We have developed ourselves over the years and we can see it in our toddlers. Today's kid can pick up a smartphone and understand how it works, manipulate us and accomplish things. Day by day, we are progressing and levelling up. However, our brain is bad at one thing, connecting and memory. Therefore, we need something to store our ideas and then connecting them.
You do tens of different things and you will ramble and then go over all the places. Feel lost and then give up. We don't want that and therefore, an idea is simply to get up and make sure you are wired and ready for the win you seek.
What if there was something simple, which you could take, do minimal inputs and then the leverage would be tens and hundreds of folds. Of course, you would want that and then more so you could grow and make your dent in the creative path you want to achieve.
Before I reveal and delve into the simple and free tools, you need to embrace the fact that, it isn't the tools that is going to revamp you, it is your wanting, more than anything else.
Enter Second Brain System
If you are doing something offline, then something as simple as a notebook can be a second brain and you would be fine. You can note down your process, information about the meetings, etc. However, if you move to the level, you can delegate all the above things to an assistant and then focus on the online world - the Internet world where your second brain system makes the leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
What I will share below is how I use my second brain system and then you can take the impression and make the system yourself. Because each one of us is different and the ideal second brain system would be different for each one of us, for the simple reason that we all want different things.
My whole second brain system is online on the Internet and I have improved my capability, reach and impact because of these system.
Can I live without it? Of course, like all things in life, you do somethings because you want to change and not because they are mandatory. Take everything with a pinch of salt and personal preferences.
Idea Dumping Ground
I have ideas, perhaps too many of them. For my blog post which I am writing, for my videos on YouTube channels - multiple of them ranging from Dance to Science. It's crazy the amount of ideas that rush to my mind. If you let it, then those ideas go away.
Of course, ideas aren't everything but if you don't that as your starting point, then you start to lose and get lost. So anytime and it means any time of the day, an idea comes to me, I write it down in my Notion idea list. That's it. There it exists for me to navigate based on the header and then choose from them when I sit down to make content.
For example, this specific blog post idea came to me 10 days earlier but I am writing it down today, so that's how it becomes useful.
No matter, for my videos, podcast or articles, I need to jam up and make content, to satisfy myself, you all and the algorithm, there is always an idea dump ground from which I can sort and take the best sounding ideas and start developing it.
Daily, Weekly and Annual Reminders
This seems simple yet we forget like our ideas. All the important things which I need to do - for example, birthday wishes, strategy change, check up on a friend, start something new, how to prioritize this year versus last year, anything else, I put it all on the Calendar and then set it as a weekly, monthly or once reminder for me to see.
This is the first step, then I go ahead optimize my smartphone so the first thing i see when I open it is the calendar and any reminders.
This way I don't miss anything which I need to act on today or whenever, wherever I am.
Of course, you can say to yourself and then forget about it. The best thing I have learnt is that you need to make your brain remember less and let creativity spark, that's when it makes the best use of your time and produces the best output.
Of course, you can do this, in a notebook, offline which you check daily but in the online and smartphone addicted world, this is the way to go. A simple Google Calendar does the trick for me to remind me for all the second brain important activities.
Screenshots, Bookmarks and YouTube Playlist
Whenever I am scrolling twitter, I land up on many beautiful ideas, thought process - I immediately screenshot the text and keep it in a folder. Whenever I am visiting any website, which is amazing and provides me with something useful, maybe in the future, I bookmark it. And whenever I see a YouTube video which would be useful to me in the future, I put it in the playlist.
This way, I have the content and process mapped for the future. For example, I have a website called becoming millionaire which shares how millionaires work their brain. That's my goal. I have saved YouTube video about retiring to a remote place, that's my retirement plan.
This way, whenever I am ready, I don't have to search and exhaust myself, those are already in place for me to rethink and act.
Conclusion
Of course, all of these and many other ways work when you do things intentionally and you want to expand and use your potential to the maximum level.
If you don't, and you skip this, it's alright. But for those who want to level up and be on the edge of the things, this is the starter pack for building your second brain.
How else do you build your second brain?