantee they WILL remember it, and a second brain means they don't need to rely on remembering it, bc they'll see what they wrote down whenever they check their second brain.
Just to clarify, what I said earlier was "you don't have to remember it anymore" meaning you don't have to make the effort to keep it in mind because the notes will do that for you. So this is for things you need to remember, and the notes serve to help you with that. :)
And yeah it's mostly a todo list!
I've also used it for journaling and personal research as you've mentioned in your post edit. For me personally, "offloading" it from my mind and writing it out helps to clarify my thinking. When an idea is just in my mind it often feels nebulous but when I write it down it kinda forces me to be more specific, detailed, and clear in expressing the idea.
These notes don't necessarily need to be "worth keeping" as in, preserved for the long-term. They can just serve to help me "offload" / clarify my thoughts in the moment.
Btw I don't have any fancy or well-organized "second brain" system. I just have a bunch of markdown notes in various apps. I call it my "second brain" just because I feel like it "remembers" a lot of things for me, not because it's any sort of special or complicated setup.
You may find this article on "the extended mind" interesting:
https://anniemurphypaul.substack.com/p/my-essay-for-the-new-york-times-about
I use notion to stay organized on research projects. There are many details that I may spend a few hours figuring out, for example debugging weird errors or working out the math behind something. I usually write this type of thing down, as it’s always possible I will encounter an analogous if not identical situation in the future and I can look back to see what solution I came up with before. I also use it to write down ideas I had that I don’t have time to pursue at the moment. Just to give some examples.
Researcher here. And also an enthusiast for all things cognition and meta-cognition.
I think the "second brain" concept that you're alluding to is actually a "knowledge graph". If, as you mention in your edit and comments, that you don't mean a to-do list or just writing information down.
To distill this figure into words: information is a list of facts, but knowledge comes from the relationships between the facts. Formally, a graph is a tool used to represent objects and their relationships. Hence, a knowledge graph.
The recent and maybe original method for this was the analog Zettelkasten approach. Analogous to the internet, you would have cards with essential pieces of information which would then reference other cards with definitions/concepts/ideas.
This becomes powerful when populated and networked because a) it facilitates making connections between ideas, which is one definition of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking and b) if formalizes and solidifies your trains of thought i.e. how you went from fact A through B, C... to Z. (To paraphrase Metcalfe's Law, the value of the knowledge graph is proportional to the square of connected ideas (n2).)
Long-form writing is a form of thinking, but often limited to being linear, while a knowledge graph expands this a non-linear space, allowing for tangents that could one day be reconnected or expanded on. To me this is the true second-brain functionality. Not to mention the value of offloading your memory onto a large and much more stable medium: a physical hard disk.
Really any note-taking app that allows markdown and hyperlinking can be used for this purpose. But I lean in favor of Obsidian because it explicitly shows a graph/network view of your knowledge graph. Essentially a way to visualize your meta-cognition.
I gave up on a second brain. I tried Emacs Org Mode for years and I always ended up stuck with an overly complex structure that became a problem in itself. I also used Org Roam, deft, Org Brain, and many other Emacs modes that a lot of people love. But something like Emacs could never work for me, I'm a compulsive tinkerer with an ADHD diagnosis and if you give me a car made of lego I'll spend 20 years taking it apart without leaving the garage.
Now I use Obsidian, but it's not a "brain" to me. I use it as a text editor with markdown support. There's no logic to it, and no "best practices", because any logic I come up with will automatically become a tinkering temptation. I write whatever I must write, that's about it. There's barely any linking, tagging, or anything of the sort.
I organize the files in folders (for "project" or "area" in a very obvious and unsophisticated manner. For example, one folder for comments and posts on Tildes) after the fact, but again, there's no fixed logic or standard procedure for it. Any kind of fixed procedure will lead to ADHD obsession. So I don't have any.
Obsidian's search is useful, and it's all markdown so if I need to perform more powerful queries in the future I can just use the command line.
Obsidian is what I use for my fantasy world-building at the moment, as it's super easy to make a wiki style setup, but I'm curious as to what everyday things you write down? Also I agree with the idea of being a "compulsive tinkerer", that could be a part of my misunderstanding of the function of a 2nd brain.
Provided that I'm at the computer, anything that I write of considerable length is on Obsidian. So it can be anything, really. Including things that it wouldn't even make sense to preserve. Any comment that I post on Tildes over a certain length was typed on Obsidian. Aso wrote a 4500 words short story in it. Anything.
That's interesting. Would you say that you find yourself writing more because you have obsidian? As in, do you have more thoughts that you consider turning into writing because you have the tool?
