Transcription
All you need is a place for the information, a place for the stuff that needs taking action, and a place for all the cool stuff you come across on the internet that you might want to keep. That's it. It doesn't have to be that complicated.
If you clicked on this video, you'll probably already know what a second brain is, and you're sick of seeing these highly complicated 10-step systems that people call their second brain on the internet. And today, I wanted to share with you something way more simple that hopefully you can start using and actually stick to for your second brain.
Welcome back to Fun Productivity. For those of you who are new, my name is Andrea, and today I wanted to show you how I organize my second brain. I, of course, being the productivity nerd that I am, experimented with these highly complicated systems using multiple apps, blah, blah, blah, anything under the sun. And I realized, not quickly enough, that honestly, it doesn't have to be that complicated. You can go way more simple and still land on the same place. So that is the system that I wanted to share with you guys today. I'm just going to kind of walk you through the outline, show you more or less how it looks like in action, and give you the guide to how you can actually start building your own and start organizing all that digital information today. So without further ado, grab coffee and let's get started.
Of course, first things first, what is a second brain? Well, this was a term coined by Thiago Forte. He has a whole entire like course and system and books based on this idea. And he describes a second brain as, let me just get this right, a digital system to organize your ideas, knowledge, and creativity. And I actually think he hit the the nail, what is it, hit the nail in the head, hit the head, whatever. Because in this highly crowded digital age, we receive thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of information throughout our lifetime. And a lot of that information, you do want to keep, a lot you want to use and then get rid of. And it's very hard to stay organized with the amount of information that is coming to our plate. So he coined this system and kind of gave birth to the idea of being intentional about organizing your whole digital life, which is something that we could all use, honestly, and that I think is kind of necessary in this digital era.
So your second brain is just that. It's basically a collection of all the information. It's anything that you might need, anything that you need to save, anything that you need to reference, anything that you need to take action on. Calendar events, tasks, notes, ideas, pictures, references, um, stupid manuals that you have to keep for your house, everything, all organized in a way that makes it very easy for you to find. Because that's the point of this. The idea is to be able to use that information when you need it.
That can look like having everything in one single application, in one place, somewhere like Notion, for example. Or it can look like having multiple applications that work together in order to build your entire second brain. The basis of this is that it is all purposeful, intentional, and organized.
I do think there are some ground rules that we need to play by in order to actually use a second brain. And the first one being, everything has a home. Just how in your house, every single object should have a place where it is stored, where it lives, where you know you can put it back. The same thing goes for your digital life. Everything needs a place to go. And that needs to be, if not intentional, at least clear. You at least know where it goes for this to work.
Number two, everything needs to get captured. So if you don't get in the habit of actually putting things into your digital system or your physical system, if you want, or whatever, into your second brain, then you won't have a second brain ever. Everything needs to be captured so that your brain can rest and can actually just forget about it, trusting that it is in a place where you will come and find it later.
And finally, number three, is that this whole system operates in a certain rhythm. And it's this rhythm of capturing information, organizing it, resurfacing it when necessary, and just constantly going through the capture, organize routine. Otherwise, everything will just be in a dumping folder, and you will never be able to find anything. And all of these things make it sound way more complicated than it is because honestly, you already do this as a part of your day-to-day life. This is just kind of doing it in a little bit of a more organized, intentional way.
No matter how simple we want to make it, and I already said how simple it can be, it still needs structure, right? You can't just have everything in one folder. I mean, you could, but are you going to find it pretty quickly? Probably not. It does require a little bit of structure. And the down for to the creator of the second brand came up with a structure he calls PARA: Project, Areas, Resources, and Archive. Which I personally don't like. I don't think it makes a lot of sense for me, and I don't use this in my day-to-day life. So I created my own. Are we surprised? No.
I think that this just makes a lot more sense and is actually a lot more applicable to all of our lives. And I called it the Wall. You know how like in crime movies they have that wall with like the red string and everything that's going on? That's what I mean by the Wall. There's basically three parts to it. I mean, technically four, but you'll see why I say technically. So let me just walk you through it really quickly, and then I'll dive a little bit deeper into what these actually are, how you can organize them, and what they look like in my system.
So the Wall, they all follow the acronym, of course. So W for Wiki, A for Action Zone, the first L is for the Library, and the second L is for Loose Thoughts. So the Wiki is basically where all of your information goes. This is documents that you need to keep, this is recipes, this is notes, this is any piece of information regarding your life.
Action Zone, pretty self-explanatory. It's where everything that requires you taking action will go. This one, I specifically break it down into two different sections. There's the day-to-day system, which I call the Productivity System, that involves your calendar and your tasks and whatever. And then Headquarters, which is all the information related to anything that needs taking action. So projects, goals, checklists, for example, all the areas of your life, like anything that will kind of organize on a bigger scale, things that need taking action.
The Library is where I would store anything that I come across in the world. So like quotes, notes from books that I read, I don't know, I saw something on Instagram or YouTube that I like and I wrote it down, not it's on a little podcast. Like it's basically what in the Zettelkasten world you would call your literature notes. This is where everything that you encounter and you want to keep, basically knowledge, would go to the Library.
And then finally, the Loose Thoughts. This is your space to think without structure. Because I think any system, don't you need a safe space to not have to be thinking about how I organize this outline, format, and the title, and the headers, and all that? No, you need just space to dump and just to leave everything on the page without any restrictions and constraints. And that's what I call the Loose Thought section. You'll understand what I mean by that in a little bit.
And of course, as I mentioned, all of the system relies on you being able to capture the information. So you capture it, it goes into your second brain, probably into an inbox or something, and then it goes into its corresponding home. Bottom line: a place for all of your information, a place for all the things that need taking action, and a place for all the cool stuff that you've encountered. That's it. It sounds way more complicated when you put on a graph, but honestly, that's it.
