My Second Brain in Notion - Full Setup

Hiya, if you're new here, my name is Elizabeth. I'm a medical student and an artist living in London and today I am going to do the full walkthrough of my notion setup for my second brain. I already have a full video on why a second brain is absolutely life-changing, so all of that you can watch to your heart's content if you so desire, but here I am going to give you the full step-by-step setup. The reason that I have a second brain is number one because I am a massive nerd and I find things like this incredibly fun. Number two is because it helps me make connections on things that I would not have necessarily done without it, and whenever I have to work on a project or write things, I already have a pre-setup library of my own thoughts which is perfect and timeless and does not fade the way that my natural memory does. So if this sounds like a cup of tea, this is how I've set my own one in Notion. The first step is capture. I have had some variation of a second brain for over a decade now, so it comes very naturally to me when I am consuming things like books or articles or podcasts to kind of think in the back of my mind what do I not want to forget here, what do I want to store. Having this sort of mindset when you are kind of mining for information in the world that you will find valuable is incredibly important to start with. The first thing I will do with my capture is put them in a drafts page. So let's create a new page on Notion and let's call it drafts 2. Sorry, I have one before. So let's do that and I use a board and the reason that I use a board is first in my first one I will have let's say pre-processed but you can call this whatever you want, and the second one I will call sources, the next one I will call studies, the next one I will call anecdotes, the next one I will call images, and yeah I think that is good. So let's say I have a piece of information from a book that I want to capture. If you are completely new to this note-taking, idea capture, second brain thing and are wondering well what is worth going into my second brain? What should I take notes of? I've never done this before. My recommendation would be to capture what surprises you. If you find something surprising it's probably because it is new information, it is shocking, or it is resonating with something you are already interested in. So it's unlikely that you will be wrong keeping something like this in your second brain. However, whichever way you do this is absolutely fine. It will start to come naturally to you as you build your second brain. What is important enough to put in there and not put in there so it feels like second nature. So let's say that this is an extract that I took from a book that I found interesting. It's from Cal Newport's Deep Work. The first thing I'm going to do with this note, sorry it is just a personal thing, but I like to convert it to a quote just because it looks bigger. I will always have the resource at the bottom. So it's from Cal Newport's Deep Work book and I will always highlight the main part of the note especially if it's more than five words. So here we have demonstrate poor performance on the next task. So I will just highlight that. So step one is to import the note itself and to highlight the main part of the note. Step two is to make sure that I have the resources in this note here. Step three is to write what this note means to me. To me there is little purpose in capturing random things if I don't know why they're there. So for example for this note the message to me is don't switch between tasks if they are simple straightforward ones. Just get them done. It's worse to move on to a new task and back. This is my message. In the title I will put the word attention residue. So now I have created a note. The status is pre-processed. I here have the I have the note from the book itself. I have the resource. I have what this note means to me and I have the title of the note. So every time I can see attention residue I see everything that is in here. Usually what I will do is just read my own note and I'll only use the resource if I need to mention it somewhere else. Now that this is finished it can go into my sources. Now I'll take you into what this looks like once it's been filled in. So here I have my unprocessed notes. These are basically notes where I'm just even though I've done the work I'm not sure in what category they fit in in my second brain. So I've just let them simmer here for a while. These are my sources which I have 573 of them and they are all part of my second brain already. They have been put in there. I'll show that process later. Here I have the studies which I keep separately. So again processed in the same way and here I have medical studies which are kind of different because they are not always relevant to the things I talk about in my second brain. Then I have my rules, articles, things that I've learned from courses and literature I love. So now that I've this is kind of my inbox and first step off my second brain. Honestly you can leave it just as this because this way you've captured everything that you found interesting but if you do things this way I think they will just sit there forever. So I could technically search for things in my second brain but I don't think it would be very effective and there's no connections and yeah this would just be I think extra work for no real reason. Now this is where the magic comes in for me. The next part is the second brain itself and to create this all I've done is created a second page called let's call this the slip box. I've used a table so in this table what you can do is add a property which for me is a relation and I will relate this to my drafts to database and if I've connected them now for example if here I have so let's say in this part of my second brain I want to talk about productivity and here I want to talk about getting tasks done effectively what I can do is go to my property and I can find attention residue. So I can link a retention residue here I will call this my source one and every time that I go to tasks being done effectively I can see that attention residue is part of that. Now this is basically the principle of what I do on a much much larger scale it looks something like this. Again this has evolved over time so I here have put all the main topics all the main topics that I am interested in my life which are life itself, life design, getting to know oneself, mental frameworks, emotions, people, success productivity that's a big one, creativity also a big one, money, branding, communication, learning, time, storytelling, science, writing, medicine also a large one, reading for fun and politics. So these are the main topics that I'm interested in. Now one thing that I feel passionately about in the second brain is not leaving things just as topics it's better to have subtopics within each one of them and a very cheap subtopic is minimalism for example because I can chuck