We have come a long way from lack of information to lakhs of information. Each day we are consuming around 74 GB of information. Now to put that into context, 500 years ago that was the amount of information a person would have consumed in their entire lifetime. [1]

How do we make sense of all this information? Should we memorize every piece of the idea that emerges from this information overload?

Well no, you shouldn't be wasting your brain power memorizing ideas. As said by David Allen Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. The way to make sense of relevant information is to build a second brain.

The Second Brain is a digital note-taking tool that lets you capture and organize your notes. It will help you to make connections between different ideas and thoughts. You can dive deeper into the concept of the second brain through the book - Building A Second Brain by Tiago Forte.

You are free to use any available software of your choice. Below I will share what my second brain looks like and the process of note capturing that goes into it. To get better at note-taking check out the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.

The majority of the information I consume happens from daily reading of books. Most reading happens on Kindle, every highlight I make with Kindle gets exported to ReadWise.

While reading physical books I make underlines with a highlighter and ReadWise allows me to take a photo that gets converted to highlights.

I read a vast amount of articles, most of them from Medium. ReadWise syncs with Medium highlights also, but I go a step further by using RainDrop. It helps me organize the articles I want to read in folders and also helps tag them. I read the articles in RainDrop and every highlight again gets synced to ReadWise.

While listening to podcasts I use Snipd which helps me make highlights and it too gets synced to ReadWise.

Another source of my information that directly syncs with ReadWise is Twitter. Every time I see an informative tweet I bookmark it, and it gets saved to ReadWise.

All these collections of highlights get synced to Notion. And Notion also holds my morning pages. Morning pages are a self-reflection journal system that I do every morning.

And while scrolling through Instagram or Linkedin I take screenshots of interesting posts and share them to Google Keep. Every interesting point I might across in a movie, in a conversation, or while reading a Newsletter all get screenshotted and shared to Google Keep.

Occasionally I try to transfer ideas from Google Keep to Notion.

This gives me the ultimate second brain for connecting ideas and retaining information.

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