As I mentioned, you can have one application or you can have multiple applications that kind of encompass your entire system. I like to have everything in one application as much as possible because this will make it easier for you to like send things to its proper home, for you to connect different things together, and all that stuff. And my personal choice is Apple Notes. I keep my entire life on Apple Notes for many reasons, but along with those, it's free, it's super simple, it's a very beautifully made application, and you can load it so quickly without the need of internet. I love it so, so, so, so much.
Now, if you do need to use other applications, which I'll get into my use cases now, my rule of thumb is when that application is made 10 times better for whatever function you're looking for. For example, obviously Notes is not a great task manager, so I use a task manager for that. It doesn't even have a calendar, I obviously use a calendar for my calendar. You could easily create your entire system in something like Notion or any application that you actually love.
Let's walk through the entire system and I'll give you a really quick preview of what that looks like in my computer. The first one would be the Wiki. And as I mentioned, it's just all your information. So I like to just have one folder based on whatever that information is, and I have a multiple list of folders, and that's about it. That makes it very easy to find anything. And honestly, I don't go through these folders very often.
And for the Action Zone, I keep all of my Headquarters files in my Notes app. And then I use either Todoist and Calendar or AnkiFlow in order to organize kind of my productivity system. I actually made an entire video dedicated to creating a productivity system with one app, so you guys can go check that out. And I will be making another one creating a task manager and calendar combination in the future, so stay tuned for that.
And for the Library, again, I keep this in my Apple Notes. And I personally like to categorize it just based on where I got the source from. I still have to migrate where I used to have my library from, so that's why there's not a lot here, as you can see. It's very simple. I literally have one folder for Wiki, Action Zone, Library. And then I just have subfolders that kind of make sense under those. I typically try to stick to a one-tier system where it's like one subfolder and that's it. I don't like to go like 10 folders in. And that's pretty much it. So everything is very straightforward where it should go.
And for the Loose Thought section, this section is a little bit different because as I just mentioned, you need space to be able to work without boundaries. And for that specifically, I think nothing beats paper. Pen and paper is my go-to for actually being able to brain dump and create ideas and just write to my heart's content. So I personally just like to use a little notebook that I keep with me all the time. And I just build this to the brim with whatever is going through my head. Like, just some of this is trash. Oh, actually, look, this is the outline for the second brain. So some of it is actually pretty good stuff. This honestly has been an invaluable tool for me. It has just really, this sounds very exaggerated, but completely changed my life. I'm going to make a whole video about it. But as you can see, the loose thoughts is just this special place where you can actually go to create freely. And then whatever you actually need, you can send it to your system if you want.
And that is pretty much it for what my system looks like. Obviously, there's a lot of information that comes across you, and there's a lot, lot of ways to organize this. No matter how simple we can make it, there's still a lot of things that you can do with it, which is why I'm going to do dedicated videos as part of this second brain series where I walk you through all the different sections, and if I have any tricks and stuff that I do for them, and how I like to organize them, and blah, blah, blah. The first video is already up, and it's a productivity system. So go ahead and check that out.
If you were going to build your own, if you were going to migrate into my system of the second brain, how would you go about it? Number one is, you got to pick the application. Honestly, I think any note-taking application works. I really seriously love Apple Notes. If you're not an Apple user, you can use something like, I guess, OneNote, Evernote, whatever. If you want a very simple kind of like folder-note system, or if you want to just go crazy and kind of create things a little bit more tailored, you can use Notion. That's a great place to be your all-in-one system as well. If you guys are interested, I am thinking about making a template possibly for my entire second brain system in Notion, but I'm only going to do that if you guys really want me to. So let me know in the comments.
Now, the only caveat that I would add to this application is that you need it to have really, really, really, really good capture. Nothing beats the Notes app in my opinion. You can swipe from the corner, you can press like keyboard shortcuts, the Quick Notes function is beautiful, or you can just open it and make a note really, really quickly. As long as there's a very quick way for you to capture information, whatever application you love should be fine.
Number two is, start building. And I personally like to use a bottoms-up approach in which all you're going to do is create the high-level folders: your Wiki, your Action Zone, and then your Library. And maybe, if your application doesn't already have it, create like an inbox. Start using it. So in the beginning, just start putting all the things that you think are relevant to each of those folders as you go. And then slowly, you're going to start to notice either categories come up, or things that can be grouped into a specific folder, or subcategories that you could put within that high-level hierarchy. And organically, you will start to be able to organize it. This is why I love a very simple kind of folder-to-note application because the only option you have is to group them onto a folder like that. That's the only thing you can do. And then either create a folder or a subfolder. So the hierarchy is kind of done for you. And this makes it very, very easy for you to organize it as you go, just by grouping things together through like theme, category, or whatever, into a folder.
About once a week, maybe in the beginning, start going through that inbox and just deleting the things you no longer need and sending things to their proper home. If you do that, then you'll be able to kind of keep up with it, and you'll know exactly where everything is. It's just very, very simple to use, in my opinion.
As a little bonus, get a notebook. Honestly, start experimenting with just writing your ideas down on paper. You can always take a picture, scan it, send it to your Notes app or whatever. And it has really freed up a lot of mental clutter for me, and it has been very helpful to just have a place where you need no structure. So I would definitely encourage you to try that.
And that is it for this video, guys. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give it a thumbs up, subscribe, all the things. I am definitely going to continue this series where I walk you through in-depth of each of those sections of my second brain. And hopefully, you guys can get a bit of ideas and share with me how it is you organize yours and the things that have really worked for you. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.