Inside Francesco D Alessio s Second Brain Keep Productive

What could compel someone to review over 600 digital productivity apps? Good question. It's a bit sad, to be honest. In this video, we'll find out about the four steps of Francesco D'Alessio's second brain, the system he used to build one of the world's leading productivity channels. I was so obsessed and I was like, okay, there's something wrong with me. And the exact set of apps most important to his digital productivity empire. Let's now look at apps. I want to look at them through the lens of code. I use the term capture tools, a category of software that's specialized, really, really good at capture. How do you think about capture tools in particular? I have used Evernote for a considerable part of my life, probably about eight years. Like, as you can see here, I pretty much saw anything in it that sort of comes up, everything from phone contracts to, you know, serial numbers. So here's a good example of one, right? This is a health document I put in back in February. But basically what I try and do is I take a lot of notes on the Remarkable tablet and then I export it into Evernote with just forward email function. Evernote is that sort of backup resource for me. It's evolved over time to become a filing cabinet. Anything that say, for example, plans for like a holiday or medical information or things like that. I might need to share with a family member or maybe even just reference at a good time with files and stuff, tend to put it in Evernote. But now I'm about 80% committed to a new app called Mem, which I think is going to be quite a popular note-taker in a few years. The one thing I quite like about Mem is the ability to capture how fast is it and how easy it is. Let's say I'm wanting to save this little quote that you've made. So I can either save it as a brand new Mem or I can add it to an existing Mem. Maybe I have a note about meetings or London trip. Here we go, for example. And I can enter it and just add it to the bottom of that note. Interesting. So instead of sending it to a folder or a notebook or something, you're sending it to a specific note, a specific document. Yeah, but you can also search inside of this spotlight function. You can also create Mems as well. So you can start writing away. So I find the capture functionality to be, reminds me a lot of when Evernote started in its early days, but in a much more fine-tuned way to the market that it is today. iOS application is like in a test flight version, because I only primarily use it on Mac. Once they have all those sort of core, core elements, I think that's when I can sort of fully commit and fully on board to it. Another way Francesco captures notes is by sending emails to himself. This is like a quick capture inbox for his thoughts before they get added to his second brain. One of the ones that I use quite a lot of as a team is Notion. Me and Steve, who is the editor, we primarily use Notion where we plan videos and we script them. That brings a lot of knowledge and information in. Say if there was a piece of lovely art, that would probably just be captured on my phone and put in Google Photos. Unless I'm going to buy it or there's some sort of action associated with it, I probably wouldn't log it like that. The camera roll is kind of the ultimate capture device these days because you always have your phone with you. Your phone has an incredible and increasingly better camera. It can be synced automatically to Google Photos, so the next time you want to find it, you just fire up Google Photos. And you can search with Google Photos, so it's perfect. Evernote versus Google Photos. Oh no! Francesco uses the calendar app Cron to capture events and the app Sunsama to capture any new to-do items. But for prioritizing his daily tasks, he relies on the Bento app. Bento is a new app that we launched. And it's a task manager that limits you to three tasks only. A large one, a medium, and a small one. So when you go and create your box, what happens is you're prompted by a workflow choice. And that's very simply the order you want to complete the tasks in. So let's say I start with my slow burn. And then you choose your small task, your medium task, and your large task. Record YouTube. As you go into a focus mode, start a timer, and to really tune in on that task. So it's very basic and very simple. It's nothing more complicated than that. I often find when I spend, you know, an hour doing some admin tasks, it's like I don't give myself credit. It's like, oh, that didn't count. That was easy. Or stuff I needed to be doing anyway. Yeah. And so you've spent all this time and energy and you feel tired, but it's like you, at least I, finish that work session with this sense of dissatisfaction. Yeah. Like that actually closes the loop and gives you that sense of, no, I did actually complete something important. So with Bento, we actually use craft. I don't know why we were using craft, but we just all soon like migrated there. And what we do here is we organize ideas and thoughts. And what's really nice as well is, here's a good example of it. What we do is we take screenshots every time there is a version of the app that we have in the past. And it's now like a really nice library to zoom back and see how it evolved. It's just a really sort of immersive docs experience, just very natively, very fast. And it's one of the best apps out there. Craft is your dedicated environment for this specific project or this specific product that you're developing, which is the Bento productivity app. It's kind of like a parallel to the physical world. Sometimes when you're starting something very new that requires a different state of mind, a different kind of thinking, you actually want to boot up a completely separate environment so that when you step into that environment, even if it's just an app, it's like your brain and body knows, oh, it's time to work on developing software. So you switch into that mode. I use the tablet, the Remarkable tablet quite a lot. What I really like about the experience around it is it's offline, go to coffee shops and sketch out ideas, write journals sometimes. And it's just so nice. It's so much more mindful. I can have like a really relaxing bit of music, get some of the best carrot cake in town. And then what I tend to do is you can just send it through your email, which means I can organize and process it for later. Once Francesco has captured from all the inputs in his life, he moves on to organizing them, starting with Evernote. A lot of it nowadays is associated