The second brain

I am sure many of you are aware of the concept of the second brain, a concept propagated by Tiago Forte. Well, actually, the concept probably is not new, but Tiago Forte has built a methodology around building of the second brain.

To me, with such information overload from everywhere, it is important to have a digital "you" / "brain" which you can refer to as and when needed. As you have access to technology wherever and whenever you need, you should be using that technology to build up your second "digital" brain, thereby allowing your first and primary brain built into your head to be more productive. You should not be trying to "memorise" important stuff, you need to just "recall" them using your mobile while you go through your work. And this can be applicable for not just your work, but on your hobbies, on current affairs, on basically everything.

My attempt in digitally storing things (it can be books excerpts, it can be news articles, it can be research readings, etc), is primarily made through the usage of 4 apps - Instapaper, Evernote, IFTTT and finally Notion. Of these, I have subscribed only to Instapaper and for the rest, have been using the free version of the same.

Instapaper

I use this app to store all interesting news articles I read (through laptop, mobile devices, etc). You can share anything interesting you find to this app. Once the articles are shared into this app, you can highlight the relevant excerpts and keep them readily identifiable and available for future use. While the free version of the app allows only 3 highlights per article, I found that unsuitable in many cases. So, went for the paid premium version for this one.

Evernote

While I use the free plan of Evernote (which allows 60MB data per month), I use this app to extract the highlights / important excerpts that I had made from Instapaper. As I normally extract only texts from different articles, I have found the free plan of 60MB per month is sufficiently adequate for me so far. While you can structure these snippets of texts on various topics using a typical folder structure, I found tags to be more useful for me. In future, simply clicking on a tag provides me all relevant information across time in one shot for me to review and recollect once again.

Now, the next question that will come to mind is that how does the highlighted excerpts from Instapaper come to Evernote ? Do I have to do a manual copy-paste from Instapaper to Evernote ?

Of course not, it comes automatically ! Here comes IFTTT, the magician !

IFTTT

IFTTT provides free applets that allows Instamart highlights comes automatically (almost realtime) to Evernote. Only the highlighted excerpt (not the entire article) along with the URL of the news article. You can configure these applets easily without knowing any coding. That way, whenever I highlight say multiple sections of the same article, I know for sure that all these sections comes as one note in Evernote within a time of 10-15 seconds. This is definitely an useful automation that a layman can use.

Notion

Finally, comes the mother of all repository for me, Notion. I use this app to summarise on a topic which will have inputs from various articles, knowledge from books, etc. So, effectively, while trying to summarise and put this in a text format on any topic (some of whose outputs you can see as blog posts), I refer to Evernote snippets on the same topic (which I can easily search using tags) across different time stamps and then apply my thought processes to come up with the final version of the article or research topic

Without making this a very costly affair, I use these 4 apps (which works cross platform across iOS, Android, windows) to build a readily referenceable knowledge repository for not just my work, but also for my interests and hobbies

Thought I will share this concept and the apps along with the dataflow with you all. In case anyone has other alternatives or even find this useful, I will be very much interested to know about your thoughts !