Second Brain for Software Developers

Do you know what is a waste of time?

Searching on Google for the same answer every time you need a code snippet.

Especially when the answer was a few Google Pages deep, or you’ve sorted through a lot of Stack Overflow answers to find it.

Introducing: The Second Brain

This concept was introduced by a guy named Tiago Forte who has developed a very complicated process and sells a really expensive course around it.

But all in all, the idea behind this concept is that you shouldn’t go hunting every time you want to eat.

For example, when you want to create something, build something, or develop some software, you shouldn’t go all the way to Google, Stack Overflow, Documentation, past projects, old GitHub repos, and so on.

Or, search 30 minutes in the documentation because you can’t remember where was that specific use case of that specific function.

But you should have an archive, a place where you have captured all kinds of ideas, all the bits and pieces of tutorials, articles read, videos watched, projects are done, and so on and so forth.

Basically, it’s like having your own Wikipedia that lets you capture content and ideas and lets you find them easily

And this kind of system is perfect for software developers, content creators, authors, bloggers, and whatnot. Actually, it’s really good for any kind of Knowledge Worker. And if you are a software developer, you are a knowledge worker, if you didn’t know.

But, there are 2 big problems that I find with this system:

1. The course costs an arm and a leg, it’s really expensive, from about $1500 to about $6000 or $7000.
2. The system is extremely complex and you can get lost in trying to get the whole system perfectly right, and you never get it, and you never get the benefits.

It might as well be my ignorance talking here, but anyway.

I wanted to develop an 80/20 kind of system based on The Second Brain. And I did it in Notion.

Notion is the app that I use for my personal notes, for my YouTube channel, and for a lot of stuff that I do.

So, I’ve developed a simple Notion template that you can also use.

My requirements for it? To be as simple as possible, and as easy to use as possible.

If you are a Notion expert (or if you are Thomas Frank) reading this, you might laugh at the ignorant peasant that I am.

Here is the video explaining how this Second Brain Notion template works

If you want to download it, click on the button below and get the template.

Get the template