About a year ago I took some cognitive tests. All the tests went reasonably well, except those that had to do with the work memory. I’m basically Dory from ‘Finding Nemo’.
Since then I have taken the second brain trend much more seriously: underlining, annotating and digitally archiving everything that may be useful to me in the future to free up space in short-term memory, one of my most finite resources.
Structure and order are needed to have a truly functional second brain and not a unfathomable mixed bagbut an Internet junkie who receives a constant bombardment of information through videos, articles, tweets, newsletters and podcasts needs to write everything down so that the information does not end up fading from memory.
In general, there are only two things that I never forget: my grandmother’s house phone (even though my grandmother is no longer there to pick it up) and the TV commercials that I watched as a child; especially the jet extender ones. I have to write everything else down if I intend to keep it.
Luckily, actively taking notes helps me process and consolidate information better, something any student will have seen for themselves. With bandwidth as small as mine, the idea is to underline everything.
Highlight, annotate and archive
I don’t follow a specific method to write everything down, nor do I have a perfectly indexed database in Notion or Obsidianlike the productivity gurus, but I do something that could be defined as Getting Things Done (GTD) for lazy people.
The first step is to collect all the information that catches my attention or can be used for something in the app that is more within my reach. This nuance is important because it helps me avoid the catch-all I talked about above. What do I mean by the application that is most within my reach?
Books. Normally, I read ebooks and longer articles on my Kindle before going to sleep. If I see something interesting, instead of going to my phone and copying the quote into a notes app, I underline it with the Kindle’s own underlining function, which also supports annotations.
Underlined text and annotations sync through the Amazon cloud to the Kindle app on all my devices, so I always have them on hand to process later.
Podcasts. I do the same with podcasts. There’s an app called Snipd that mixes the classic features of a podcast player with AI-generated transcripts that can be highlighted and annotated. It also does summaries, automatic chapters and other things that AI is starting to enable in many applications.
The most interesting thing is that the annotations sync with Readwise, Notion, Obsidian and other popular note apps. In my case I use Obsidian because it is free, but Readwise has interesting functions for these purposes, such as annotating articles and PDFs.
Videos. There are also services to annotate YouTube videos, but until Google releases its own tool, what I do is copy the parts that interest me from the automatic transcription, which is available in all the videos on the platform along with the description .
If they are long videos, they can be summarized with Microsoft Edge Copilot or ChatGPT, both free. A useful indication in these cases is to ask the AI: “list everything the video says about (specific topic that interests me).” Like podcast excerpts, video excerpts go to Obsidian.
Tweets. If what I see is a tweet that I can use for an article I’m working on or a podcast script, I save it directly to my X account with the saved items (or “bookmarks” option).
The best thing about
Websites. I no longer use RSS, but the content format I consume the most is still web articles. I’ve tried everything for highlighting and annotating websites, including Notion and OneNote’s advanced web clipping tools, but I’m sticking with… Telegram.
Telegram is one of the applications that I use the most in my daily life. When I realized that I was consulting it more times than the specific task and reminder apps, I started saving links and notes there.
If I think of something I want to remember, I write it down in “Saved Messages.” When I see news for Xataka, I paste the link in a private group called “Xataka”. If I come up with a headline or annotation on the topic, I’ll note it as a response to that link.
I have dozens of Telegram groups with myself for this type of annotation. I have one for every podcast I record with my colleagues. I have several with my wife for things like “Málaga Restaurants” and “Movies”. And I know many people who do the same, only on WhatsApp.
Retrieve, dump and process
Once I have all these notes scattered across Kindle, Obsidian, X and Telegram, it’s time to process them.
When I want to group web pages by topic (for an article I’m writing or a podcast script), I use OneTab, a browser extension that does nothing but archive open tabs.
If I’m writing an article and want to document it with excerpts from different sources, I use Obsidian to structure everything in a draft. The process is as rudimentary as it is simple: I look for the notes that I have been storing in other apps, I dump them into the draft in a certain order and expand with what I want to write.
Obsidian doesn’t have much of a mystery. It has a very fast search engine that allows me to quickly access all my annotations and works with Markdown, the language in which I format articles like this.
I used to use Apple Notes, but I ended up regretting it when, for whatever reason, I spent time on Windows and Android.
Image | Give 3
In Xataka | The rise of the ‘second brain’: the new trend that is defining productivity in this decade