anything here but a better subtopic would be the best way to never get anything done or all you need is self-acceptance and harmony. These are specific concepts I would recommend the more specific that you get with these concepts the better because in this way your second brain becomes a lot more valuable. So addiction again is a bad topic because it's too broad but for example the pointlessness of social responsibility is a very specific topic so you can add a lot of things to that. You will see that I've made primary sources, secondary sources, tertiary sources, studies, anecdotes, rules and art and I'll explain what every one of these is. A primary source is something that is directly related to the topic itself it's a very strong supportive point so for example in designing your life the scarcest resource is interest or you only live life once or being self-reliant and in harmony with society are topics that are extremely relevant to designing your life. My secondary sources will be things that are relevant but not exactly directly targeted at this topic. This is something that I think could be spun in a way that it has a connection and my tertiary sources will be things that will directly contradict my main point or will be so far off that they are barely relevant to it but I'm making a connection. Then I have studies which sit in their own category so for example if someone asks me what are some studies about getting to know yourself I probably will have a few studies that will be relevant to it already and I don't need to go and search for them in the tens of tens of things that I have put in my primary source. Then I have anecdotes which are basically cute stories so these will also have a category of their own because they lie separately and rules so the 80-20 rule the 90% rule these will stand also separately. Then I'll have art so sometimes if I see like getting to know yourself if there's some relevant art that I find online which is quite inspiring I will try to get a resource I don't have a resource for this but and I will put it there because if I need to talk about it I might link the art to it too. So what my workflow looks like specifically is that when I take notes from a book I will finish reading the book and then I will take every single sentence or paragraph that I've highlighted and create a different source for it then I'll connect the source to its relevant concepts and very importantly one source will go to many many different concepts this is where this becomes super charged. This note for example is connected to six different sources it can be connected to a lot lot more and the more of them you connect with one another the more beautiful concepts you have. So recently for example I've started my youtube channel which is something completely new to me because I was basically not active on the internet at all so it was quite important for me to do some research on what it feels like to be a creator or how to effectively deal with being online. So here for example I have a channel on issues with social media which is something I very much considered before I started and here we have something on thinking your work is terribly important. For example this is taken from something that had absolutely no connection to social media at all because at this time I was thinking about this I then attached it to the social media so whenever I discuss it for example or think about it or I'm facing issues I can just go to this tab there are lots of things that I can easily access so the concept of not taking yourself seriously when creating content is very very liberating because as Bertrand Russell said one of the symptoms of approaching a nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. The only connection I make to the slip box is that in these cards I will name and number them so for example if number two is life design 2a will be designing your life and 2a1 will be living like the ancient Greeks a subset of which is that a straightforward life is depressing so I will kind of connect concepts continuously to one another every time I have a new concept that branches off I will just put it underneath the other name it according to its number code and also what the concept is itself and then add its cards and its sources to it. This is a very easy way to grow your second brain over time to start with you might just start with topics themselves so like life and history and geography and things that you personally find interesting but as soon as you come up with a theme branch that into a theme and as soon as you get an interesting concept within that theme I would recommend putting that concept as its own separate category because the sooner you break into categories the sooner every time that you want to put a draft in you can think oh this would fit here and there so every time I create a note I will go all the way to my second brain and look through every single one on my list and think oh this is slightly relevant so this could be a secondary source on something it could be a tertiary source on something it could be a primary source on something else and this is how I keep populating my second brain with very interesting connections to me that were not there previously. My opinions on using Notion for this is that it works so so well however I never use Notion on my phone it is simply too slow this is a process that I do only once I am done reading an article or listening to a podcast or reading a book I don't do it continuously throughout the book however when I am making notes on a book I am already doing my own thoughts on every single note that I take. The time investment on a good single book to me is a lot so even though I might be able to read a book in a few hours it will take me twice as much time to process the notes on it into my second brain I honestly find this so so useful because it means that every single book that I read I analyze so much and I spent a lot of time kind of connecting to previous things that I know and previous things that I found and really thinking is this relevant to my life or how could this enhance my life and what do I think the author meant with this and how is it relevant to me so it really I think enhances my experience of reading in general so it's definitely worth it. So yeah this was the first time that I tried to do an exploratory video and it was so difficult I'm not sure that anything made sense I will try a lot to edit it in a way that it does please please please I would love any sort of advice or tips on how I can make these sort of videos better but I do hope that this answered your questions if you had any on how I set up my second brain any tips again on this are so appreciated it takes so much time out of my life so anything that could make it quicker or more effective would be absolutely great as always thank you so much for spending this time with me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind to yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye