#secondbrain To understand why I am finally creating a Second Brain is to first understand where I was beforehand.
As of writing this (November 21st 2023), I’ve been writing for about 2 months now.
The system I used to generate posts and content looked like this:
- Capture interesting thoughts/information from my day to day in “The Queue”.
- When it came to writing, I would take ideas from the Queue and try spit out posts about them.
This method was barebones, quick and agile which was just what I needed to get off the ground running. To take me from chronically consuming to finally creating.
However, the more I wrote using the system, the more cracks would start appearing.
The first issue was that taking unprocessed raw thoughts to developed ideas was not always easy. I had bundled idea development with creation.
What this would like is: I sit down to write. I start looking at “The Queue”, and scroll up and down hoping ideas magically would come. In a sense I had just gathered kindling and was just praying for lightning to strike.
Instead I needed a system to be able to reliably be able to start my own fires. Put together a creative process in place that could pull kindling, branches and logs and have a fire starter.
My second issue was the lack of compounding.
For example: I would write one piece on a particularly subject.
During writing I would develop the idea, express it in my own words, schedule the post and feel good about completeing something.
However then I would forget completely about it.
When it came to the next time an idea about the same subject would come up in the queue.
There wouldn’t be any existing notes to build off from. The only thing to build from was that exact quote inside the queue and whatever I could randomly pull out of my brain.
Its like coding every program from scratch instead of using prebuilt libraries. Inefficient, time consuming and draining.
“When we’re confronted with a blank page, it’s easy to think “I can’t write when I’m staring at a blank page” and then Google solutions for blank page syndrome. We don’t realise that the reason we had the blank page in the first place, is because our note taking was “unsystematic, inefficient or simply wrong” (or non-existent).” - How To Take Smart Notes
“To sum it up: The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything on what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic.” - How To Take Smart Notes