Building a second brain #

Building a second brain is a philosophy and methodology for saving and storing information, ideas and connections that we accumulate throughout life. It allows for one’s memory to be “augmented” and even browsed by others if it exists in a public form, like a digital garden.

“Personal knowledge base” or “repository” are other terms used online to describe this kind of thinking (though this usage is a bit older and there is rarely a “public-facing” consideration).

  • Wikipedia
  • Tiago Forte’s course
  • Illustrated course notes
  • Monocle, a very interesting personal search engine written by Linus Lee. This is what deft should be able to do in emacs but I’ve always found it extremely slow (and obviously you need to bring all your other data into it, emails, CRM etc).
  • A post about why personal knowledge management may be bullshit. Agree with some points and disagree with others here.
  • Trilium, a feature-rich Linux-native app for building large personal knowledge bases.
  • Acreom, an interesting tool at the intersection of a calendar and a PKM.
  • Tana, another second-brain “your life as a tool” kind of thing that is getting a lot of hype. Long waiting list (Dec 2022).