How to Create your Digital Brain
By Daniel Robledo| Last Updated May 31, 2020
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Having two brains
For the last years, I have been experiencing the pleasure of having not one, but two brains.
Do you want to know how is that possible?
Picture an information warehouse in which you have clear, easy, and fast access to anything that you need for your work.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
You wouldn’t feel discouraged and lost anymore whenever you are working on an essay.
You wouldn’t be mad at yourself for forgetting that important meeting, data, research, article, etc, that you need right now.
These are just some of the incredible advantages that come when you have two brains, one for creating, one for storing.
You are human (or I guess so) so your creative brain is already inside you and you live in the information age so you can create your second brain.
Today, we are going to learn how to set up a note-taking and file-management system in which you will be able not only externalize everything that pops in your mind – which, is one of our main purposes here – but to store tons of useful information and an easy and non-resistance way.
Your Note-taking system
We are going to start by building your note-taking system, a system in which you can capture everything that gets in your mind and in which you can save all of the information you learn over time.
Why are notes important?
Before we start building up a system for your notes, let’s think about why notes are important in the first place.
Having a good organized and efficient note-taking system is important for two major reasons: it removes resistance on your productivity and frees your brain from storing information.
Starting with the first main benefit of having a note-taking system, a well-organized note system makes you less likely to either procrastinate or get confused when taking notes.
As we have talked before, removing resistance (the force that prevents you from doing what you want to do) is one of the most important goals of any productivity system, and having a note-taking system is one of the most impacting ways to decrease resistance.
Following with, the second main benefit of having a note-taking system, scientific researches has found that the human brain is wired to create ideas, not to store them.
Have you ever feel like your brain is at its full capacity? That you literally can not think of anything else?
That was you trying to use your brain for something it was not designed for, the more ideas, thoughts, and information you try to store, the more likely you are to forget about them and the less efficient you will be when trying to work with this material.
All of these means that you need to externalize as much as possible all of the information that pop-ups in your mind, and taking notes in the fastest and simplest way to do that.
Physical vs Digital
The very first step on taking notes is to decide where are you going to take them, here you have 3 options: Digital, Physical and Digital-Physical media.
Let’s first talk about the digital and physical media, they both have their advantages and disadvantages:
- Digital: They are usually more convenient and clean but require a digital device and a fast typing speed.
- Physical: They are more natural to us and are more flexible but they are so hard to well-storage.
I would suggest using both systems depending on the situation.
If you need to go through large chunks of information with no conceptual representation (like history, math’s theory, or language), go for a digital device.
If you need to visualize the information, draw or the information is harder than extensive, it will usually be better to for a physical note.
To finish with, let’s talk about the Digital-Physical notes, they are a combination of both systems and I think they are the most efficient note-taking system, usually presented in the form of a tablet device.
I think the best device to take notes on this form is the IPad so I’m going to give you an example on it:
- System: IPad (+ keybord + pencil)
- Physical Advantages
- You can draw to create flow notes and mindmaps
- You can edit your notes as you may do with a pencil and eraser
- Hand-made notes on digital devices are clearer than paper ones
- You can make it feel like paper with a special screen-protector
- Digital Advantages
- You can carry it wherever you want
- It is easy to create large chunks of information due to the typing speed
- Easy large storage
- Disadvantages
- They are usually expensive
Now that you know all of the options you have for your note-taking system media, I would suggest going for a combination of all of them.
Take a look at your resources and needs and choose different media for different situations.
How to efficiently take notes
Let’s be clear, almost everybody knows how to take notes, but did you know all of the note-taking techniques?, do you use a specific system for a type of knowledge?, do you know that you may be turning your brain off while taking notes and not get a clue of what were you learning when you took those notes?
Creating notebooks
Before you start taking notes, you need a place to store them, you can not just simply put them all in one big hole.
Remember that you want to remove resistance as much as possible when creating and consulting your notes, and the best way to do that is by creating notebooks and stacks.
You have a lot of freedom on organizing your notebooks and stacks but I would suggest that you base your stacks on your life hot stops and your notebooks in your projects (if you don’t know what I am talking about, you should check out my time & attention management post).
The key here is to have a system in which your notebooks are representative of the project they belong to and that you can easily differentiate the different stacks from one another, i.e. you may have the following system:
- Stack: Learning
- Notebooks: Piano, Web Development & Writing
- Stack: Personal
- Notebooks: Journal, Finances & Fitness
- Stack: College
- Notebooks: AI, CIS, SDP, FDDBB & OS (One per subject)
Taking notes
Now that you have your notebooks and stacks system set up, you need to start creating the notes within those notebooks.
