Second Brain
topic on 4 shows · 8 statements across 4 episodes
Founder's Journal 
the Neon Show 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 
the a16z Podcast
8 statements about Second Brain, every show
Bloom: 'Second brain' tools create illusion of progress without actual work
“What I found in my own experience working with some of those things is that you end up moving a whole lot, but not actually making progress on things. You know, you like have this complicated productivity system, but you're not actually you know, creating prog…”
Steph Smith: People Spend More Time Organizing Second Brains Than Using Them
“Some people spend more time organizing their second brain than actually using it.”
Lieberman: Save modular work packets to reuse templates and insights later
“You should have 100% save that deck in your second brain Because maybe you'll want to draw on it later if you, say, want to start becoming a thought leader on LinkedIn around sales, and you want to reference your old work. Or maybe you end up deciding that you…”
Forte: A second brain system transcends any single piece of software
“Your second brain is not dependent on any one piece of software.
It is a collection of different tools that you use, different pieces of software.
Any individual app can be swapped out.
Any single one can be changed, but the overarching system that is your sec…”
Tiago Forte: Organize digital notes by active projects, never broad subjects
“In my view, the central organizing principle of your second brain needs to be, what are my currently active projects? What are the projects that I'm trying to move forward right now? And everything in your second brain should be organized around what you need …”
Tiago Forte: Never revisit old notes unless you have practical use
“To me, you know, if you take notes on a book, let's say, and you save those in your second brain, unless there is a specific use case for those notes, you should probably never look at them again.”
Tiago Forte spends just 30 minutes a day maintaining his notes
“At most. Yeah, it's just these little, little moments to just save, capture, import, download, and then the job of, like, organizing and retrieving those, I postpone to the future, sometimes the far future, to the moment, whenever that moment arrives, that I a…”
Tiago Forte's system cut an oncologist's patient note-taking time by 70 percent
“And so he started using his second brain to organize his patient notes, and the impact of that, he told me, is that in a 30 or 40 minute appointment, which is all the time he has, right? 30 to 40 minutes. Instead of spending, you know, 20 or 30 of those minute…”