Your Brain s Not Broken My Second Brain in Notion

Our main brain is not meant for storing information. We're very bad at it. I'm worse than average. In real life, if we need to create neural connections, they either need to be traumatic enough to be stuck there forever, or they need to be repeated again and again, and we just don't have the luxury to do that. The thought that I have on the bus, a feeling that I have randomly when someone says something, that's not going to stick. But sometimes we get that. Sometimes you read a book and suddenly you see the world differently, but you can't adopt that lens forever. This means I'm never not ready to talk about something because it's there. It's my brain. This is Elizabeth. I've made the connections. It wouldn't make sense to anyone else. In this video, I'm going step by step through Elizabeth Phillips' second brain. So your whole second brain is in one table? One page. There's no folders. There's no files. There's no tags. So I'll do these maybe two or three times a year. Oh, wow. Very, very rarely. Oh, that is even more extreme than I do. I love it. The systems that get better, the less you work on them. I was like, oh, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. Let's dig in. Starting with capture. How notes enter Elizabeth's second brain? I used to start with just pen and paper because I had this romantic notion that if you write it by hand, it just feels so nice and all that stuff. But it's awful. It's just not sustainable. There's too much information. So I've switched to digital now. When I started creating a second brain, it starts just with books. And I would recommend it just starts with books. They're the main thing that you capture it because you don't want to overcomplicate it. Like Readwise for this. It's just like the ultimate app and it just connects everything together. It's like a personal assistant that you pay really well. So you don't feel too guilty. So every time that you see something interesting, but you're not in the mood, it's just there and it goes, oh, no, it's fine. I'll sort that for you later. And it just grabs it. Because it connects to all these apps that I mentioned. It's on my Twitter, on my Notion, on every book that I read, on my podcast, on my audiobooks. Readwise just gets rid of anxiety and then it all goes to Notion. My main one would probably be Kindle. I tend to read quite a lot of books on Kindle. It's easy. It's highlightable. I just can take notes on it. It's really, really good. Instapaper, an interesting app where you can use offline, which I quite like. So if I'm in the tube or I'm traveling somewhere, it's quite good. It's kind of like your own curated newspaper of sorts. So if there's any online article, newsletters that I quite like, I just share it to Instapaper. And then it strips down all the images. And it just creates this really clean, empty, just information thing, which I really, really love. I'm the same. I'm a hardcore Instapaper user as well. And then you can highlight there as well, the same way as in Kindle. I quite like Twitter. I've gotten into it this last year. I hated it before. You have to find the right little corner of nerds. And then it just like, it's an explosion of really cool book recommendations. I love my Twitter book recommendations. Apple Books, I used to use in the past before I had a Kindle. Air, I have here. I don't really like it. It's like a podcast capture thing. I listen to a lot of podcasts. And I still haven't optimized for a podcast and for audiobooks. Why do you feel the need to have different ways of capturing? It depends on the type of book. If it's a super information-dense book that I know I will need to highlight a lot, I will not buy the audiobook because there's no point. I'll probably get a Kindle. And then I'll highlight because I know that those will be saved automatically. I call books fluffy when there's like 20 examples for one thing. And this whole book should have been a tweet. And I'm like, oh, so frustrated. But it's kind of good anyway. Those type of books will definitely get the audiobook only. And then I'll write down as I'm listening the main notes that I want to take. And then in the middle, I'll kind of get both of them together if I need to. I do something super similar. It's like there's a spectrum from, as you put it, like information-dense to fluffiness. I know when I'm going on walks or driving often, I will purposefully listen to fluffy books. Yes. Right? Yeah, absolutely. I'm just like, why fight the situation? Why endanger my life by trying to save bookmarks on the audiobook? You choose not just the source, but the capture method based on basically your context. I think as you go further down the line, you realize, no, but I'm getting input from a lot more sources than just the things that I read. I use Apple Notes a lot. I just love this app. It's so simple. And that's all I need. All I need is something that opens on one tap, just has a piece of paper. I just want to write things down. When things happen throughout my day, I love going to the National Gallery, for example. And there's so many paintings there. Every time I go, I'll see a painting and I'll have a different thought about it. There is one that I saw recently, the Enchanted Castle painting. It's just this girl sitting outside of her castle. It made it into a note, which then made it into a video for me. So this is kind of the process that it goes through. Cool, great example. Whenever I talk to people about second brains, they always treat it as words and information. Pictures are a really good thing to capture, that whenever I see a piece of art, it reminds me or makes me think of something. I'll connect it to something else. So I think art is a good thing to capture. And I want to start capturing music too, especially classical pieces often make me feel something specific. And I'm like, oh, what is this? And then I'll connect that to something else. I'm starting to do that too. It's like, yeah, you can put yourself into different emotional states, which is incredibly powerful. When it comes to task management or life organization, I need to not overdo it with task management. But also, I have to get some structure. Otherwise, it's utter chaos. The smallest reminder for something will just go a task