Building a Second Brain

So much of the time we are “info hoarders”, stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our own anxiety. I struggle with this a ton, and collect notes almost as if it were a hobby in of itself. I believe this is in part because it’s a form of Pseudo-productivity, where I can kind of mindlessly do something without thinking too hard about it, but feel like I’m doing something useful, therefore I don’t feel guilty about doing it like I do with gaming or scrolling through Youtube. I have noticed in the past I rarely go back and review those notes or try to make connections with and distill them into something of my own. This book hits a lot on all of that.

“According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes. A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986”

Whenever your capture your notes in a central place like this (this meaning my Obsidian library where I take all of my notes and even grabed this one from), you will start to see the patterns and connections between them. This is especially true in Obsidian where you can see your page links and everything, and can customize this to show links between tagging and stuff as well.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this and am actively trying to apply many of the tips and strategies shared in this book in my own workflow.