There are tons of different note-taking techniques out there, I am going to show you the three that work best for me and that I think are the most useful:
1. The outline method
Let’s start with the simplest method, the outline method.
Taking notes on an outline method is pretty straightforward, you just write hierarchically.
- You start having the main points up
- Then start writing child-points
- And you can create as many depth-levels as you need
- This is so meta
- I know right?
Outline notes are useful when you need to gather information without conceptual understanding, they are fast and don’t require much effort.
For example, I use the outline method when taking notes from my college classes, I found them useful since I can write them while I listen to my professors and I can easily transform them into flow notes, later on, I also use this method when creating posts’ outlines.
2. The mindmap method
Continuing with, a mindmap is a physical (or digital) representation of how your mind understands a concept, create a mind map is a really simple process:
- You start with a very general concept in the middle.
- Then you start to create related concepts to that general one around it, you connect the little ones to the big ones with lines.
- Repeat step 2 on every concept until you have written down everything you need to know about the general concept.
Mindmaps are useful when you need to know a lot of things about a general concept without going dive into each one of those specific concepts.
I usually use mindmaps for some posts’ ideas, projects brainstorm, and big general college concepts.
3. The flow method
The final technique I want to show is the flow method.
Flow notes try to recreate the process that the human brain goes when learning new information, this means that these notes will only work for you since they will be a representation of how you brain understand the information
Taking flow notes is the hardest process to master among any note-taking technique because it variates to much from one person to another.
Although you may indeed find them useful to:
- Write all over the paper, don’t go left to right and up to down, just write the information in wherever feels more clear to you
- Try to draw little sketches of any concept you want to remember
- Link on concept to another using arrows
I use flow notes when I am studying, I usually take my outline notes and develop a flow summary note of every unit that I need to study before I start studying it, this way I interact with the content and create a resource I can look for that I fully understand.
Note Apps, Tips & Examples
To finish with, I want to give you some Apps, tips, and examples that may be useful for you when you start creating your note-system.
Note-Taking Apps
The two most useful Apps I have found for note-taking are Evernote and Notion.
- Evernote: In this Windows/MAC application you can create notebooks and stacks, templates, tags, and the free version is more than enough for a regular user.
- Notion: This is an all-in productivity application, among all of its features, you can take notes and relate them with each other to create a fully responsive system.
These two applications are really good to create outline notes, if you want to create mindmaps I would recommend draw.io and for flow notes either the physical or digital-physical media we talked about before.
My note-taking system
Even tho I use both physical and digital media for taking notes, I store them all on Evernote (using the quick capture Evernote’s feature).
I have 8 different notebook stacks, within those stacks I have from 5 to 10 different notebooks that contain my notes:
- Blog: I use this stack for my post ideas, scripts, and general blog notes.
- Books: Here I write the notes I take from all of the books I read, each on its corresponding notebook.
- Actual classes: I have one notebook for each subject I’m currently taking.
- Classes: Here I store my past subjects in case I need to take a look at something.
- Learning: I use this stack for anything I am learning, like Web Development or Psychology.
- Personal: I keep here my finances, journals, and thoughts.
- Projects: I store here the projects that are not so big that they need a full-stack.
- Inbox & Templates: I use this stack for taking notes that I do not have the time to store, and to store the templates for other notes.
The process I follow when taking notes is different from one note to another but my most common and general process are:
- Studies: I develop an outline based on my college’s material and my classes, then I create a flow note based on that outline, it usually contains one or more mindmaps.
- Books: I usually highlight while I read and then write an outline based on those highlights.
- Templates: When I feel like I’m writing the same structure more than once, I create a note to use as a template, i.e. my class notes or my post idea notes.
Hopefully, now you have your system set up and ready to start writing down everything you need, remember that it is important to maintain that organization over time, and now it is time to learn how to organize your non-notes files.
Your Files Organization
The second cornerstone of your information store are your files, both digital and physical.
You need to keep documentation about anything that will be useful to you in the future and you need to keep it in an organized and easy to access system.
Physical Files Organization: The 3 location system
Let’s start with your physicals files since you’ll probably have so much less than digital (or at least you should)
We are not going to spend so much time on this topic because physical files don’t present any advantage over digital ones and you should keep them to the minimum.