Obsidian is useful to me because it has some basic features I require without being a bucket of colorful Legos as it would be the case for Emacs, Vim, VS Code, or any other highly configurable/scriptable platform. It could easily be replaced for any pretty enough text editor with a Vim mode and markdown highlighting. I like that it's aware of folders, which are displayed on the sidebar. The search is nice, but a lot of editors have just as good visual search.
It was just a case of it being already installed and configured to my liking. It is not a "brain" to me so it wouldn't have been my choice if I was looking strictly for a text editor. But it ended up being a good fit.
Because it's got features that are missing from my first one
From Forte Labs:
Reduce stress and “information overload” by curating and managing your personal information stream
Create a digital environment that promotes clarity and peace of mind
Unlock the full value of the wealth of learning resources all around you, such as online courses, webinars, books, articles, forums, and podcasts
Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds
Spend less time looking for things and more time doing the best, most creative work you are capable of
Cultivate a collection of valuable knowledge and insights over time without having to follow rigid, time-consuming rules
Consistently move your projects and goals to completion by organizing and accessing your knowledge in a results-oriented way
Turn work “off” and relax, knowing you have a trusted system keeping track of all the details
Some of these sound kinda vague - I'm just copy pasting from their source.
For me, feature 4, 5, and 7 are buggy at best and perhaps even totally missing. My brain doesn't come with a timestamp feature: imagine a database with no timestamp. Most of the time, recollections and their time frames have to be inferred from peripheral information. Example, did I make that 6 hour drive to another city yesterday, or two days ago? -- it was for a Saturday liturgy, and today my notes say I have work, so that must have been two days ago. Regular brains don't need that extra step, I've been told.
Others use it because without an outside list of to do things to confirm that all things are done, they can't relax and will go into spirals of "keep thinking in circles because we can't afford to miss doing something important".
I feel that the term "second brain" is unfortunately heavily commercialized, with all its associations with expensive courses and books, so I refer to my organizational system as a personal wiki or simply a digital notebook – but that's just what I've decided to do for myself.
I have created one wiki for my personal life and one for my school activities. I'm mainly going to talk about the former here, as school-related stuff may be off-topic for this discussion (so nothing about tasks, mail, and calendars, for instance).
To answer the "why" part of your question, the main purpose of my notebook is to collect any kind of information I receive or create myself. This clears my mind in the short term and allows me to refer back to pieces of knowledge later on. Also, it just feels good to have everything in one place and to declutter my digital space.
Now for the "how" part, which I didn't see much of in this thread (yay, my chance to contribute original ideas and not just badly rehash what others have already articulated better): When I first decided on a structure, I was thinking about how I would broadly categorize my life, so I created a few main areas/contexts. Although I can see the argument for a tag-based design (and I've been trying to implement it in a complementary way without success so far), I'm more comfortable with a hierarchical structure; it's also quite easy to keep track of as I don't have that many categories – there are just under 15 right now [1], and I'll probably need to reduce that.
I believe that a system that basically manages everything that goes on in your life is fundamentally messy and will always be a work in progress. No concept, not even the fundamental design of the notebook, is set in stone, and I occasionally take time to think about whether a change is needed to ensure the system's long-term scalability. Still, I think it's best to have a simple and adaptable framework (plain text files, libre software, high speed, offline workflow …).
I aim to review my notes often, to monitor the structure, and to delete and improve my notes (I like the metaphor of repeatedly tending to a digital garden, watering the plants and pulling out the weeds). I've thought about making this easier by automatically prioritizing certain notes for the review (think spaced repetition without the flashcards), but I don't know how to implement this with the software I'm using.
Maybe this comment has derailed from the topic at hand, and it's become somewhat rambly, but hopefully it's of some use; I see a lot of posts on the web that focus on what concrete tools are being used but not what workflows (the more abstract organization behind it all) people are implementing. I'm not sure if I should mention the tool I use; it's an important part of my process, but maybe that would make my statement seem insincere.
[1] To be specific, the more important ones for me personally are: Finance (for storing receipts), Hobbies (books, comics, movies, games …), Knowledge (mostly notes on health topics like nutrition and exercise, as my study material is stored elsewhere), Lifestyle (notes on how I actually implement this knowledge in my life, so stuff like self-care), Medical things (like prescriptions), Productivity (describing my study workflows), a scratchpad for quick notes, Thoughts (essays I've written myself and ones I've found on the web that seemed interesting), and Recipes. I also have a to-do list of tasks I want to do sometime in the future; anything I think of doing during the day goes straight in here without a deadline.
Perhaps what you're missing is the option not to write everything down in the second brain. Nothing wrong with short and sweet.
I don't quite understand this comment, are you referring to the option to choose not to write something down? or the option to write something short down?
