Should Notion Be Your Second Brain ft. Thomas Frank

In a world that's moving faster and faster, we all have to find resources and tools to help us make sense of the noise and the chaos of daily life. I'm Tiago Forte. I'm a father, a writer, and a productivity expert. And I'm on a mission to help people use technology to live more productive and meaningful lives. Today, we're talking about using notion as a second brain. Today, I'm talking with my friend, Thomas Frank, who is a notion expert, a study fiend, and productivity guru to really cut through the noise and answer one question. Should notion become your second brain? We're getting ahead of ourselves. What the heck is a second brain and why should you consider building one? For all this stuff that comes into our life, whether it be ideas or events or tasks, where do you put them? How do you manage them? That's the second brain. It's an externalization of the things you shouldn't be trying to memorize. A second brain is a trusted place where you keep all the information that matters to you. It can be a paper journal or notebook. It could be a filing cabinet full of note cards. It could even be those random Post-its that your spouse or significant other leaves around the house for you as reminders. But for most of us today, the most common type of second brain is stored in a digital notes app. I used to do a lot of note taking in a notebook. I used to actually create goal sheets in a notebook and I would track my B-roll charts for videos I was making. Thomas's note taking app of choice is Notion. Notion originally came onto the note taking scene in 2016 and since then has captured the hearts and minds of millions of people. I think Notion best fits the kind of person who wants to make their own system and wants to make their own customization. Notion markets themselves as a productivity tool. I don't see them as that. I see them as a disguised programming language where you don't have to do any coding. Immediately when I realized you could add things to a database and then you could create another view with a different sort criteria, I was like, that's a game changer. Holy crap. I have my own list of 10 requirements a piece of software needs to have to some degree to serve as what I call your second brain. So 10 requirements plus one bonus requirement, which you will find out about if you listen to the very end. And so I was wondering if we could sort of run through these requirements and see how they map to what you know of Notion. Sure. Searchability, the search function. You need to be able to search your notes. So how does Notion do when you just know what you wanna find, you know more or less what it's called and you just wanna find it as fast as possible. Notion's indexing of its content is very good. The speed is not that great. So if you're used to something like Evernote where you have a literal local database or Obsidian maybe, it's not gonna be quite as fast. I mean, I've tried to compensate for it by good organizational structures of my databases. So is that the main way that you kind of make it work is organization? If I'm looking for a video that I'm working on, I tend to just find it through organizational structures. If I'm looking for something else like a quote or a book that I was taking notes from, I often use the search function. On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate Notion's search? I'll give it a seven. It's quite good. Those extra three points will be awarded for speed in the future. Factor number two is duplication. The whole purpose of a second brain or note-taking system or whatever you call it is to reuse knowledge. Knowledge is not single use. The more valuable it is, the more you wanna use it. How would that work in Notion and how would you rate Notion's ability to have these certain assets that you can kind of reuse again and again? Notion is incredibly good at duplication. So when we wanna make a video, we create a row in our database and then there is a YouTube video project. You click that and we have multiple pages that are spawned for that project, topic validation, a related content area, a script area, research area. It all just pops up. Where I will not give it the highest rating, you can, like in Roam Research and Obsidian, grab things you've already created and then sort of embed them or link to them, but it's just not quite as robust. So for example, they just recently introduced the sync block feature. So say there's a quote from Getting Things Done that's in my Readwise page for that book. I can throw it in a synced block and I can sync it to maybe an article I'm writing about how Getting Things Done work. That's pretty nice. But in Roam, I would just do bracket bracket and I would just search for it and it would find a block instantly. So that's like the gold standard for that kind of replicatable knowledge. But in terms of making templates, reusable checklists, things like that, I can't think of a better tool. So how do you rate on a scale of one to 10 Notion's duplication? Let's give it a nine. Amazing. I'm hyperbolic here. And to get to 10, what would it need? To get to 10, bring in that hyperfast reference linking, which is sort of a new concept. Before Roam, there wasn't really anybody doing that except for like Wikipedia. Third factor is access anywhere. I can show you on my home screen, content ideas right there, bring me to my ideas area and I can just grab content or track a new idea. All my recents here, favorites here. It's on my phone. It's on every device I use. Access everywhere, it's very good as long as you have an internet connection. That's the current Achilles heel. So Evernote, their model is native apps, database. You can't access it on the web, but if you're without internet, you're still good. With Notion, they do cache things on your local device. So if you've used a page often enough and you're not on the internet, you can access that page. But a lot of your workspace will be totally offline if you're offline. So how do you rate Notion's access anywhere