Second Brain

#secondbrain #distill #express https://maggieappleton.com/basb https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/maggieappleton.com-V2 github.com/oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden

The four types of note-taking

  • The Architect
  • The Gardener
  • The Librarian
  • The Student

    The Architect: Building Systems

Architects want to fit all their information into an all-encompassing “ultimate system” with a clear hierarchy. The same way a real architect needs a precise blueprint that details exactly where each part of a building goes, information architects tend to use a single overarching goal as the driving force in their knowledge collection.

Architects are ideally suited to large-scale projects that demand significant resources, where a plan is needed in advance. They excel at interpreting every piece of information through the lens of their overarching principles, and fitting it all into an elegant framework that many kinds of people can make sense of and act on. They are masters of structure, using a systems mindset, and making tradeoffs between form and function.

The pitfall Architects must avoid is inappropriately “force fitting” information into the system when it doesn’t fit. Because their thirst for order is so strong, they may sometimes ignore information that doesn’t fit with their mental model or follow a favored approach when the situation has changed and it no longer makes sense. 

Their need for consistency often leads Architects to plan their system upfront. If their needs change, the system needs to be rearchitected from scratch at significant cost. Often Architects seek out collaborators with other styles that balance and complement these tendencies.

Succeeding at knowledge management as an Architect requires you to make executive decisions about how you want your notes to work: the hierarchy of pages or folders, which categories you want to use, where an index or table of contents is needed, or which columns should be included in a database, for example.

Apps like Notion and Craft are well-suited to architecting your knowledge as part of a holistic system.

The Gardener: Cultivating Knowledge

Gardeners are the exact opposite of Architects. They tend to think in a “bottom-up” way, cultivating many kinds of ideas and possibilities at the same time like seedlings sprouting in a wild garden. They are most at home imagining, dreaming, wandering, and making spontaneous creative connections in a way that no upfront plan could ever predict.

Knowledge gardening is about favoring relationships and connections, so that each individual seed can entangle itself with others and grow into something greater than the sum of its parts. The Gardener’s job is to create space for them to emerge, to cross-pollinate promising ideas, and harvest them once they’ve matured. This requires a nurturing, exploratory approach of protecting new ideas until they’re ready to make their debut. 

The pitfall of Gardeners is that they often don’t know where they are headed. They can sometimes go off on tangents too easily and get distracted by new information that might be fascinating, but has nothing to do with their goals.

Succeeding as a Gardener requires the courage to react quickly and follow your spontaneous interests and curiosities, even if you’re not sure where they lead. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with organizing methods that can be used in the moment – such as adding a link to a related note, changing the title of a note, pulling relevant ideas into an outline – without requiring you to rearchitect the entire system (which you will find very challenging). 

Apps like Obsidian and Roam are perfectly suited to the Gardener mindset, allowing you to create connections on the fly without your fingers even needing to leave the keyboard.

The Librarian: Researching for Projects

Librarians have a fundamentally practical relationship to information, valuing books and ideas for their own sake but also seeking to organize information for specific purposes. They have a deep desire to find and save the most useful, interesting knowledge to be able to retrieve it as needed.

Librarians often have a project orientation, like Architects. But unlike Architects, instead of architecting their entire lives, they prefer to do research that informs their projects, goals, obsessions, and curiosities. They like to capture information from a wide variety of sources, though not all the sources have to fit into one overarching system to make sense. They thrive on the varied and eclectic.

Librarians are all about curating a collection of knowledge, deciding what’s in and what’s out, and organizing it to be easy to find in the future. With that in mind, they often adopt a hierarchical system with “a place for everything and everything in its place.” In other words, they will try to stay consistent with their organizing for the sake of clarity and minimizing the effort required.

If you find yourself often collecting new nuggets of knowledge, categorizing your ideas, and combining old and new information into a new understanding, you are likely a Librarian. Your strength is your consistency and commitment to serving your future self’s needs, while a common pitfall is acquiring tons of content without ever actually doing anything with it. 

Apps like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote kicked off the digital notetaking revolution years ago, and remain the best in class at collecting information from a wide variety of sources, often automatically. They support a wide variety of devices and operating systems and often prioritize reliability and stability over releasing new features.

