Joan Westenberg: I Deleted My Second Brain

For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

I’ve been interested in this premise. Capture it all, have a way to search it, and your life can attain some level of order. Instead of chaos and forgetting, we can capture time in our notes, and wrangle it to our intended purpose.

There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts. But there is a special anxiety reserved for unread lists of unread things. My reading list had become a totem of imagined wisdom. A shrine to the person I would be, if only I read everything on it.

Again, guilty. I’ve got lists of lists of things I wish to do.

Reading over Joan’s experience, though, I wonder if there’s a required shift that we all must take. At some point I didn’t take any of my thousands of notes seriously. I stopped using them as a second brain, and more kept them around as an occasional archive to supplement searching for a captured idea.

Having a “capture it all just in case” mindset is fine, so long as it’s loosely used. Most ideas are just that, ideas. We don’t need to treat everything with equal weight.

I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.

Agreed wholeheartedly.

Via Westenberg.