Let’s talk about the Second Brain system.

The Second Brain is a system that was pioneered by Tiago Forte, and it works on the principle that human brains are really good at creating ideas, but not remembering them.

What is the Second Brain System? Why is it useful?

The second brain helps collect those ideas and also helps you come up with new ones from tiny bits of information that you already know and have.

It helps you start from abundance instead of starting from scratch. If you have to write something every week, you could sit down and think about what you’re going to write, create a structure, and then write it. Or, you could have a list of tiny bits of information that could spark something in you and help you write the thing, without you having to think too much about it. Once you begin to offload these things to the Second Brain, burnout will become less common and it’ll become more fun doing the things you want to do.

What are the main parts of a second brain system?

The second brain system uses a framework called CODE.

CODE has 4 parts: Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express.

Capture, as the name suggests, helps you take ideas and thoughts out of your brain and put it into safe storage as fast as possible. It also helps you note down interesting ideas and things that you read/watch/listen to that you find interesting.

Organize, as the name suggests again, helps you take the information and put it into places where it will be useful. For example, blog quotes and video quotes are useful for maintaining your blog; and chord progression ideas are useful in music making.

Distill helps you take that organized information and reduce it down to the ideas that are most important to you. It helps you take information and simplifies it to a state that you can create your own interpretations from it. I know it sounds a little vague (and it honestly kind of is, I don’t really know how you can do it yet), but that’s what I’ve understood from the videos I’ve watched and the blog posts I’ve read.

Express helps you take the ideas and flesh it out into a video, blog, podcast, or just a piece of information for yourself. Basically, creating output from things you’ve learnt.

My Second Brain System

Capture

My Capture system consists of 4 main things: a calendar, to-do list, a note-taking app, and a read it later app.

I use Google calendar as my calendar of choice. Previously, I used Outlook calendar, but I just find that Google’s calendar is a lot more aesthetically pleasing and is easier to create events on. I mainly use Google calendar to plan my week every Sunday: the things I have to achieve and when I’ll achieve it.

My to-do list of choice is Microsoft To Do. Honestly, I started off with it and it’s been everything I needed. Custom lists, groups, quick adding and editing of tasks… it’s almost perfect for me. I especially like the My Day feature, where I can add tasks to finish on that day. It’s extremely useful and helps me keep track of the things I have to do on that specific day, without having to go through the massive list that is all my tasks.

I use Google Keep for notetaking, mainly because it’s really light and quick with low load times. This allows me to write stuff into it quickly, without having to wait for the page to load. It’s also extremely aesthetically pleasing. Whenever I see or read something that is interesting, I open up Keep and copy-paste, paraphrase, or take a picture into my notes.

My read-it-later app of choice is Instapaper. Instapaper helps you save links for reading later and also allows highlighting and notetaking within the app (although I don’t use it). It also provides you with an email ID that you can use to subscribe to newsletters (which is a big leg up over my previous app of choice, Pocket).

Organize

Everything goes into Notion. I have a ton of databases to keep track of everything I do and the things I want to do. It is extremely powerful and it helps me break down everything into small steps and reduces overwhelm.

I did previously use Obsidian, but it didn’t really work for me and I went back to the tried and tested.

Notion has all my creative projects, college-related information, and important school stuff too.

Some people use an app called Readwise to automatically send highlights and notes into Notion, but I just manually copy-paste it at the end of the week.

Distill

The main way I distill my notes is by converting them into to-do tasks or ideas in Notion. It makes the notes useful for other things too.

Express

Blogs, podcasts, and videos. That’s all there is to it!

This Week’s Updates

Midterms

I have midterms coming up soon, and most of my effort is just going into studying for that. It’s kind of stressful mainly because its a new board and its the first official exam that I’m writing in this board.

I think everything will go okay though!

YouTube

It is back! Videos are up!

Thanks for reading!

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