12/4/2023 0 Comments Apple notes as second brain![]() Must-havesĪlthough this is a strict requirement for my P.A.R.A. The less friction there is in sharing, the more often you’ll do it. You can always copy and paste something to social media, of course, but ideally you’ll have a share feature integrated directly into the app you use. You should be able to jot down the most random thoughts, write out long personal reflections, sketch crazy harebrained schemes, all without the fear of criticism.Īt the same time, it’s just as important that you have a way to share those ideas as soon as they’re ready for showtime. It’s important that your notes app serve as a private space for the ides that you’re not ready to share with the world. Other kinds of files, such as videos, GIFs, PDFs, sound files, webpages, and others, should also be included, as attachments if necessary. This ensures that you will regularly come across them, serendipitously making new associations and connections. ![]() ![]() Your notes should be able to include images within the body of the note, not as an attachment that you have to click to view. Ability to handle images and attachmentsĪlthough text tends to be the most common format for ideas, learnings, and observations, images are becoming a more and more important part of our creative vocabulary. ![]() Ideally, the search feature also includes auto-complete (making suggestions as you type). It is essential that the search feature searches both the body of the note, as well as its title and meta-data. Even with the powerful organizational methods I teach, it is often the very best way to go straight to the note you’re looking for. With thousands of notes spanning hundreds of projects and topics, search is an essential feature of a notes app. What matters is that you use them consistently. I use bold, highlighting, and underlining, but any of these can easily be substituted for another style. It doesn’t matter exactly which formatting options are available, but I recommend at least 3 distinct options that can be overlaid on top of each other (as in, a given passage can have more than one formatting style applied). They are both very familiar for anyone who has done word processing, and customizable for those of us using specialized methods (such as my progressive summarization technique). Basic formatting optionsīasic formatting options (such as bold, italics, underline, font colors, and highlighting) are an essential feature for quickly annotating text in a notes app. It’s very important that the collection can scale quickly, without performance lags. This principle inevitably leads to creating thousands of notes in a relatively short amount of time. Instead of giant Microsoft Word or Google Docs documents, each note should be small and agile, so it can easily be mixed and matched with other notes. One of the critical principles for building a second brain is that each note should contain information from only one source. Scales to thousands of notes without performance lag The same is true for editing – you need to be able to quickly find a note you’ve already saved, and opportunistically add, remove, or edit it, on a mobile device if necessary. One of the key strengths of notes apps is that they are made for just this kind of quick capture. I can’t imagine this happening with Google Docs, or other heavy-duty text editing apps. This is a common daily occurrence for photos, but not so much for ideas and insights. My most fundamental test of a knowledge capture app is whether, if you’re walking down the street and a brilliant (or wacky) idea suddenly pops into your mind, you will actually pull out your phone and capture it. Capturing and syncing across multiple devices This article will describe what I believe to be the essential features for any app to serve effectively as your second brain, according to the methods I teach in my online course Building a Second Brain. Automation: certain kinds of content can be captured automatically, such as social media posts, emails, and web bookmarksīut this still leaves dozens of options, and it can be difficult to know exactly what the essential features look like.
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