I have always been scribbling in notebooks. Back at home I have a lot of half filled notebooks that I honestly don’t want to throw out but also don’t really want to keep. Today I have at least 10 different notebooks ready to be used.
I got onboard the trend of bullet journals a few years ago and that has been a game changer in term of organization and keeping track of some information. After a few years of using them, I finally found the perfect system that works for me that is really fast to set up and fast to fill out everyday. But bullet journals work well for day to day tracking, not so much for organizing my thoughts or keeping track of more important stuff or research. It is also not convenient when I am trying to find that specific piece of information I know I wrote down but can’t recall on which page or in which notebook. Who likes to go through all their notebooks to find that page where there is that specific thing you are looking for? (Actually I do, I always find gems when I look for something, but it’s not very time efficient).

I picked up Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte after someone from work recommended it. The concept was appealing: how to finally organize your thoughts in a manner that will make sense to you?
I usually don’t have too much expectations when reading self improvements books and am usually happy to get a couple of good advice from them. But I must admit, I was more than happily surprised at how much of an improvement that book is making on my life.

I am still slowly applying the concepts and ideas from this book but here are a few takeaways for now:

• I always have a lot of things in my mind and now I can just brain dump them in a place where I know it won’t be lost, where I can make it actionable and where I can easily find, revisit, update the most important projects I want to work on.
• I can keep things clear and organized a lot more easily
• I started brainstorming big projects and can easily share some key findings with my partner
• It helped me create a daily process to make sure the most important thing I need to do will be prioritized.
• I am starting to use it in my professional life and it makes me feel so much more organized and productive.

All of this seems like small shifts but I can already see the bigger impact it is starting to have in my day to day life.
I will continue implementing it and will give some feedback after a few months of use!