Why You NEED A Digital Second Brain?
Why You NEED A Digital Second Brain?
Most people do not deliberately maintain a second brain and never will. Almost everyone keeps notes of some form, but unless they are organized as a whole, we wouldn’t speak of them engaging in personal knowledge management (PKM). That’s okay because, strictly speaking, one doesn’t need a second brain to achieve anything.
However, colloquially, what we mean by “needing” is that it can profoundly impact one’s work and life. The select few who engage in smart second-braining are in for a tremendous edge over those who don’t.
A second brain will help you support creative endeavors. Anything “creative” requires you to collect raw building blocks. Whether crafting a speech for a funeral or writing your autobiography. With a functioning second brain, you have a trusted system that you can use to store and retrieve unlimited amounts of such building blocks reliably.
A second brain will help you save progress, enabling you to circumvent your first brain’s heavy constraints on memory. What you store in your digital brain, you can keep; what you don’t store will eventually be lost. Thus, a second brain is like a memory card for the game of life. It provides unlimited slots (notes) to save your progress on different endeavors, ensuring you never have to worry about losing progress and can return whenever you are ready. This will help you remember, but it will also help to reflect as you have more data to look back on.
A second brain will, above that, extend your thoughts. Since your working memory has but a handful of slots, keeping notes organized helps you quickly unload and reload certain bits. Externalizing or “mapping out” part of your thoughts can also structure your overall thinking processes. Working with digital notes will thus expand your mental scratchpad and guide your thinking.
A second brain will help you build a legacy. Digital second brains are a somewhat novel phenomenon, but they could become a person's greatest treasure trove throughout their lives. The parts you decide to be accessible to others will grant them a peek into your unique mind and most personal work.
These are just a few potential benefits of keeping a second brain. Many people will also find unique and personal use cases that can’t be generalized.
Another use case for second braining is knowledge building; to grow a personal knowledge base. This is what we drive at with this Fractal Productivity spin-off called “Knowledge Builders”. Over time, keeping a second brain will let you accumulate a treasure trove of personal knowledge that will let you develop expertise in specific areas but also become more learned in general.