What Things Should You Capture Into Your Second Brain, And What Not?
What Things Should You Capture Into Your Second Brain, And What Not?
Practically speaking, digital space is limitless. Theoretically, you can keep almost anything you encounter. And yet, the more you keep, the more you need to organize.
Ultimately, of course, what you keep is up to you, but there are a few interesting questions revolving around the “capture decision”:
Are some things better suited for capture than others?
When do you capture too much? When too little?
What are things that should never land in your second brain?
Tiago Forte, the creator of the second brain movement, recommends you capture whatever “resonates”—what you deeply feel is worth keeping.
Additionally, he proposes to capture things that are
Inspiring — a testimonial you received, a motivational image
Useful — an E-Mail template, a backpacking checklist
Surprising — a fresh and paradigm-shifting idea
Personal (un-googlable) — a blacklist of foods (you have allergies against)
Easily Lost — an interesting idea popping into your head
On the other side, Forte also suggests a few things not put into a second brain:
Things that can easily be looked up again — a Wikipedia entry
Sensitive Information — passwords, pins, coworkers’ details
Large files — a movie, a database, a very big eBook PDF
Unsupported files — a file that only works with a special mind map app.
These are good heuristics, but as stated in the beginning, it really depends on your use cases. Ultimately, your rationale for keeping a second brain determines your favorable inputs. The above criteria may work great if you are a content creator like Forte. It may not be if you are a researcher or software developer.
If you only have a single and narrow use case for why you are keeping a digital second brain, you might reason completely differently. In that case, you only want to collect everything you get your hands on related to that narrow use case. Or you may be more discerning and only keep high-caliber stuff. Or you may even apply a subset of Forte’s criteria from above to your narrow use case.
Yet another simple approach, called Feeding A Someday Maybe Empire (SME), is to capture everything you want to.1 This works best if you mostly focus on personal knowledge building instead of personal knowledge management.
Knowledge Builders, a Fractal Productivity spin-off, extends PKM to PKB. For the personal knowledge builder, the SME is best. If you want to learn more about this, check out the series on The PEAKER method. You may also be interested in reading about Personal Knowledge Companions.
In any case, the one thing that should probably be excluded from being put into a second brain is sensitive information. Even here, though, there is some wiggle room. A password is not a great fit, but a very personal journal entry may still be valid.