Why My Second Brain is Replacing my Paper Diary / Planner – The Mental Well-Being Coach
For anyone who has followed my posts you’ll know i’m a HUGE fan of journaling and using planners and organisation strategies to gather and reflect on lots of different important areas of my life. It’s been vital to the improvements in my mental and physical health and I will always say, if there is one habit you should definitely try to adopt, it’s the habit of having a daily journal practice.
I’ve always been a huge fan of paper planners and notebook systems (like bullet journaling) because it’s always been the best way for me. There is a lot to be said for physically writing things down to help memorisation and information processing BUT in this digial age i’ve been acutely aware that paper planners & diary systems are flawed. A few years ago my daily planner was lost after my bag was stolen and suddenly all my stats and analysis and thoughts and plans for that year had just gone. I’ve known that i needed to move to online capture and have dabbled in the past at a few different options for To Do lists and spreadsheets but it never seemed to really work.
I think that is about to change. I’ve recently come across the concept of building a second brain. A concept championed by Tiago Forte. This basically consists of coming up for a strategy for your personal knowledge management. It’s about building a framework which may consist of one or many different platforms that integrate with each other so that your captured information becomes interconnected in a way that makes sense for you and what you want to achieve.
I’ve recently started building the architecture for my own Second Brain project and so far it’s looking like it’s going to fit all my needs.
Will I still be using notebooks? Yes! (Which is good because i’ve been a notebook hoarder forever!) There is, of course, still a place for written journaling and so for more stream of conscious and therapeutic journaling, I will stick to pen and paper as that is the sort of stuff that I don’t necessarily ever need to read again and certainly don’t need access online. I’m going to be using notebooks now more for on the fly idea capture rather than my day-to-day planning. When it comes to my daily plans/task, my projects, and my daily data journal logs, they will all now be done online. This means that data lives in the cloud and is easily accessible on any of my devices.
My current Tech Stack for this is going to be:
A project management and note-taking software platform where you can have multiple databases which can all be interlinked.
Instapaper is a social bookmarking service that allows web content to be saved so it can be “read later”. You can also use it to highlight relevant info. It’s important to distill new info in to the most important points to help with info overload.
Emails that need actioning can be forwarded in to Notion via Zapier to make sure the tasks are linked to the emails.
No code rules engines to help with data transfer.
This is a tool which imports in any highlighted notes I make from any Kindle Books I read, and pulls in favourited tweets and social posts and exports
them to Notion.
What this all means is when I find something that is interesting in one of my key areas of interest I can capture the bits that are most thought provoking, I can link that piece of info directly to any current projects as resources. I can also link my day to day tasks and data to my calendar which creates a web of connected knowledge flow which is much more organic than ever before. With my paper journals I could have a contents section and note down page numbers or places to find info in other journals but it was far from instant and in the evenings I found my notebook/planner stack consisted of 5 different books which needed updating. I can do this all in one place now in Notion each evening.
If anyone is interested in this as a concept feel free to reach out. You can also find some great You Tube videos by Tiago Forte, or find out more in his book “Building a Second Brain“.
