Building a Second Brain

In my new role, I often feel overwhelmed and bewildered. There is no one helping me as my French colleague would say, perceptively concerned about my mental health. There is a challenge in my current cognitive ability and discovering new tools such as BASB is a God send. A tool in the burgeoning field of knowledge management. I am using all the new tricks that I can find on Youtube to keep above the water.

I hit the motherlode of new self-help books: Atomic Habits, The Organized Mind, Building a Second Brain, and The Extended Mind plus the several Youtube creators out there is fuel enough to educate the uninitiated like me. In fact, I have been building a second brain without my conscious knowledge by using tools like EverNote, Dropbox, and MS OneNote. However, I lacked the Aritoteliean rigor of categorization, which would have helped in simple things like organizing my file system. Or even my garage.

Instead, I get stuck in the software tools. I downloaded Obsidian, then Notion but never got to use them, preferring the suite of tools I already use; for work Microsoft suite of Outlook, To Do, Teams, and OneNote. For personal use, I look to the Google suite of Gmail, Keep Notes, Gmail, Tasks, and Drive. Despite having used these tools for a while now, I am unable to smoothly incorporate them into my workflow.

Last week, I tried interstitial journaling, creating a new notebook in OneNote where I make daily entries. The idea is to be mindful of my working day and to control my emotion. Procrastination is really about managing one's emotions and journaling is a way to be aware of what I feel during the day. This technique shows some promise in calming my emotions and controlling my thoughts. I do not have the time to write long journal entries like these on a daily basis as I used to do in the past.

Listening to Tiago Forte, in the process of BASB, one must become a producer or creator instead of being a consumer. I am a glutton for consuming media which reflects my overall attitude with one look at my cluttered garage. I am in the midst of clearing this mess up which takes a lot of mental energy because of the awareness of my sickness of consumption; whether media or physical things. In fact, it is a mental disease that has corrupted me with mindless material accumulation.

Externalizing the mind, liberates one from rumination and too much thinking, by creating an external brain that one must bring order and clarity, to be organized and productive. This is the goal that one must achieve instead of diddling with the various software tools out there. Again the mind gets stuck with all the thoughts that swirly around with the possibilities of what one can do with these various software tools.