Working on My Second Brain
Susan Nicolai
Communications pro. Collaborative freelance writer with a passion for storytelling.
The idea of having a second brain that not only takes smart notes but presents me with a fluid and constant opportunity to connect the dots into new-to-me constellations feels like becoming a wizard of creativity. And I’ve only had a nibble of what’s coming to this glorious buffet.
My second brain appetizer was integrating Readwise, a content scraper that resurfaces your best and favorite highlights, with Notion, a connected workspace for thinking, writing, and planning. My day begins with an email from Readwise with six thoughts from books within my Kindle library, articles I’ve read on Medium, and any PDFs or other web pages I’ve shared with it.?
It feels random but somehow relevant; it’s like someone has breathed new life into books that otherwise would have become dormant and nearly forgotten. Sometimes, Readwise will suggest highlights from books I haven’t read so that I can decide to add them to my favorites and perhaps consider reading the source material.?
Studying a person’s bookshelf is a bit like going through their dresser drawers, so now that Readwise knows what I read, it gets me, maybe even better than I’d like it to.
The fun of this daily inspo pushed to my email may wear off over time, but I’m hungry for more of it and exploring how to bring on the next tasty and intelligent course.
Building My First Automation
Earlier this week, I tackled my first workflow automation with the support of a?YouTube video by Thomas Frank. The workflow focused on transcribing audio notes automatically and then culling them into a uniform summary that would propose questions and offer a critique to round out and sharpen my thoughts on the topic. The content would all be available to me through my Notion dashboard.
Breaking it down: The process involved using the automation tool Pipedream to move my audio file from a watch folder into OpenAI’s Whisper to translate it to text, then running it through a ChatGPT prompt before sending the nicely formatted content to my database in Notion.?
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Thomas Frank accomplishes this task in a little over 30 minutes on YouTube. For me, however, it was like watching a Food Network Star with tiny, measured bowls of ingredients prepped or nearly so, and the completed cake magically done in the oven.
It took me the better part of Monday to get my automation to go without a glitch. Part of the error of my ways was watching only some of the video before jumping into following along. Frank had also linked instructions, which, along with his troubleshooting notes, might have saved me time if I hadn’t been so cocky.?
Meanwhile, I wasted gobs of time on a timeout error, not knowing about Whisper’s file size limit, and struggled a bit, realizing that every test would require a new file to be pushed to the watch folder since that was the trigger event.?
The Pipedream app was easy to use, but only because of Thomas Frank. He provided a good amount of cut-and-paste code that also helped get the high-quality output from ChatGPT.?
In the end, I purchased his Ultimate Brain for Notion because I’m not ready to ride without the training wheels and might never. I’m a writer, so the right side of my brain dominates the left.
Now that I’ve installed the Ultimate Brain, there are more videos to watch to set it up to be the invisible, tireless assistant it promised. Successfully integrating a second brain is difficult, but I’m enthusiastic about how it won’t simply reduce time-consuming tasks. A well-functioning second brain could help me become a better, faster, more intelligent version of myself.