I was referring to the former but the concept doesn't exclude the latter. You should customize the second brain methodologies so that its helpful to you, not burdensome.
I think the problem is that I don't have many thoughts I consider worth writing down. I don't know if I'm expecting too much from myself, or if I actually have not much mental depth lmao
It's also possible that you simply don't need it as much as other people do. If you have a fairly good memory for details and are otherwise well organized, then maybe you simply don't need it.
It also highly depends on the context where you are using it. A lot of people who are into something like a second brain are people who work in a high information density environment. For example, if you work in IT, have lots of meetings, things you work on, etc.
Even more so if the organization you work for has chaotic tendencies (poor meeting notes, task management, etc) then it can become difficult to keep track of all the things that are happening. In that case, using a second brain type of deal can help you deal with all of that more easily.
If we are looking outside professions, it greatly depends on the kind of hobbies you practice. If they are hobbies that also require juggling a lot of information then it might be useful. So things like hobby programming, writing, etc. But for someone who is more in physical hobbies like doing a sport, then they probably have very little use for extensive note taking.
So I guess my question is, what is the context you were looking at using it?
I'm just about to start at university for design, I don't know what kind of note taking I'll need for that so that's not factoring in quite yet. Apart from that - which is only a "hobby" until next month - I produce music which doesn't need much note taking outside of my audio workstation (I have a physical notebook for when I'm learning about stuff), and I casually do worldbuilding for a fantasy setting and cyberpunk setting. For those things, Obsidian seems to work fine. I find that I have fleeting ideas - either creative or introspective - that disappear into the ether because I don't have an outlet for myself. I'm not even entirely sure that it's a bad thing, but it does mean that I end up never expanding upon any of the ideas. These are ideas that aren't detailed enough to require that I make a specialized system just for them (e.g. both of my worldbuilding settings have a wiki), so they never get any attention. Whenever I've had note systems in the past, I've felt like I was forcing myself to write stuff down, it didn't come naturally.
Generally speaking it does sound like a whole second brain system might indeed be overkill for you.
The one thing that does jump out is this
But for that you don't really need an extensive system. You might as well carry a notebook around and jot down notes if you are curious about exploring these fleeting ideas a bit more.
But even that, only when you really do want to explore those ideas a bit more.
One more remark
You need to do whatever works for you. What watching online resources doesn't tell is that most of these guides are highly anecdotal and basically tailored to the people that have found that a specific way of working works for them.
I am also not organized enough to keep structured notes, I still do need to write things down, or I'll personally forget. For that I have my own system that works for me but likely will be terrible for other people.
Regarding your edit:
There are definitely users that take notes on every show they watch, every book they read, every podcast they listen to. Some professionals in e.g. research or academics use Obsidian to link and make sense of all their work corpus. They're a vocal minority of power users, and they are also those same people who produce and consume the several videos you've watched about the trendy note taking apps and the dozen methodologies that come with them.
Most users will simply take notes of the few things they deem important. Work stuff, DIY home improvement, hobbies. Those users are the majority but they don't need 2-hours videos on Zettelkasten or Johnny Decimal to learn how to write a to-do list.
I was unfamiliar with the term "second brain" so I did some googling. It seems to be a system for systematically making a fairly comprehensive digital archive of notes.
In my professional experiences I've seen a large gamut of note taking styles, and only one person comes to mind that I feel is a good fit. They used written notes using the levenger disc bound sheets to make their own custom day planners, meeting notes, decision points, etc. She was my boss and mentor at the time, and we oversaw capital construction projects, space, safety, and IT for a large organization. She used her notes to hold committees and contractors accountable to agreed upon time frames, building programming decisions, etc. Probably one of the most deliberate people I ever met, but would be completely lost without her notes.
But I don't think most people need or use notes quite like that. The majority of people I know keep lists of thoughts or items for follow up with just enough context to jog their memories. They aren't going back months and months. Those sorts of situations are usually covered by formal meeting minutes.
I use notes like that, but often times it's also to capture a particular phrasing or nuance of an idea that I might not recall exactly the same way when I have a chance to sit down with it later. Sometimes I wake up at night or have a thought right before bed that will keep me up if I don't jot it down quickly.
Honestly, I think the best thing to do is try a bunch of different ways of taking notes, tailored to your actual use and needs, and iterate over time.
I've been using Logseq since last July (and obsidian 1-2 month before that) in both professionals and personal capacity.
I dabbled in Obsidian some times before but ended up with Logseq because of Obsidian license.
At work (in a software dev) I use it both as a journal and as a way to centralize my own notes it the various project or client in involved in/with.
