Master Organization With These 5 Second Brain Techniques

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Life shouldn't be too hard.

Do you have a busy life, feel stressed, and/or have symptoms of burnout?

Ah, I've been there.

But fear not! Here I wanna share with you 5 techniques that have transformed my life from chaos to calm.

How?

I let my brain forget.

I don't overwhelm it with endless streams of information anymore.

Now I store it in another place: my second brain.

So, are you ready to improve your life starting right now?

"Baby, let the games begin!" — Taylor Swift

1. Use a Calendar

This is an effortless but still very effective second brain technique for your life.

Have you ever tried to remember all your meetings, birthdays, and important dates?

Believe me, it doesn't matter how much you try to remember, you'll forget them.

So, instead of trying to remember all my dates, I store everything in my Google Calendar.

Now I don't have to think about them anymore.

I just go and check my calendar and that's it.

My calendar is a second brain that never forgets.

Now you can also share your schedule with other people, making it easier to find a time to meet with your friends or family.

2. Use a Day Highlights App

Similar to the calendar, have you ever tried to remember all the things you have to do in a day?

This could range from going to the supermarket to having a meeting or a study session.

If you have a busy life, this can stress you out, and even lead to anxiety, as we feel we can't control what we are doing or need to do.

So the best thing you can do for yourself is to write highlights for your day.

• You can write them down on a sticky note in a checklist format.

But I prefer to do this on my devices, using an app called Todoist.

To use it is very simple. You just press the + button and write down what you have to do for the day.

You can also add priorities (p1, p2, p3 that stands for priority 1,2 and 3), which helps you to organize your days.

Now that you can see all the things you need to do, your brain will feel much safer.

And god, it feels really good to check a day highlight!

3. Use the P.A.R.A Method

I already wrote an article about this, so you can go and check it out if you wanna learn more about it.

The idea is to store all your information, folders, documents, etc in just 4 folders.

Yes, just 4 folders.

Those folders will be your P.A.R.A method.

• P stands for Projects.
• A for Area of Responsibility.
• R for Resource.
• And A for Archive.

So all the important documents that you're working on now because they're a priority, you'll assign them to the Projects folder.

Anything requiring ongoing attention but not necessarily top priority belongs in the Area of Responsibility. For example, a responsibility for me is to check how my students are doing, and writing medium articles.

Resource folder serves as a repository for reference materials or perhaps important information that you will use it in the future. For example, I store scientific papers for Medium Articles ideas.

Lastly, Archive houses completed projects.

With these 4 folders, your workspace stays clean, making it easy to locate and tackle your daily tasks.

Beautiful, isn't it? Your jungle of folders is now condensed into 4.

4. Take Notes

As you read in my previous articles, your brain is a forgetting machine.

If you don't take notes you will not remember what you read and study.

So please, after reading something write them down in notes in your own words.

Those will help you to encode and retain the information better.

But most importantly, it will give you the possibility to check whenever you want about the information!

So your brain can forget, but your second brain (your notes in this example) will not.

5. Use Obsidian, Notion, or Any Software to Take Notes

Finally, I highly recommend you use software for writing notes.

The possibilities here are a lot. Some of the most used ones are Obsidian, Notion, and Evernote.

The reason to use software to store your notes is that you can organize them better. Also, you can write and gain insights faster!

Which software you choose depends on your needs.

I used Notion for a while but I moved on to Obsidian as I had more control of my notes. Additionally, the graph view is amazing, and I can find my notes and their nodes easily.

This is my Universe of notes in Obsidian:

In that universe, I have notes about research papers, books, ideas, articles, and so more.

Imaging trying to keep all of that in my poor brain. It wouldn't fit, I would forget.

But now I stored all my knowledge there, in a place that doesn't forget, in my second brain.

Conclusion

Woohoo! You're now at the end of the article.

I hope you now have a greater intuition about how the second brain works and how you can use it to make your life easier.

Here's a summary of what we learned:

1. Don't try to remember your schedule, use a calendar.
2. Don't try to remember all the things you need to do on a day, write them down in a sticky note or application.
3. Don't create a jungle of folders that will make it hard to find relevant information, use the P.A.R.A method.
4. Don't try to remember all your ideas and what you read and study, write them down in notes in your own words.
5. Don't write everything on paper, use software for writing notes (Obsidian, Notion, Evernote, etc).

In my case, Obsidian saved me a lot of time not only to study but also to show my work.

For example, I forgot almost everything about some books that I read years before. But now I can check my notes in Obsidian and write high-quality Medium Articles with them.

The possibilities to expand and use your second brain are infinite.

Now it's your turn to build it up!

Thanks for reading!

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