to me and the family. If you go to say my notebooks area, I sort of adapted the power methodology slightly. How dare you? I liked the power structure. I think what I struggled with was because I didn't use my Evernote for just projects really. I'm storing any notes correlated to current projects. So for example, the house is what I primarily use a lot of Evernote for. So organizing documents for the house, health documents, family documents, all goes in that one area, which is like my projects. So essentially my projects, but I call it house. And then two is anything related to work, PDF files that are sort of stored on the go. Resources are like follow again, the power sort of structure. It's anything that I'm going to come back to in the future. And then archive is where everything goes to die, but in a good way that can resurface. Out of all the applications, when I sit down with Becca, we tend to bring out Evernote because it seemed like a pretty, not too complicated application to bring into the picture. She's not into tech so much. She doesn't want to sit there as you build a database, right? Yeah, yeah. When we were sort of exchanging for a house, me and Becca tend to use it to sit down and like work out, what is there questions wise to go through? I always use Evernote because I find it like a good medium that I can share publicly. For example, like I've got like a schedule for the wedding for me, my sister's wedding, which was quite nice. And as you can see, I've got shareable notes here and other stuff again, like it's really like serial numbers, you know, COVID jab information. Here's one that could be helpful, like something that Becca was like, take a photo of this lovely stool. It's this place where I'm just constantly adding stuff to it. When I need that information, it's there. But when I don't, it hides away nicely. You know, what are these notes that you're showing? They're kind of like this just random, but important collection of little micro pieces of information. No single one is going to completely radically transform your life. But the sum total of all of them together, when you have that thought, hey, that random thing that I took a photo of or the COVID details that are vaccine details or that thing that I kept in the past, where is it? You pretty much, there's like a default place to go to, right? I know it's going to be there. A good example of that is when I'm doing an app review, what I might do is bring together some concepts and ideas. Here's an app that I'm yet to review. So essentially what I'll do is I'll accumulate all of the structure of the video, but also a lot of information and knowledge that will be helpful to when I come to do the review. And I bring it together in this side here. And then on the left side, I basically brief my editor about that information. So it's a great place to bring stuff together and be able to be on the same page. But we also, you know, collectively use it to, you know, log our holidays of when we're off and things like that to the articles that are coming out too. Small things like, you know, what petrol we used on the trip. I don't know whether you saw that, like the only sort of structures we do have is editing and like a content library. I try and keep things a lot reformed when I'm doing it because Notion search is so powerful. Without the filters, it's excessively long. It's a huge document. So it's really a lot easier to manage with search. There's not a great level of capturing function in craft, but what's nice about it is across the week, we have ideas, we have thoughts, and what we can do is just pile it inside of the next agenda. So that's really like a nice thing in the background. And we also use it as well to capture sort of marketing updates, weekly downloads, and also quite a lot on agendas. So like, for example, this one here, we sort of had last week to sort of talk about. It's all nestled under there and we've got all our other meetings here, which is really nice because we can go back and we can just see what we discussed previously and recap on it as well sometimes, even if one of us missed a meeting too. My Memuse is quite loose at the moment because I'm still exploring a lot of its sort of functionality. Here, like I was taking quite a fast note. The guy called me up and was like, oh, here's this information about your kitchen. I was like, blah, blah, blah. Type it down and then run to Becca and explain and then pick up the phone and do that. But just being able to sort of capture it was quite helpful. What I really like about it is from the calendar here, I can create memes or notes on any of my sort of upcoming things. So I can sort of plan a few notes around a specific calendar event, which is nice. And there's a feature that I quite like called Flows in it, where you can create templates. Making a template is fairly easy, but what's nice is the actual ability to sort of implement it. If I just press slash command, I can say, load up my personal notes, meeting notes and start typing away. And that level of friction removal is really nice. And that's one thing I like about it. They've also released this feature called MemX on the side here. And it basically sources all of the previous notes you've taken that are similar in structure. And it brings them up. So as you type and as you start making and connecting notes together, it improves this similar search function. We're getting used to that with, say, Google. You put in almost any combination. It can be a question, it can just be a few words. And it's almost like Google kind of knows what you're intending. It's like, well, you said this, but what you really mean is this. It's time to create, time to produce, time to publish. Where do you turn to? I think Twitter, also obviously YouTube, but that's a merit very much in a video format. So a lot of it's done in Notion. I also actually do a lot of sort of planning and structure to videos in my head, because sometimes it's nice to be able to think things through like that. And I don't necessarily need a bit of paper. I would say out of sort of all my applications, my Notes app is the one that I least use, but I also find incredibly valuable. And that's why you have to spend considerably more time researching the note taker. Because although we talk about lots of apps, I like people to stay with them. Because that's the true test of productivity is, I think, staying with something that works over a long period of time. If you want to pick your very own note taking app and start to use it every day, watch this video next.