My second brain with Notion, Readwise, Google Maps, and much more
My second brain with Notion, Goodreads, Google Maps, and much more
As an Engineering Manager and productivity geek, I’ve always been interested in how you can utilize technology to increase your impact. It all started with something simple as a digital calendar and a to-do app (Remember the Milk, for those that are interested) and maybe taking a note or two (in Evernote). Soon, I started to utilize those tools to remember every small detail in my life: from wishing my parents a pleasant flight when they would go on holiday, to a weekly reminder to change the towels: my phone would make sure I remembered it. I quickly noticed how delegating these kinds of tasks to a digital tool made me not only more organized, but also a better friend and overall more relaxed. Therefore, I started to research which areas in life I could also ‘enhance’ with technology.
So, I started my journey into the concept of the Second Brain. For those that don’t know, the idea of the Second Brain is “[…] a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience.” (Forte Labs). It is built around the quote of David Allen from Getting Things Done: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
For this article, I will be assuming that you are familiar with the Second Brain concept as explained by Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. If you are not, I would highly recommend getting the book or checking out this great video from Ali Abdaal. But even if you’re not interested in the concept behind it, this might be an interesting read if you want to find a way to always remember:
- Any task, appointment, or activity
- Anything read anywhere, ever
- Any movie you’ve watched
- Any place you want to visit
- Insight into the health of your body over time
Curious? Read on!
The foundation
In the Second Brain book, Tiago Forte recommends using the “right tool for the right job”. The focus of the book is mainly on digital notetaking. I have taken this concept further and tried to find the right application or website for any of the types of content that I would like to capture. The great thing about this is that you get a lot of extra functionality (such as personalized recommendations, overviews, or easy integrations) when you use a specialized app. In addition, almost all of the better apps have some sort of integration with other relevant applications, making it easy to create connections between the separate parts of my second brain. Below you find a brief overview of all the different tools I use to capture every aspect of my life. In the rest of the article, I will be diving more into the details of why and how I use each app.
Task and time management
Apps in use: Todoist and Google Calendar
Let’s start with the most basic one first. The concept for knowing what to put where is simple:
- Is it actionable, resolvable within a day but not timebound? (e.g. ‘picking up drycleaning’) > put it in Todoist
- Is it actionable and timebound? (e.g. ‘meeting up with friends’ or ‘traveling by train’) > put it in Google Calendar
- Is it none of the above? > Put it in Notion (see below)
The reason I chose Todoist is twofold: firstly, it has great ‘natural language processing’ capabilities which allow me to type tasks such as ‘polish my shoes every last Sunday of the month’ and the app will understand when to plan it. Secondly, it has location-based reminders. Location-based reminders are when you can get reminded of a task when you enter or leave a certain area. Great for when you are meeting up with someone at their place and need a reminder to ask for that book that you have lent them.
Next to using Todoist for tasks, I also have a shared list with my wife for the groceries. Every time we (almost) finish something in the inventory, we add it to the list. Next time either one of us is in the supermarket, we just check the list of newly added items. (Added bonus: you can also display the list on a home dashboard such as Home Assistant!)
The last list I would recommend is my ‘gift ideas’ list. Every time a friend or my wife says “wow I really like this and that product” or “it would be so cool if I could do that” it gets added to the list. By the time their birthday or the holidays are coming up, I pull up the list and immediately have some great inspiration.
The use of Google Calendar is mainly because I already have a Google account. This is quite a basic setup. Basically, anything that is timebound such as travel (using the Dutch Railways app), appointments, recurring appointments, and birthdays (see ‘Contact information’ below) gets added to the calendar. The key here is to make this consistent, so you can trust that your calendar gives a complete overview.
Reading and watching
Apps in use: Feedly, Instapaper, Readwise, Notion, Goodreads, Kindle, IMDB*
A large part of the flow of my second brain is built around the different types of content that I daily read. As an Engineering Manager in a start-up/scale-up, there are always hundreds of things to spend my limited time on. Next to that, the technology around us is changing faster with the day. To stay up to date with trends within the software development world (and make sure that I remember all those trends), I follow multiple newsletters and blogs. I can add these in an app called Feedly, where they are all bundled together so I can review them every morning. I forward interesting articles to Instapaper. I read these on either my phone or tablet (an Onyx Boox Leaf, a tablet that runs Android and thus can install any app). Other interesting articles that I come across can also be easily added to Instapaper through their browser add-on or mobile app. Any highlights and notes that I make in Instapaper, as well as my Kinde app, will automatically be synced to Readwise.