on a scale of one to 10? I'm gonna give it a seven and this doesn't seem that fair because they do a really good job of having apps for basically every platform. It's just the lack of offline access is definitely a weakness, especially for people who maybe don't have great cell phone reception or who are offline for other reasons often. Factor number four is shareability. How do you think about Notion's ability to share an idea that you have into your network of people? It's pretty great. We do a lot where I'll just like grab the URL to a page and throw it in Slack. With other people outside of my organization, it's very easy to just toggle the share to web button, throw it up anywhere I want. Is there ever a person or a situation that for some reason you can't share content from Notion and you have to even put it into Google Docs or some other platform? No. With YouTube descriptions, if I write something in Notion and then I try to paste it from Notion directly to the YouTube description, it doesn't work very well. So I'll just throw it in a code block inside of Notion which converts it to plain text. The one thing I want, if I have say an agency and I've got multiple clients, what if I wanna have like a master database for all the projects I'm working on for that agency? There is limitation. If I have a client, right? And they want access to their pages, I would either have to individually share each page with the client or give them access to the entire database. My biggest wish for Notion now is can I create a filtered view of a database where whoever I give access to that view, they only have access to whatever shows up in that view, not the entire database. Scale of one to 10, shareability for Notion. Shareability 10 out of 10. Permissions, if you wanna add that in there, probably subtract a couple. Factor number five, being editable. And this is something I think people go like, is there anything that's not these days? But I think there's an interesting tension with productivity apps where it's a two-way thing. So you are both a consumer of that information, you are reading, you are taking it in, but you're also the producer. You have to be able to change it, to format it, restructure it, put it into bullet points, add checkboxes, like you said, tables. It made it as easy as possible. Notion has different layout tools where you can make multi-column layouts. So there's that. In terms of editing pure text, I think that the industry has sort of solidified a new method that it's not just on Notion, it's on Whimsical Docs, Dropbox, Paper, it's the block method. So you can drag blocks around. They have implemented the markdown where it instantly formats for you, but you can also use a menu and you can also use keyboard shortcuts. Pretty much any way you wanna edit and format, it's in there. And that seems to have sort of propagated across a lot of different tools. Do you do your writing, like straight up free-flowing writing in Notion? I do, yep. Being easily editable in the flow of what you're creating, how would you rate Notion from one to 10? I mean, I think it's pretty darn good. Let's just say nine. There's probably something else that we could do better in the future, but for rearranging, creating your own layouts, all that kind of stuff, it's pretty good. Factor number six, upgradability. So something I notice is often you just download a little notes app to just jot down your grocery list and to take some notes on a book maybe. And then over time it starts becoming a productivity system and a knowledge management system and a second brain. And by that time you're sometimes so far deep into it that you're like, oh, I don't wanna move. I just wanna use what I've always used. So how do you find Notion basically scales from the first little ways that you use it to more sophisticated things? I think it's probably the best tool that I've personally used for that purpose because with Evernote, I started using it as a student and it was great for that purpose. And then when I wanted to start doing collaborative scripts with my team, that's when we started running into some difficulties. Or if I wanted to start managing tasks or I wanted to do some more project management kind of stuff I couldn't do it in there, so I had to use a different tool. That's sort of the strength of Notion is because it is almost like a software builder tool, there is the ability to add in other workflows over time. I think a lot of people just get it because they're like, oh, hey, I can make a page that I can drag blocks around or I can do a task list, things like that. My top videos on Notion are my task manager videos. So I think a lot of people are looking at how do I use this as a task manager? Scale of one to 10, how does Notion upgrade and scale over time? I guess 10 being a JavaScript framework or literal programming language, we'll give it an eight or a nine. Perfect, awesome. 8.5, cut my face in half. That's pretty good, that's pretty good. Yes. Factor number seven, transferability. If you're gonna be pouring your knowledge, your ideas, your life's work into one of these tools, are you locked in? Are you now trapped inside this ecosystem? Or if you want to at some point in the future, can you leave? Yeah, I think the vendor lock-in is pretty high with this one. They have export tools, you can very easily export into Markdown or to PDF. You can even export an entire page with many sub pages and it will do its best to kind of create a PDF that has all of it in there. But in terms of like my entire custom built workflow, I'm not porting that to another system. Do you ever feel a sense of personal risk? Like even if Notion were to make a decision or their culture were to go in a certain direction, the product were to go in a certain direction, like you wouldn't feel sort of trapped in there? I mean, I would have a long weekend of copying stuff out, I guess. It's a risk I take. I realize it's a risk. There's always some way to get out. It's the cost that you incur. Yeah, so I mean the cost in my case is either