Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them!

Here is how to build a second brain

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A notable problem faced by everyone today is information overload. According to The New York Times, the average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information daily. The reason for the huge figure can be traced to technological advancement. With modern technology tools, you can access a lot more resources to get information, from books, articles, videos, podcasts and others.

However, a lot of the information you are exposed to each day is not even related to the tasks needed to accomplish your primary goals. But you just make sure to keep every beautiful quote you see on the web in your head, perhaps it might be of use someday. In reality, you only end up remembering very few of these information you gather— quotes, highlights from books, and even your own brilliant ideas.

So, a consequence that results from information overload is that information becomes unretrievable when you need it. Truly, the brain is a super- powerful memory organ, but many are confused about what to actually store in it.

“Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them” — David Allen

Now, what is the solution to Information overload?

A direct solution is that you should trim down the quantity of information you consume, by using less educational resources. But because there is a constant need to improve yourself, this solution is a not a great one. To increase your knowledge and experience, you always need to deal with a lot of information.

Apart from that reason, your process of acquiring knowledge, and exposure to information doesn't always happen consciously. Sometimes you come across great ideas and excerpts subconsciously and you find them worthy of being kept. This essentially means you are not in full control of the amount for information that reaches you. So, you can't effectively cut down the amount of information that reaches you.

To deal with the problem of information overload, the amount of information you consume is not the big issue. You should consume a lot to learn a lot.

The solution that will be provided in this article will instead address how you should deal with the information you gather, storing and organizing it for future reference, and making it retrievable anytime needed. This, I believe, is a more effective way to manage information overload.

Here is the simple solution: Write things down immediately they catch your interest!

Writing things down gives you these benefits:

• Every worthy detail from your favourite book, or podcast is preserved and becomes retrievable when needed.

• You deal with less stress of forcing your brain to recall page numbers and other ridiculous information, freeing up your brain to do other important things.

• You save the time of combing through the web, or other resources for the second time, to search a particular quote, or excerpt that you loved.

A place where you document all these noteworthy information is called a commonplace book.

In it, you write everything information that resonates with you—quotes, notes from meetings, excerpts from books, lines from podcasts, brilliant ideas that popped up while you were in the shower, smart points from conversations with a friend, etc.

Your commonplace book gives you an abundance of information collections that you can always go back to when you need ideas. For content creators, this is a big deal.

Since a commonplace book is like an external brain where you store collected knowledge to free up your brain to perform more important tasks, Tiago Forte calls it a second brain!

In simple terms, your commonplace book is your second brain.

Setting up a second brain

A second brain is an organized space where you keep every information that interests you, but is not very relevant to you at the moment. Think of a physical book where you write down your thoughts, ideas, highlights from books, notes from meetings.

A physical commonplace book may be quite messy however. There are many reasons why a physical commonplace book won't serve to be a perfect second brain:

• You can't keep all forms of worthy information you come across in it—like pictures, recordings.

• You also can't search for ideas you saved, you will always have you go through every single page to get the information you need. This wastes time.

For these reasons, your second brain should be a digital commonplace, not a physical one.

A digital commonplace is a note-taking app that provides features that allows you to save and organize all forms of information, knowledge and ideas you gather. This preserves your best thoughts and contents that resonate with you. It also serves as a reliable knowledge bank you can go back to to source ideas when you need to show your work, create new things, and impact others.

To help individuals setup a highly effective second brain (a digital commonplace), Tiago Forte in his book titled building a second brain, proposed the CODE framework.

C in the CODE framework is for Capture.

This implies keeping everything you find noteworthy. You should also be selective with the type of information you capture, making sure your commonplace doesn't turn to another messed up web. The information you should capture are of two types— External and Internal Information.

External information includes excerpts from articles, highlights from books, lines from podcasts, quotes, pictures, recordings from videos, notes from meetings and others.

Internal information is everything that comes from your head while in the shower, or while trekking to class—brilliant ideas, ruminations, memories. Journaling also falls here.

O is for Organize.

Tiago Forte believes that notes should be organized according to the current projects you are working on. This helps to narrow your focus, and you have a vast garden of ideas stored to keep you going with the project.

This means that instead of having a folder in your note-taking app for keeping excerpts from books, you should instead create folders for your projects. Then, you paste in relevant quotes, excerpts, links that relates to each project into the specific project folder.

What are your opinions regarding this method of organizing your notes?

D is for Distill.

Interacting with your saved notes periodically to highlight the real gist, is distilling. Even though you highlight and save the important lines of a chapter, it happens that you can still extract the most important of the important lines.

E is for Express.

This is utilizing the knowledge stored in your second brain to create outputs —showing your work, creating things, and impacting others. In fact, that is this ultimate goal of the second brain idea, just like the basic goal of all knowledge we gather.

My second brain

I operate my second brain on Google notes. I have used different note-taking applications in the past, but right now, I stick to Google notes. A friend recommended the application some months ago, and I have been maximizing it since then. This was even long before I discovered the second brain concept. Now, I am working on exploring more around building a highly effective second brain.

A good feature that stands out about Google notes (and every other application by Google) is the synchronization feature. This means that as long as I have my gmail address functioning, and a device that can connect to the internet, I can always access my second brain anywhere, anytime.

Plus, on Google notes, I can preserve information in all forms — pictures, voice recordings, texts, web links. These reasons make it a just perfect digital commonplace for me!

Okay, that was a wrap.

Building a second brain helps to organize your life and boost your creativity. You don't always have to think of what YouTube video to make next— you have an abundance of ideas saved in your second brain that you can always go back to. For those that are not content creators, a second brain helps to free your brain for other important things that matter to you— like having fun!

Now, over to you! How do you manage your note-taking? What applications do you use and what changes do you look forward to implementing after going through this article?

You should also check out Tiago Forte's book— Building a second brain, for a deeper insight on this entire concept.

Until next time, stay good.

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