Introducing My Homemade Digital Second Brain

Over the course of more than 8 years of web browsing, I've constructed my own digital second brain using Notion—powered by Notion's Chrome Clipper extension and its AI features. This system serves as an organized library for all the valuable content I’ve encountered, transforming an overwhelming flood of information into a structured, easily searchable archive.

What is this library?

This home-built library functions similarly to MyMind but offers more customization and control. It allows me to clip, organize, and analyze content from various sources like articles, videos, reports, and more. With over 2550 entries to date, it provides an in-depth archive that makes every piece of information easily accessible.

Each entry in the library is tagged with:

• Created Time: When the content was first added.
• Title: The headline or name of the resource.
• Summary & TLDR: A brief synopsis of what the content covers.
• Keywords: Tags or key concepts for easy retrieval.
• Writer: The original author or creator of the resource.
• URL: A link to the original piece.
• Content: The full article, video, or page clipped for later reference.

How does it work?

To make navigating through the content easier, users can search for keywords or use pre-filled categories like /space, /AI, /marketing, etc., to quickly find relevant articles. It also integrates well with Notion AI, which helps summarize and categorize content, ensuring that important details are never lost.

This system acts as my personalized knowledge hub, whether I’m researching trends in AI, studying the latest marketing techniques, or looking for inspiration across other disciplines. Every piece of content is curated and stored here, ready to be pulled up whenever needed.

In essence, this digital second brain is a treasure trove of ideas, strategies, and insights that have shaped my thinking over the years, and it continues to grow with every new piece of information I encounter.

Next Step

Rendered by ChatGPT

When I originally built /second-brain, I never imagined so many people would end up there, browsing through my backlog and bookmarks. In the past 9 months, the website has attracted 40K visitors from across the globe.

After an in-depth study of the digital second brain market landscape and its 30+ players, nothing captivated me enough to migrate my entire database. The reality is that Obsidian, MyMind, Fabric, Supernotes, and Mebot all focus on building from scratch, but none truly addresses the market's need: migrating existing content into a new system.

This applies first to your brain, as you're supposed to learn from mistakes—yours and others'—and second, to your often disorganized system, whatever it may be. Everyone has bookmarks, note apps, notebooks, folders, or scraps of paper where they store their second brain. It might not be perfectly organized, but it's searchable and accessible.

Revisiting my study, which you can access here (https://stephane.bio/ideas/digital-second-brain-landscape-2024), I realized many people are seeking the same solution, yet no one is addressing this market gap.

This is where AI could play a crucial role, organizing thoughts and being smarter than you—not the other way around, where you're learning from scratch at time zero. That's not AI; it's ChatGPT. Imagine having 2,493 lines of data (the number I have in my second brain freely accessible here: http://moored-clef-48b.notion.site) multiplied by the number of users signing up (let's say 1,000) and feeding their data into your algorithm. Data is gold, folks! It's invaluable for the algorithm to work with 2,493,000 data points.

These insights have led me to consider several improvements for my /second-brain:

1. A more engaging interface than Notion
2. Advanced search and filtering capabilities
3. A comprehensive tutorial for you to build your own second brain
4. An intuitive way to import from any file (collective memories)

Ideas

Last modified by STEPHANE BOGHOSSIAN ⋅ 13 days ago