Solve Information Overwhelm with this Productivity System

Read time: 2 minutes

Let’s shake things up.

Today I want to take a bit more of a curated approach to the newsletter and share a way to organize your business (and digital life).

I wouldn’t call myself an expert in productivity and organization tools, but I do know one thing with absolute certainty:

Every entrepreneur, creator, or solopreneur needs a simple system to help them organize information.

I spent countless hours learning how to optimize and streamline the flow of information. But when I learned about Building a Second Brain, everything clicked.

I want to introduce it to you because it solved the information overload problem. It’s a simple but game-changing concept to help you increase productivity & creativity while reducing the overwhelm.

Building a Second Brain 101:

Here’s the deal: Building a Second Brain is a system to capture, organize, and distill digital information using a suite of applications.

It’s designed to free up your mind by allowing you to offload information you don’t have to memorize. And it reminds you to organize the information so your future self can understand it and your present self can easily find it.

Instead of keeping everything you find, the ideology is to filter more and hoard less so you protect yourself from information overwhelm.

At its basic level, it’s an ecosystem of applications that work together. It’s a notes system at the center, surrounded by task managers, read-later apps, workflow tools, and other productivity-enhancing apps.

But it’s not just about the tools; it’s how you capture, organize, distill, and express the information that is the secret sauce.

Here’s how you can get started:

• Watch this video: How to Organise Your Life with Ali Abdaal is a series of takeaways and practical insights after implementing Building a Second Brain.

• Listen to this podcast episode: Building a Second Brain to Organize Your Digital Life is a 50-min conversation with Chris Hutchins (All The Hacks) and Tiago Forte about the value of organizing your digital life.

• Read this article: Building a Second Brain: An Overview, by Tiago Forte, is an overview of the system directly from its creator.

If you want to go even deeper and implement the practices, I suggest Tiago’s book and videos.

The Grand Takeaway:

It’s worth highlighting…the grand takeaway is that building a second brain is a way to package current information into a form your future self can use.

No more scribbled notes that don’t make sense the next day.

No more searching through endless folders to find essential emails

No more information hoarding.

I used to pride myself on holding everything in my head. Now I realize the brain is meant for creative and strategic work.

If you already use the Building a Second Brain system, send me an email and let me know how you use it and the tools you use.