The Second Brain — How to never forget what matters

One of my first and most popular articles I posted on Medium was “How to build a second brain in Notion”. In it I described my quest to refine and perfect my digital knowledge system — basically how I organize my to-do list, projects, notes and everything else, in a way that I could quickly and easily find it. I wanted it to be fairly low maintenance — as many Notion aficionados might have already learned, it’s very easy to add needless bulk to a system, to the point where maintaining it almost feels like a full-time job.

Recently, I went through the exercise of putting together a new, shareable template of my “Second Brain” system. My existing system has, as usual, changed a little bit over time — most of it, however, still fits well within the framework I had set out in my article above, and if you want a nitty-gritty how-to, I still think that tutorial can be of great use to you if you want to build it yourself. If you want to save yourself the time of rebuilding it all, though, I took a few hours to recreate my system as a template and write up a good tutorial built in — and I’ve put it on Gumroad for $5. I’m also offering a 50% discount code to my readers, so you can pick up the template for $2.50. All you need to do is enter the discount code “158fxlv.” Rather than pre-populating this template with a bunch of stuff you may or may not use, I wanted to…