Maximize Your Learning Potential: Boost Your Creativity and Idea Generation with a Second Brain

A Guide to Building a Personal Knowledge Management System with Readwise, Snipd, and Obsidian

In today’s digital age, we are constantly overwhelmed with an excessive amount of information. This can lead to information overload and fragmented knowledge, causing us to lose valuable ideas and insights that are crucial for our creativity and growth.

But what if there was a solution? Dive into this article to learn about a systematic approach that can help you effortlessly capture, organize, and retrieve valuable information.

Enter the concept of a “second brain.”¹

A second brain also known as a personal knowledge management system (PKM) is an organized method for capturing, organizing, and retrieving information and knowledge encountered in daily life. It helps overcome the limitations of relying solely on memory to store and access this information.

So what, why do you need a second brain?

The key reasons why a personal knowledge management system is valuable are:

1. Avoid losing important information and insights: Without a system, valuable ideas, notes, and resources can easily get lost or forgotten in the digital clutter of bookmarks, files, and apps.
2. Make knowledge more accessible and usable: A well-designed system allows for easy retrieval and connection of related pieces of information when needed, eliminating the need to rediscover or re-learn things repeatedly.
3. Support continuous learning and knowledge growth: By capturing and organizing what you learn, you can effectively build upon your existing knowledge over time.
4. Enhance creativity and idea generation: An interconnected organization of knowledge sparks new insights by combining concepts from different domains.

Now what, how do you build a second brain?

You need these essential components to build a second brain

Capture mechanism:

To begin, you need tools that enable you to effortlessly capture valuable insights from different sources. These sources can range from websites and articles to books, podcasts, and videos. For example, when reading Kindle books, you can highlight important points.

Organization System:

Once you have captured valuable information, it is essential to have a structure in place for saving, categorizing, and interlinking related pieces of knowledge. A note-taking system can be incredibly helpful here.

Workflow/Habits:

Having a well-defined workflow and cultivating effective habits are crucial aspects of maintaining your second brain. Establish techniques for reviewing, updating, and organizing stored knowledge regularly.

Readwise²: A guide to capturing information from various sources

Readwise is a powerful tool that helps you capture and organize valuable information from various sources. Here’s how you can make the most out of Readwise:

Ways to capture text highlights

• Install the Webhighlighter Chrome Extension on your browser. It allows you to highlight important text and save notes directly to Readwise.
• Connect your Amazon account to Readwise to automatically import your Kindle book highlights.
• Link your Twitter account to Readwise for effortless saving of tweets. Simply reply to a tweet with “@readwise save thread” to store it in Readwise.
• Connect your Medium account to automatically import highlights from articles you read on the platform.
• If you have highlights in PDF format, simply email the file as an attachment to add@readwise.io. Readwise will extract the highlights and add them to your account.

Effortlessly capture podcast highlights with Snipd and Readwise

Improve your learning experience with podcasts using Snipd. When you create snips in Snipd, it will generate AI-generated smart notes to help you effortlessly save important takeaways. By connecting your Snipd account with Readwise, it will automatically import these podcast highlights for you.

Readwise Reader helps you highlight and save video transcripts

The Readwise Reader app acts as a central hub for all the information stored in Readwise. You can now add YouTube videos to the readwise app, and it will show the video transcript alongside it. As the video plays, you can follow along with the transcript and highlight significant sections directly within it. The highlights will be saved in Readwise.

Export your Audible clips using Whisper Obsidian plugin

Please refer to my article for instructions on how to export Audible clips to obsidian.

Exploring more integration options

Checkout all other import integration tools to import highlights from more sources. Readwise continually adds new integrations to keep up with the latest popular tools.

Obsidian: A comprehensive second brain for note organization

In my quest for the perfect note-taking app, I’ve tried out different options such as Bear and Notion. However, I recently switched to using Obsidian as my second brain.

The following powerful features of Obsidian make it a exceptional note-taking system.

Bidirectional Linking:

One of the most powerful features of Obsidian is its ability to create connections between notes through backlinks. This means that whenever I mention a note inside another node, Obsidian automatically creates a backlink from the mentioned note to the node that refers to it. This feature allows me to easily navigate between related notes and build a comprehensive web of interconnected knowledge.

