#Apple notes as second brain how to
#Apple notes as second brain software
#Apple notes as second brain trial
#Apple notes as second brain free

My biggest problem seems to be my notetaking skill. In fact, the blog post was inspired by my uninstalling of the application. Let's get this out of the way: I haven't even opened Obsidian in more than a month. But because I already had decent habits with Instapaper and Reminders, I saw no need to change those habits and could try out something fancier for more permanent storage. I've heard of people using just Apple Notes for everything, or just Notion, or just a physical notebook. Then, when I had the time, I'd read the article or transfer my notes in Obsidian, where it would get added to my knowledge graph.

Any article that looks interesting gets saved to Instapaper.

Notes and thoughts get written on paper if I have paper around, otherwise they're filed as a reminder.

But I did decide to be more diligent and formalize my 'in a rush' system: I didn't like that idea, partially because I don't really have issues with my memory. There are all sorts of ways to do this, and some people have different notetaking applications for different media, and then transfer those notes into something more permanent like Evernote or Notion when they have the time. If that's not available, you need to save something that will remind you of your thought when you have enough time to start preserving that information. The goal of the second brain is to offload some of your cognitive power into a permanent system as quickly as possible. Obsidian worked around the issues I just listed above by being a frontend to regular markdown files, so I could switch services at any point if I wanted to, and provided a graph of my notes so I could see connections. My reasons for Reminders are listed in the linked post, and I chose Instapaper because I've been using the service since 2011 as a 'read it later' service.

#Apple notes as second brain trial

In the end, I decided on a system of Apple Reminders, Instapaper, and Obsidian for my trial run. I played around with Notion a bit at work (my company pays for the service) and decided it wasn't what I was looking for. Even worse, many of these products don't use a standard format for storing notes, so there's no way to migrate you information out of the service if you decide you don't want to pay or you think another service does it better.

#Apple notes as second brain free

This choice on its own might be overwhelming, as many products don't have a very good free tier or trial for you to play around with before spending money on all the features. If you have a preferred way of storing information, there's a service out there that will be better optimized for that workflow. And some people want to manage everything about their life in the same place for searchability and progress tracking they should probably use Notion or something similar. People who want a connection graph to form naturally from their notes may want something like Roam or Obsidian. People who write long pages and want to manually search and link information may prefer something like Evernote or Bear. There are countless ways to boost your information storage setup, and certain systems work better for certain people. I can name 9 without even thinking about it (in no order):

#Apple notes as second brain software

There's an exploding market for modern notetaking and knowledge storage software right now. At some point this winter, I decided to take a weekend to get myself set up, and even made daily notetaking one of my habits for the new year. I found it around the same time I found out about the Zettelkasten method of notetaking, which I also found extremely interesting. Sometime last summer I discovered this idea of a second brain and thought it was a wonderful idea.

#Apple notes as second brain how to

Productivity influencers swear by the process and each have their own take on how to implement the core principles for themselves. The high level is: you leverage modern notetaking, media capture, and graph visualization software to store information quickly and be able to effortlessly recall it later. The idea has largely stemmed from Tiago Forte's wonderful course and system he called 'Building a Second Brain'. There's been a lot of chatter about the idea of a 'second brain' in the last year or two.