Every year, I take online courses, listen to podcast, read and highlight books. Besides, I take notes to use later in my job and personal projects. But it's hard to study and memorize every insightful quote, game-changer tip, master-mind artifact or ultimate infographic I'd found.

Information overload has become a daily issue due to mature mobile devices and well-trained social media. We as technical and knowledge workers need a customizable personal system to save, curate and retrieve information when we need it the most according to our daily day.

In 2021 I met the tools to build a "Second brain", this concept from Thiago Forte in his legendary course "Building a second brain (BASB)" was a big upgrade to my life. So, every year I update this post with my findings and tools about implement this "Second brain" philosophy in my job and personal life.

2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025

2025

It's February 2025, and here's my update. Last year was a big change on how I deal with information and digital places. I adopted a more robust and complex app for notes and thinking: Obsidian. This has been a step forward from an Architect mind-shaped to adopt a "Gardener mind-shape". So, these are my new tools so far:

2024

In 2024's early days, my Second Brain is now refined by actionability or reference using a couple of questions:

About this thought or urgency I feel... is it something I need to do soon or not?

    • a) Do I know when is the best moment to do it?
      – Action: Task or Event
    • b) Do I want to keep it as-is or I just need an specific piece of it?
      – Reference: Storage or Notes

So far this year, these are my tools:

2023

So, in 2023, as soon as I could, I signed for the premium "Building a Second Brain Cohort (18th) Course", and it blowed my mind. I finally was able to apply the CODE method: Capture, Organize, Distill and Express. Since college I didn't take so many personal and technical notes. And my stack of apps grew in complexity and ROI:

2022

In 2022, I pre-ordered and read the BASB book and It changed completely my digital life. I started using the PARA formula: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive. PARA was my organization criteria for my computer's folders and files, later in my Google Drive, and my Notion pages, even my email inbox, and browser bookmarks were now categorized by "actionability".

2021

In 2021 I met the tools to build a "Second brain", this concept from Thiago Forte in his legendary course "Building a second brain (BASB)" was a big upgrade in my life. So I wrote about it and built the first version with these apps:

This combo was great to keep consuming content and make it findable in one-stop-shop: Notion. I thought that was the corner stone to revisit my notes, write more insightful posts in blog and share more clever stuff in social media.