For those files that you need to store on a physical form, I’m going to summarize a system created by the content-creator Thomas Frank, “The 3-location system“.
The 3-location system
The 3-location system consists of having three main places in which you store your physical files, each with one purpose:
- Main file box: Here you will keep everything that needs to be physically stored. I would suggest getting a multiple folder box for this location.
- Inbox: You are going to use your inbox as a temporal store, you will place here the files that come up and you don’t have the time to organize them, you mainly use a simple folder as an inbox location.
- Portable file folder: Finally, the portable file folder is a little version of your main file box in which you keep the files needed for a specific situation, for example, an interview.
If you want to dive deeper into this system, check out Thomas Frank’s Video about the 3-location system.
Digital Files Organization: The tree structure
If you are anything like me, you tend to keep more than you need when it comes to digital file storage.
This leads to a complete mess of archives, folders, and disks that makes no sense and in which navigating is as pleasurable as sitting on a college’s chair.
The Tree Structure
To get a digital file organization system that boosts your productivity and not the opposite, I’m going to recommend you to create a tree structure to your files.
Creating a tree structure is pretty simple:
- Start with a general folder.
- Create subfolders that represent more specific information.
- Repeat step 2 until there aren’t two archives with different characteristics in the same folder.
Some useful tips when creating your digital files’ tree would be:
- Separate the information that may cause trouble if it gets lost from what may not.
- Be as specific as you need, it doesn’t matter if one archive is 10 clicks aways (we will solve this problem in just a bit).
- Try to match your folders with your life’s hot stops.
If you take the time to organize your digital files, you will earn x4 hours in exchange for the value you have put in getting your files organized.
Remember that you will need to maintain that order when new files come so it doesn’t return to its natural state.
My Digital File Organization
To give you an example, I’m going to show how I organize my digital files so that I know exactly where is everything I need.
To start with, I divide my PC into two folders: Local & Google Drive
Then, I divide each one into more specific types of programs and archives that will be stored on them
Finally, I keep creating new folders until I reach the pure archives
Taking your file system to the next level
Now that you have your files organized, I’m sure that you notice some drawbacks that it may have.
- It is pretty hard to insert new information into this super-organized system.
- If I want to access a specific file, I have to come across multiple folders until I get what I’m looking for.
- What if I suddenly lost my PC disk? All of my information would be lost.
Here is where out productive-master skills come to place, let’s review the 3 most important features to add to your files-organization system.
Quick Access
The very first thing you should do is identifying your most commonly use archives and folders and create a quick access menu to access them.
On pretty much any app and operative system, you have access to the quick access feature, link the files you use the most there to remove resistance.
Cloud Synchronization
The next thing you should do with some to your files is to upload them to some kind of cloud service.
This way you will make sure that they don’t get lost if something happens To your primary manipulation device and you will have access to all of them no matter in which device you are.
Some very good Apps for cloud synchronization are:
- Google Drive: With the free 15GB they give you should have more than enough for your important files, you can buy more storage if you want.
- Dropbox: Pretty much the same as Google Drive and it has so many integrations with other applications, but it is a little more expensive.
If you are a college student, you probably have unlimited storage on your student account, just make sure you will be able to retrieve your files once you are done with your career.
Quick Capture
To end with, I highly recommend that you use some kind of quick-capture service to easily get any though or information into your inbox, so that you can organize it later on.
Some good free services for quick capture are:
- Evernote’s Capture Feature: You can make photos of your paper and create notes based on them.
- Word’s recorder: You can create written notes based on what you are saying to your microphone.
- Scanbot: An Android/IOS App that lets you scan documents and them send right into your google drive system.
I use Evernote for everything, I scan my flow notes for my exams and I record any idea I have when I can not write it (90% of my ideas occur in the shower or walking with my dog).
A Long Term Road
Developing a system that works for you is a long-term task, you need to first set up what you’ve already have and then keep improving that system over time, eventually, you will end up with a perfectly organized system in which externalizing a though or checking out a file is just a click away.
Let’s get moving
I want you to start this road right now:
- Choose a service for your notes and the next time you are learning something take an outline or flow note.
- Insert that note on your system and keep it organized.
- Create your tree structure for your digital files and upload the most important ones to a cloud service.
- Get rid of any non-essential physical files and build a 3-location system with the remaining.
- Keep your system updated over time and enjoy your new life.
I hope you found this post useful and that you started building your second brain.
It would be amazing if you share this post and let me know what you think.
Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it. See you soon!