me or hiring somebody on my team to literally go through every page we have and copy the content and throw it somewhere else. Scale of one to 10? Let's give it like a three. Factor number eight is linking. Our personal knowledge bases are like mini internets. Yes. How would you rate Notion's ability to link from one place to another internally within your workspace? It's quite good. It's not the fastest. I guess the best illustration of how not fast Notion is when it comes to linking is I tend to go to a page, grab the URL, and paste it where I want to create the link, even though I know I can hit the double bracket and start searching. With Roam, I can literally link to blocks specifically. In Notion, I need to create a synced block and then paste it directly. I can't search for a block of text currently. It doesn't feel like a huge limitation to me personally. Something that I think about a lot is what are the features of these productivity tools that we get excited about because they're novel versus what do we really actually use on a long-term basis to be productive and to get our work done? So personally, I don't bring in all these linked references all the time and I'm not entirely sure if I need to. On a scale of one to 10, linking in Notion? I'll give it an eight. Factor nine, multimedia. In your work, how many different kinds or what different kinds of formats like media do you use and how does that work in Notion? Notion is good for basic stuff. So images come in just fine. You can embed videos. One thing that I actually do for my own study is I'll take a video of myself trying to explain a concept that I've done some learning on and then I embed that via an unlisted YouTube link in my notes and then I'll do a critique of my own thing. I embed a lot of screenshots. One thing that I like is that if you have an image on your clipboard, it is just instant paste in Notion. So this makes it very easiest for us to make documentation for processes. I'll just take a screenshot of every step and throw it in the Notion or I'll make a loom recording and embed that in the Notion. That's pretty nice. There are definitely some things that I would love to see, better support for drawing and writing with a stylus and the iPad, but it would be nice if you could just say like, all right, drawing block and let me expand it and let me actually draw things. That would be super cool. How would you rate Notion's multimedia capabilities? I'll give that an eight as well. Bring me handwriting. Factor number 10 is metadata. The data about the data, it's stuff like when this was created, who created it and what context it was created. Is there any intelligence that Notion adds beyond what you directly write in? A random, just regular Notion page has things like a word count. There's probably hidden metadata. If you put things in a database, now you have the ability to create pretty much any kind of metadata you want. So you can create what they call a select property and that's how you could tag things. You could do a multi-select so you get multiple types of tags and you could do create a date, update a date, who made it, assign people things all kinds of different stuff there. You're almost creating your own metadata system. Yes. If you create a database and you create a property for tags and you create a property for last updated date, well now you can all of a sudden start filtering by your tags and now you can have a page for your fitness notes and for your PKM notes or whatever it is. You can start sorting by last updated date or start sorting by alphabetical, whatever you want. So you have to set it up first, but once you do, you can tailor it to what you want specifically. Something that I always wanted them to have is a tagging feature. I think Roam has a thing where you can literally just like put pound sign to create a tag on a block and then you could search by tag. That is not in Notion. So how do you rate Notion's metadata? I'll give it a nine. I'm a DIY person. I like to make my own metadata. I would love tagging, like real tagging. Bonus factor. The bonus factor. It's automation. Okay. Do things happen without you needing to do them? Is there an example from another tool that you have that you think of as like gold standard for automation? The notes app that I use, Evernote. Using Readwise, you can sync, in my case, Kindle. What I know on my iPad, which is here, when I make a highlight, that will be automatically synced through Readwise and just appear in my notes. Yes, that is in Notion too. And then in terms of automation, so Notion has an API. So depending on your level of knowledge and your ability to use things like Zapier or Automate.io or your coding knowledge, there's a lot you can do. People have been using it to do Google Calendar sync for Notion. They've been using it for things like the Readwise thing like that. Fascinating. So what is Notion's rating for automation? This is a tough one. I mean, it's a really, really good compared to other tools, but there's a lot more that I could do. So, you know, let's give it a nine with some wiggle room for adding extra endpoints and extra block support for the API and things like that. The fact that they have an API is pretty great. If someone is like, I'm sold, I'm convinced, I love everything you've said, how would you recommend they get started with Notion? Go over to thomasjfrank.com slash fundamentals. There's a free open webpage where I'm trying to make the best beginner content for Notion possible. Adding together all of Thomas's ratings, we come up with a grand total score for Notion's suitability as a second brain of 78.5. And with bonus points, 87.5 out of 100. It's kind of not fair though. The bonus points right to 110. To learn more about how to harness the power of your second brain, whether it's in Notion, Evernote, Apple Notes, or any other note-taking tool, go to buildingasecondbrain.com or follow along by subscribing to this channel. Thanks for watching. And I hope you'll join us on your own journey toward building a second brain.