It helps that Logseq is more opinionated toward this goal than Obsidian, as it display a journal view on launch by default. It somewhat works with how my brain works.
The cost to record something is low, as I can just write
#clientXYZand then whatever and everything will be gathered automatically in the dedicated clientXYZ pageFor personal use I found that the best use-case for me is to record stuff about medium/long term project or complex one. This provides a uniform interface on how you access information. But since it's an outline, it also helps to think about said stuff. For instance:
This stems from the realization that I'm bad (not rigorous enough) at doing review / tending my knowledge garden as various methodologies often asks. However I do know how to search for stuff.
It depends on what you write down.
I work in hardware development, and a lot of the things I do for work is coming up with new ideas and testing those ideas. I need to document those ideas and write down the results of those tests. Many of those ideas relate to each other, and of course results have a relationship to ideas.
Those apps help me organize all that. In time, by subject, by project, ect. And they allow me to extensively link between them.
Of course, I could just write everything down in an old-fashioned lab book. Or keep a loose collection of emails and a file system full of Word/PowerPoint documents only I know my way around (many of my colleagues work like that). Or I could write a wiki (I do that, too, it works about equally as well. More effort, but easier to access for other people).
Those apps are one solution among many. In my opinion, they are among the better ones.
The closest thing I have to a "second brain" is a Mycroft Mark II running vanilla-ish Raspbian with a crontab that gives me a few recurring reminders using text-to-speech, on-screen notifications, and push notifications to my phone. Reminds me to do things like roll the trash to the curb on pickup day every week, the dogs' flea prevention treatment once a month, replacing our HVAC filters every few months, screens-off time for the kids before bedtime, my own daily meds, and so on.
I've tried to maintain more elaborate systems where I also keep track of ephemeral tasks or information, but I've never felt I got enough value from them to be worth all the effort of integrating them into my daily life. I think it's because I go out of my way to avoid future tasks and procrastination in general--I hate having things outside of my normal routine "looming over me" from the future (upcoming dentist/doctor appointments can stress me out a bit, for example) so if something comes up that I need to do I'm very likely to just do it immediately so I don't have to think about it anymore, meaning there's no point in writing it down to keep track of it.
I like the linking and tagging features in obsidian, in the sense that my goal is to create an index of things I think are worth remembering.
So, the quotable quote, the memorable film, the intriguing vacation idea, my husband's random comment that might inspire a birthday gift, research notes related to work.
The idea is that in ten years, I really won't remember that thing that I thought was cool or interesting, and I definitely won't remember the details of what I was writing about.
The people who talk online about links and tags say that they make folders unnecessary, but I use folders also. But like the tags on Tildes, my obsidian vault is searchable by topic.
I also use it for a calendar/diary that I don't share with Google
Edit-
Forgot 6.
Syncing. Having all my data synced through obsidian (i pay for their service to support them but there's other ways if price is an issue) or github (via dendron) helps a TON with being able to always know what I last did. No "oh that's on the other machine" or "whoops I think i'm farther here". For mobile work I use github journal to access my repo (since there's no mobile dendron), and obsidian mobile is serviceable enough when I want to pull up the places to eat we've all been talking about or want to go to.
And 7.
Always have access. Both of these tools store data as plain markdown files and do fancy stuff on top of it. Should any of the companies explode over night the data is MINE. It's still all stored locally as well as the syncing location and I can access all of my data and switch to another program should I want to.
I don't remember where I read it-- maybe Andy Matuschak-- but it's the image of notes as workbenches that hooked me first. I'm interested in vastly more things than my poor brain can keep up with, and was forever chasing after myself, trying to remember where I was when I got back to one hobby or another.
Now I just spawn a note. What research had I done on the particular costume I'm thinking of making? Where was I in my reading on the Jurassic vs. the Cretaceous? What was the last scene I'd written about this pair of characters trying to escape a cave and what connections had I made between them and anything else? What did I eat last week? What tasks do I have left for a client's project and how did I solve that problem we had on a similar issue with a different client-- which project was that, even?
At this point I have everything in Obsidian-- daily notes, personal research, work, writing. I just had to get over stressing about having a perfect system. I fretted about having different styles of daily note and the idea of going back to reformat a decade of them-- and it wound up not mattering, because I can pretty much always find things again. I remember that I've taken notes on things, or I put them in places I'll simply run over them again when I need to, and that's enough. I pile unread website links into unsorted lists in the notes they're most related to, and when I have time for that topic again I go through them. Being able to query things with Dataview is absolutely the cherry on top.
Long answer short... I'm actually semi-organized for the first time in my life-- sufficiently organized and with a system I can continue improving and that feels safe and complete-- and it is awesome.