in my calendar. And on the day, I'll just be like, do this, do this, do this, do this, do that. So that's kind of where I put my, where I capture. I massively overschedule answering someone's text, thinking about a project. There'll be repeating tasks on my calendar. I'm also very comfortable with ignoring them. I'm not very rigid with these. As we talked, I realized that every part of Elizabeth's system is built so she never has to ask what to do next or how something will get captured. I accepted that I have a very poor memory, but that I'm a very passionate person. It's the pain of, oh, I had this really cool thought earlier. What was it? What was it? What was it? I have this so many times. That thing might come back to me two months later, and I'm like, oh, I can't believe I almost lost this. Every time that I have an instinct of, oh, this is a cool thought or, oh, what did that make you feel? Why specific? Always, there's always a bigger story here. And that's the story I'll capture. Once Elizabeth captures everything she needs to, the Readwise app takes those ideas and sends them into Notion to be organized. When everything comes to Readwise, it all ends up being in one page. And this is everything that we saw here. So all the tweets, all the highlights from different things will all come to Readwise in one space for me. This is the highlight that I took. And then what does this mean to me? It means that nothing is too niche. This is the message. These are just the notes that I took from the book as I read it. Two or three times a year when I'm in the mood, I'll create separate cards out of the important notes and only the important things will go there. Oh, two to three times a year? That's the only time I update my system. Oh, that is even more extreme batch processing than I do. I love it. Throughout the year, all I do is I'll highlight and I'll capture that thought in my notes or on Readwise. So if it's a Kindle, I'll just create a separate note. And then this will then go into my actual second one. This is all based on the Zettelkasten method. I found it through How to Read Smart Notes, which is a book based on Luffman's system. So Luffman was absolutely prolific in how much output he created. How is this man able to do so much? So basically what he did, he had these boxes and he would write down everything that he would highlight or any piece of information that a part of a study or something from a book. He pieced information into small little snippets and he wrote it on a card and then he would label the card with a name. So he created these cards and he used to put these in a filing system box. The thing that I love about his system is that he was the first person who separated capture from distill or organize. Every piece of information was very distinct. He would then be able to connect them with one another and find rare connections between the different pieces of information. What I did is kind of create the same card system on Notion where every single thing here, every single page is a separate card. Oh, interesting. It's like each one of these little blocks is like a digital equivalent of like an index card. Yes, exactly. Oh, cool. All of them will have a title. The title sometimes might be the highlight itself. So the highlight here is that words turn reality into something the human mind can't grasp, which isn't much. And I'll always have the source, which is the book, New Earth. For everything, I'll have, what does this mean to me? This is a short card, but sometimes cards might be two, three paragraphs, in which case I'll use your... Progressive summarization. My favorite thing in the world. They just all like bold, I'll highlight, I'll have a book and it will have 200 highlights in it. Out of those, maybe 60 are very important to me and these will be turned into specific cards. So this is a study that found that 60% of arguments couples have are about the same things that they were having arguments five years ago. So I was like, this is really cool. This is a very cool study to quote. I connected it to a year after winning the lottery, people tend to be just as happy as they used to be before winning the lottery. So it's kind of this view of if we keep doing the same things, we'll get the same results. We need to change things up. Once Elizabeth processes her reading highlights into personalized note cards, these new ideas are ready to move on to the next stage. But sometimes Elizabeth organizes certain cards one step further. A process note means basically anything. This is most highlights, most quotes will fall here. Studies I keep separately because I'm optimizing for a future where I know that I'll be able to back up the things that I say with some evidence. So all of these will come only from, these will be studies themselves. So there's a bit of progressive summarization here. So I have rules, for example, because I quite like to mention rules, especially on YouTube rules tend to be quite sexy where you say, oh, the 30% rule says that. People just love it for some reason. So I keep rules separate because I know that they're quite attractive to mention. I'll have articles because I know that these come from people that perhaps I could reach out to. I have courses. I think the second brain will definitely be here. These are things that are found from courses. I've unfortunately for the last few years not read a lot of literature. Now that Elizabeth has established her main areas of interest, she can plug in all the note cards she created earlier into those topic categories. This was the note. And this was the message that I got from the note. Now we go to the actual second brain and this is what it looks like. This is where all the cards eventually end up. This will need a bit of explaining because it can look like a bit of a hectic situation. These are all the things and all the topics I'm interested in in life. I have life, design. I have yourself. This is very vague, but it's kind of getting to know yourself, mental frameworks. I have emotions, people, success, productivity, creativity, branding, communication, learning, storytelling, science, writing, medicine, and reading for yourself and politics. So these are the main things in life that Elizabeth is interested in. And then what I do is I come up with a