The Student: Acquiring Knowledge

Student types are often beginning their notetaking journey. Whether they are actual students in school or university or merely novices in knowledge management, the scope and complexity of their notes are limited to specific use cases, such as preparing for a test, writing an essay, or applying for a job.

Students have a lot of things going on and juggle different priorities, so their Second Brain is often focused on one specific part of their life that requires them to manage a lot of information. It could be their college studies, their first job, a complex project, or learning a brand new subject. Their Second Brain is “purpose built” to help them be effective in that area, without going too deep in the others.

Students are oriented toward the short term, since they’re not sure where their thinking will lead or which is the right system to get them there. For that reason, they prize ease of use above all else – something quick, easy, and accessible on different devices.

Getting caught up in unnecessary complexity is a liability for Students, so they tend to choose the simplest, most straightforward apps, such as Apple Notes or Google Keep. Their notes are usually a mix of practical lists for buying groceries or keeping track of a travel itinerary, alongside learning resources from books or classes. 

The Student is the most common kind of notetaker, and it is what we default to when we’re short on time or energy. If you have any doubts about where to begin, I recommend sticking with a “minimally viable solution” until your needs become clear, and waiting until your current system breaks or reaches its limits before adopting a more powerful one. The default apps found on our smartphones are often the perfect place to start, as they offer just a few key features to allow practical, quick, flexible notetaking.

Part 1: OrganizationOrganization
#distill
PARA System
PROJECTS have a specific deadline or endpoint
AREAS are continuous areas of committment
RESOURCES
ARCHIVE

!para-spectrum.png


Duplicate your lists across several platfo...

Building a Second Brain

Part 1: Organization|Organizing For Insight Private or Broken Links
The page you're looking for is either not available or private!
Part 2: Digital CognitionDigital Cognition
#distill

Main functions of a note taking tool

Incubate ideas over time
raw material for unique interpretations and perspectives
Create visual artifacts.

... Part 3: Progressive SummarisationProgressive Summarisation
#secondbrain #capture

A note taking system balances
DISCOVERABILITY | with | UNDERSTANDING
– |– |–
Requires compression to make notes smaller, simpler, and easier to digest.|-|Keeps context intact... Part 4: Return on Attention|Maximizing Return on Attention Private or Broken Links
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Part 5: Project Management|Just In Time Project Management Private or Broken Links
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Four Key Components (CODE)

  • CAPTURE - You need to make it as easy as possible to capture ideas, whether from your own head or from reading a book or an article.

  • ORGANIZE - You need a system to organize there ideas. For that Tiago proposes the PARA system, discussed later.

  • DISTILL - Just saving ideas won't do you any good, you need to activly summarize and imrpove the notes you are taking. This is the key to meaningful ideas.

  • EXPRESS - The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself? Learning shouldn’t be about hoarding stockpiles of knowledge like gold coins. Knowledge is the only resource that gets better and more valuable the more it multiplies.

The three habits most important to your Second Brain include:

Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. The purpose of using project checklists isn’t to make the way you work rigid and formulaic. It is to help you start and finish projects cleanly and decisively, so you don’t have “orphaned” commitments that linger on with no end in sight.

Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything.

Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

Terminology

  • Seeds - Taking smart personal notes. Only need to be understood by you, but need to be intentional. Between #capture and #organize
  • Trees - This is the forming stage where you write short structured notes and start Knowledge Synthesis synthesizing/integrating Private or Broken Links
    The page you're looking for is either not available or private!
    what you know. Connecting the dots. Between #organize and #express
  • Fruits - Produce new work. Essays, videos, or other things with substantial effort and production value. This is what turns the notes into something timeless.

See also EvergreenNotes Private or Broken Links
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Explanations across the interwebs

https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/xgdhu3/newbie_here_want_to_build_a_second_brain_but_im/

List of Second Brains published by others anagora.org 🪴 Planting Your Digital Garden

Other digital gardens

🧠 Second Brain Foam https://sona.kytta.dev Everything I Know caffeine.wiki paritybit.ca/garden/ thoughtstorms.info/view/GardenImagologies mentalnodes.com/do-not-keep-orphan-notes conordewey.com/blog/on-digital-gardening/ Nikhil Thota|Thot's Thoughts jzhao.xyz My second-brain