Why You Should Use A Second Brain

If you haven't used a second brain before, or you've heard of it but never considered using one, this software will change your entire workflow and will make many people massively more efficient. I wasn't exaggerating yesterday when I said this was the most important takeaway of any post over the coming months.

Once you start using one, you can copy paste all the notes I'm going to give over the next couple months into a section for YouTube video creation. This will let you follow a step-by-step workflow, so you don't miss something or spend hours trying to figure out what the solution to an issue is.

One of the most important uses for these is to never lose a good idea or a good resource ever again. I'm sure this has happened to everyone here where a good idea comes to mind, but because it didn't get written down right away, it was lost to time.

Everyone will have a slightly different way they use these, though the basic idea is this: save everything. Hence the name, second brain. Any sales calls, workshops, notes from reading, useful websites, playbooks, etc, should be saved in here.

The search functions are excellent. You can type a word or phrase and pull up exactly what it is you're looking for, even if you have hundreds or thousands of pages.

There's several options available; the two that are by far the best are Notion and Obsidian. Both of these have some pretty significant differences, so I recommend watching a YT video covering the details of each before making a choice. Once you get entrenched in using one, it'll be more difficult to make a change later.

To give a basic overview, Obsidian is a better choice if you want to have a more raw and basic writing experience. It has a basic file and folder structure and the design and interface works great for storing large amounts of written info. It can do more than this, but I haven't found the other functions necessary for my usage.

Notion has a lot more capabilities, but also comes with a steeper learning curve. In addition to notes, you can use it for project management, an internal company wiki, design, making pitch decks, calendar, team integration, etc.

There's also a lot of templates available for Notion, which will help you take advantage of everything it has to offer. Regardless of your choice, it'll take a month or two of consistent use to have a good understanding of how it'll work for your use case. The templates are good, but it's better to make sure you set your second brain up in a way that makes sense to you.

Now let's cover some of the specifics. It's going to be important to compartmentalize everything as neatly as possible, even when you're getting started. If you haphazardly place files, it'll take a lot of time later on to clean everything up.

Here's a basic outline of some sections I use:

YouTube <-- Root Folder

- Community Posts <-- Sub Folder

- 03/2024 <-- Sub Folder

- Day 1 <-- File

- Day 2

- 04/2024

- Video Titles <-- File - I remove titles once the video is taken to production

- Production <-- Subfolder with notes for individual videos in separate files

- Completed <-- Files moved from production to here after filming is done

- Playbooks <-- Sub Folder

Website

- Cybersecurity Section <-- Sub Folder

- Network Security <-- Sub Folder

- DNS <-- File with the copy for that specific webpage

- Book Recommendations <-- Sub Folder

- SEO <-- File

It might seem like a lot of work to make numerous sub folders, but it's a lot easier to navigate your second brain like this. For example, I make community posts everyday. If I were to dump all those as files in the root YT directory, it would make a huge mess and be more difficult to access other files.

The above is how I organize my notes. Feel free to experiment with different ways to do this. Again, it should make sense to you, so that even if you've got a thousand files, you know right where you need to go to access something specific.

I'll cover some of my techniques in a later post, but one thing I always work towards is hyper optimization. This can be applied to anything, especially making videos - not being organized and stumbling through a random process will cause you to miss uploads and likely quit making videos entirely.

It was something that took me a while to build out, but I can make videos in far less time than it used to take. When you start out, it may take you 8-10 hours to make one long form educational video. This includes writing your outline, preparing supplemental materials, filming, editing, thumbnail design, writing a description, etc. It's going to be important to shrink that down though, because it's a lot of time to put towards a single video. Using a second brain and optimizing it well can really reduce inefficiencies through each of those areas.

All of this is well worth spending the time to learn to use. After a month or two of daily use, you should see a huge difference in your work (depending on what you do) and learning. I've been using one now for about 8 months and it's singlehandedly been the biggest change in making me more efficient.

Tomorrow is going to be the second most important post of the series. After that, it'll be time to start covering the specific details of YT and video production.