Readwise is a tool that has three great features: it can import highlights from a wide variety of sources (such as Instapaper and Kindle) and gives you a daily reminder with a selection of your highlights to keep them on top of mind and it syncs all your highlights to your notetaking app. In case there is a missing integration (such as with Udemy) or want to capture something from a non-digital book or article, you can use the Free Form input.
At the end of the flow, the notes are synced to Notion. This allows me to easily search and re-organize them for articles I want to write. I combine these with additional notes I collect throughout the day: anything from meeting notes, article ideas, and the different goals I set.
If you want more information about how I structure my Notion or any other parts of my flow, leave a message in the comments ⬇.
Finally, I use the IMDB application to save movies I want to watch and have watched. Though it is not the best app for these kinds of lists, it has two advantages for me: I always want to know a movie's score before watching it, so before watching a movie, I’d open the IMDB app anyway. Furthermore, based on the score you give it (which will mark it automatically as ‘watched’) you get new recommendations based on your movie preferences. Never a dull movie night!
Health and nutrition
Apps in use: Zepplife (former Mifit), Feelfit, Google Fit, Vivino
I have to admit, from all the areas where I currently have implemented my second brain, I’ve found this one the most difficult to make ‘actionable’, e.g. use the data that I collect.
So on the physical side, I use a Xiaomi Mi Band to track my sleep and heart rate during the night and a Fossil Gen 5 watch to track my steps and heart rate during the day. When I wake up, I use a smart scale to measure my weight and body fat. This data is all synchronized to my Google Fit app, where you get everything bundled in one nice overview. The main goal of this part of the system is to track everything over a longer period of time. That way, I hope to see if there are any areas for improvement, as well as see if the changes I make also have any effect.
In the past, I used MyFitnessPall to track my food intake, but since this takes a lot of time and tracking calorie intake became more subconscious, I stopped doing this.
Something less related to calories (but all the more delicious😋): I’m a great fan of a good glass of wine, but definitely not a vinologist. A great tool to help me remember and find great new bottles is the Vivino app. The great thing about this app is that you simply scan a bottle (by taking a picture) and it will give you an overview of all its characteristics and prices. You can then also add your score. Based on these scores you get personalized recommendations for wines you might also like.
Personal media
Apps in use: Google Photos, Google Drive
So my personal media app organization is pretty straightforward: pictures and videos will go to Google Photos, and anything with regards to files such as documents, letters, and projects, will go to Google Drive. I still have a to-do to organize this based on the P.A.R.A. system, but I also don’t struggle to find anything at this point so “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
My photo organization is probably the part of the system that I spend the least time organizing, but mainly because it works so well and that is all thanks to machine learning. Google Photos indexes all your photos and make them easily searchable based on location and date (nothing new there), but also on the content of the picture. For example: do you need a picture of the bracelet that you lost? A simple search for ‘bracelet’ and you will get all the pictures where a bracelet is visible. My hope is that more of these features also become available for other parts of my system. For example, there are already some self-organizing note apps such as Mem, which I yet have to try.
Location information
Apps in use: Google Maps
This section actually triggered my thinking about the second brain in the first place. I often was sitting with friends and they would make some (great) recommendations for a place nearby or where I was planning to visit in the coming period. The time would come and I was planning to go out to eat with other friends or was planning to go on the trip to that town and of course, I had forgotten what the place was (or where I had written it down..).
Since my sense of direction isn’t all too well, I was Google Maps already very often, and therefore expanding the ‘saved places’ functionality they have, made sense. The structure I use, is based on the one found here, and basically consists of a ‘To visit’ list and a ‘Visited’ list for every city I get recommendations for. This way, when I want to go out to dinner in a certain city, I just pull out my ‘to visit’ list for that place and see if there is anything new nearby.
This app also has some great integrations, in this case with your Google Contacts. If you want to go to a friend, you just type in their name in the search bar, and their address will pop up in the results, easy!
Contact information
Apps in use: Google Contacts
Last but not least, you of course also want to have a place to store all the information about your loved ones. Since a Rolodex isn’t that pocketable, I started to utilize Google Contacts for this. Google Contacts comes pre-bundled on my Android phone, so setting it up and maintaining is very easy. One of the things that I’m still figuring out here, is how I can easily add images from (for example) LinkedIn. One more issue here still is that Google Calendar doesn’t support reminders for birthdays. So for now, I set a daily reminder in Todoist (see above) to check my calendar to see if there is a birthday today.
Conclusion
Well, that is a brief (but in the end still pretty long) overview of the apps I use to build my second brain. Hopefully, there was something in there that might give you some inspiration on building your own. If there is any topic or part of this that you would like more information on, feel free to drop a comment below and I’ll make sure to get back to you. Finally, if you have any tips and tricks on how you make sure you remember everything, please share these as well.
Thanks for reading!