strong statement that I don't necessarily need to believe that relates to this topic. So for example, a straightforward life is depressing. This is a strong statement. I don't need to believe it. I can believe it to some extent, but I will prompt myself to make a strong, strong statement You should live life like the ancient Greeks. You have different stages in your life. First, you go to war and then you are a merchant and then you're a philosopher if you live long enough. You need to have something good that you do every day. Modern beauty is making us miserable. These are tabs that I open up in my mind. Beliefs that I want to contradict or beliefs that I want to have, but crucially need to be quite controversial because they need to spice things up in my mind. Everything here is one of the cards. So every one of these will be one of the cards that we saw from earlier from the musings. I'll separate information into three sources. So I have primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, but a primary source will be something that's very closely related to what we're saying. I didn't do any mental gymnastics here. We're both talking about productivity. A secondary source is something that's a bit less connected, where it's a bit more wild, the connection that we've made here, or it's a contradictory statement. It says the exact opposite to it. And a tertiary source is, I had to write down why I thought this was related because it has nothing to do with it. This is the super crazy connections. In my course, I call them the three Cs. So there's connected, contradictory, and crazy. So that's the crazy note, which is no one else would realize why you've made this. And I need to explain, oh no, this is related to this thing. All the cards that I get will fall into these, and every card can fall into 10 or 20. So let's say we have the card now that couples fight a lot, about the same things five years ago. In my mind, this has something to do with self-improvement and understanding yourself. It has something to do with connections with people. It has something to do with the way that you approach life. So I'll go here and I'll say, okay, this definitely has to do with life design. In my life design studies, I'll put in couples. There we go. So I'll add it here. And then I'll go, what else does this have to do with? It has to do with, we need breaks from ourselves. It's connected to that. So I'll add it here. I'll basically do the same thing. I'll keep the card in mind, and I'll scour my second brain. I'll go, it has to do with this. It has to do with this. So it creates this super random connections because I've primed my brain to think, think from the framework of couples fighting and approach note-taking or approach observing nature. And how would you connect these things with one another? It's like you're putting on a lens and then saying, what do I see? But I like that it's the lens of the source, which you already encountered in the real world, already decided is interesting, already even formulated in a way that is inherently kind of spicy and catchy. And the next time that I approach something, next time that I want to make a video on how to find the perfect couple or how to have a happy relationship, because I can go to that card and I can see, oh, I also connected this earlier. And then I can make these crazy connections and it comes up with something creative or cool to talk about. So your whole second brain is in one table? One page. There's no folders. There's no files. There's no tags. Yes. If something goes in a folder for me, I'll never find it again. This was the only thing that I couldn't adopt from real-life second marriage. I'm so sorry because that's so blasphemy. It's okay. The power of that. This is like, I just need everything in one place. What I also like about this is your main categories in the leftmost column is kind of similar to how I think about 12 favorite problems. Yes. It's like the recurring long-term interests, right? But you've used such sort of long-term, open-ended interests or questions as the core organizing principle of your second brain. So say more about this numbering system. This is something I've always been curious about. Well, translating is that it'll cast into digital. On paper, index cards, these are the core way that you identify notes. But what value does that give in digital where you can always just link to a note? So for example, if I want to talk, let's say I want to make a video on why being incompetent is a good thing. Incompetence guarantees flow. This is the statement. And because it's named 9A3D, I know that this has come from 9A3. And I know that this has come from 9A. And I know that this has come from 9. So when I'm doing my research, I have 1, 2, 3, 4 that I want to open up and see what's in them because it's going to be interesting rather than just statements. So I guess you can link them, but just the number system works easier for me because I know where it came from. You're threading ideas together, even if they don't appear together, just like you would with index cards. Yeah, exactly. I kind of love stuff like this. People sometimes say, oh no, that's from the past. That's from paper. Well, paper note-taking worked for like hundreds or thousands of years. And so most, if not all of my techniques that I teach also apply to paper note-taking. Highlighting, folders, 12 favorite problems. I kind of like that callback to the past. Yes, absolutely. It just makes it more portable and it's like easier to access because it's digital, but it is very much based on that card system. Elizabeth is the gardener note-taking style. Gardeners are obsessed with using digital notes to discover and develop their unique ideas over time. To figure out your own note-taking style, watch this video next. I refuse to believe that anyone is not creative. The moment that you realize that everyone who's ever created anything has been exactly the same as you, that's the moment that your life changes. You're starting from a blank page and you don't have any clue and you're saying you don't have any passions. I don't have any clear passions. I love that. I wish I had that. I've pined for it my whole life, but I think that there's this other kind of mathematical way of approaching the same results.