Graph View:

The graph visualization feature further enhances the interconnectedness of my notes within Obsidian. By visualizing how notes are linked together through an interactive graph view, I gain valuable insights into patterns and relationships that might have been otherwise overlooked.

Customizable Organization

Obsidian lets me organize my notes using a flexible file structure. I can create folders, subfolders, and even nest notes within each other to match the way I think and work.

Community-Driven Development

Obsidian has an active user community that constantly contributes plugins and themes to expand the app’s functionality and customization options. This vibrant community ensures that Obsidian is continually improving and adapting to users’ evolving needs.

Hotkeys and Commands

Obsidian offers a wide range of keyboard shortcuts and the ability to create custom commands, making it a highly efficient tool for workflows.

Local File Storage

Notes in Obsidian are stored locally as plain text files, giving you full control and portability.

Sync and Backup

Obsidian supports syncing notes across devices using third-party cloud services or self-hosted options, as well as version control with Git.

Mobile Apps

Obsidian has dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android, allowing you to access and edit your notes on the go.

Workflow Habits for an effective second brain

Workflow for podcasts

I use Snipd to listen to podcasts. I have set up the Snipd-Readwise integration to import podcast highlights into Readwise. Additionally, I utilize the Readwise Obsidian plugin to automatically import all the information captured in Readwise into Obsidian.

Workflow for videos

Instead of watching videos directly from my YouTube feed or search results, I usually add the ones I want to watch to my “Watch Later” queue on YouTube. I prioritize and watch videos from my “Watch Later” queue based on my available time. This method helps me avoid binge-watching YouTube and wasting time.

If a video has valuable insights that I want to highlight, I use the Readwise Reader to save those highlights.

If there are only a few key takeaways from a video that I can remember, I use daily note journaling in Obsidian. In my daily note, I add a link to the video and write down my notes.

Daily note journaling

To quickly summarize the things I learn each day, I use the Daily Note plugin in Obsidian. This practice mainly focuses on summarizing YouTube videos, as online articles and podcasts are already exported by Readwise.

Workflow automation of my second brain system

My workflow is mostly automated thanks to the seamless integration provided by tools like Readwise, Snipd, and Obsidian.

To automatically generate tables based on the metadata fields added by Readwise, I utilize the Dataview plugin. These tables can gather relevant information from different notes based on specific criteria, such as tags, dates, or other metadata fields.

For instance, the following Dataview code creates a table that is dynamically updated whenever new articles are exported:

```dataview
TABLE Title, Author, Created, Source
FROM "obsidian/Readwise/Articles"
WHERE Category = "articles"
SORT Created DESC
```

Additionally, in every note I create in Obsidian, I include the following properties for easy organization and access.

1. Tags: These help me quickly find relevant notes based on specific topics or themes.
2. Created Date: This property allows me to track the date when a note was created.
3. Category: I assign a category to each note, such as “notes,” “books,” or “articles,” to further classify and organize my knowledge.
4. Related: I use the “related” property to add links to other Obsidian notes that are related to the current note.

Summary

In conclusion, a personal knowledge management system, also known as a “second brain,” is essential for anyone who wants to overcome the limitations of relying solely on memory. It allows you to expand on existing knowledge, rediscover insights, and generate new ideas.

Your second brain will empower you to conquer information overload, enhance your learning journey, and unleash your creativity.

P.S.: This article has already become lengthy, so I have only shared how to build a second brain to maximize learning potential. In future articles, I will also discuss how to use a second brain to generate creative ideas. Please subscribe to the publication newsletter to receive notifications about future articles.

Update on May 4, 2024:

As promised, I have shared how to generate creative ideas using the second brain in this article.

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Footnotes:

[1]: Tiago Forte popularized the term “Second Brain” and published a book with the same name.

[2]: I discovered Readwise several years ago when I was searching for a tool to implement concepts I learned from the book how to take smart notes At that time, Readwise was in beta and I purchased it at a discounted price. Thanks to the Readwise team, they have continuously added more features and have grandfathered me in with the same discounted price.