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Illustrated Notes

How to Build a Second Brain – Part 2

Published or updated on April 04, 2020

After a slight delay and many, many email requests, I've finished off my illustrated notes on the Building a Second Brain course. Thank you everyone for the gentle nudges to get these published 😉

If you haven't read Part 1 yet, head there first 👉

Since taking the course in September of 2019, I've been building and developing my second brain over the past seven months.

Much like any well-integrated tool, the mental distance between you and the system grows small.
It's a lovely little closed feedback loop – a cybernetic system.
At this point almost all of my daily workflow revolves around my second brain. Links, articles, books, papers, podcasts, and half-formed thoughts go in.
These build into notes and develop over time – they merge, meander, and mature into talks and blog posts and illustrations.
It is hard to remember what my workflow looked like without it.

For tools I'm currently using Roam Research, backed up by Keyboard Maestro for some fancy automation elements.

These notes cover the last two sections of the course. Enjoy!

Just in time project management helps us balance our workflow between capture and delivery. Your orderly system of notes is like mise en place – everything in its place We need flexible strategies, not static workflows. We diagnose the problem, form a guiding policy to tackle it, and write an action plan to implement it. Some workflow strategies we can use include context switching, changing the form of our notes, and adding colour commentary through annotations and highlights.

The final section of BASB covers how to make a personal knowledge management canvas

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