I bought and read many books this summer, started a few projects, read a lot of blogs, listened to a lot of podcasts and audio books. I have noticed that I’ve been incredibly inefficient at finding my links and thoughts later when I want to share them. If I had taken notes, or stored a link – none is easily found. My paper journal isn’t indexed. And exactly which folder did I put that link in? Serendipitously, I came across the idea about a Second Brain being a productivity enhancer and the powerful Roam Research note taking tool that makes it possible digitally. I jumped in immediately and started to use it.
Now when I come across a link or want to jot notes, I put them in the Daily Notes page adding a comment as to why it was important. Here are all the networked nodes of my brain dump from two weeks of use. Much more context, searchability and ease in finding what I need.
A Second Brain as a Productivity Enhancer
A second brain is a place for you, as a knowledge worker, to both unload information and ideas easily and to help you easily create connections between concepts, ideas, questions, experiments, books, contacts, and anything else.
In Roam, the Daily Notes page is the default page with the current date in the header. You’ll notice that I popped in a slider to note my pain level for the day. For that use the ‘/’ key to bring up a menu of options for other enhancing features. I tagged the Slider bullet with #painwhilesitting so I can later see all sliders for that in one place to see any trends. Each unique hashtag gets its own page and collects all the content from text blocks that contain it.
A second brain does not have a structured database. Putting brackets around the word or phrase creates a page, such as [[Tom Ayers]].
Anytime I type someone’s name, I put brackets so that I can accumulate other information about that person as it comes up. If you value connecting with people, this is wonderful for reference. As you get ready for the next call, you’ll think ‘oh yes, last time he talked about trying x – I’ll be sure to ask him about that on this call’. It is stored on his page. Applications of this one usage could include coaching, talking to business partners or clients, managing your 1:1 calls, or relating to a relative or friend.
Within a page, there is no set structure other than the blocks (equivalent visually to the bullets you see above). Blocks contain mostly other text, words, hashtags, links, and dates. This is unlike, for example, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool with given fields that have to be centrally managed. This is infinitely as creative as your brain. As you adjust to the idea that any word can be expanded like that – creating links to pages – you’ll naturally start thinking about what areas you want to develop into pages.
Let’s say I typed someone’s name in today’s Daily Notes, and forgot to put the brackets around their name. I know I created their page a week earlier via my Daily Notes that day. One way to ‘fix’ this is by highlighting the name and pressing [[. That’ll fill in both sets of brackets. But what I did this many times? I don’t want to fix this on each page!
Simply go to the person’s page, and expand the Unlinked References area. This will show any mentions of ‘John Doe’ that are anywhere else in your whole database that are not yet cross-linked. You can then link them in one command using Link All, or separately with the Link button next to each item. In the example below, I typed Writing Club several times, forgetting to link to the page. With this great feature, you don’t have to worry about remembering your links each time, because you can do it later. Do watch out though, because the system is case sensitive. ‘Writing Club’ and ‘writing club’ would create two separate pages and the latter would not show up in ‘Unlinked References’
The Struggle Is Over and the Benefit will be More Writing
As mentioned above, Roam solves what I am struggling with (scattered digital assets, and brain overload). I will stop using Evernote, Apple Notes, and Chrome bookmarks so that I can more find and even more importantly create content in a brain-friendly way, with all the context I have accumulated easily available.
What do you currently do with the collections of links, notes and files on your various devices? Do you fail to wrangle with or work with what is stored to create rapport with these ideas? I’ve been such a collector for years and I want to change my habits because if I don’t create content of my own, I’ll forever chase down new shiny objects because its fun and I won’t be as likely to share why it is important to me and why others might be interested. In other words, I do expect this to have an impact on my desire to write and share content. Setting down my Second Brain, may make it easier for me to express myself publicly.
Final Thoughts
Maybe you currently use a colleague or a partner conversationally to unload and process your ideas each day. Maybe you have a small paper journal and while you are out biking, you stop to jot down your aha moments there. Keep doing all of those things. Just don’t lose your ideas and aha moments – you can always transfer them to your Roam Second Brain when you get back to your keyboard. That’s what I am doing, more or less, and I am loving it.
Connections and Congruence 